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playing a pivotal role.
The son of a sharecropper who
fled Dust Bowl Oklahoma, Hughes
grew up poor in the San Gabriel
Valley and received a scholarship
to USC in the 1950s, a time when a
degree from the private school was
a passport to L.A.’s upper class.
He and a business partner
made fortunes by giving people —
first in California and later the rest
of the country — a place to park
their old furniture and clothes.
Like Kleenex or Band-Aids, Public
Storage became shorthand for an
entire product. Long after the
Glendale corporation was a billion-
dollar business, Hughes kept mid-
dle-class habits, eating fast food
and hanging out with buddies at
the Santa Anita racetrack.
He returned often to the USC
campus, mentoring a circle of Tro-
jan football stars who became life-
long friends, including Lynn
Swann, Marcus Allen, Rodney
Peete and O.J. Simpson. He stood
by Simpson through his murder
trial and, according to a defense at-
torney, worked behind the scenes
to help plot a successful court
strategy.
Now in the twilight of his life,
Hughes’ enduring interest in his
alma mater has translated into
huge financial gifts. Though ad-
ministrators declined to speak
about Hughes’ contributions,
three sources confirmed that he
was the anonymous donor identi-
fied in a USC publication as having
given $360 million between 2010
and 2015.
Hughes has grown close to uni-
versity leaders, with former cam-
pus President C.L. Max Nikias
visiting him at his Kentucky thor-
oughbred farm and installing his
daughter, Tamara Hughes Gus-
tavson, one of Southern Califor-
nia’s wealthiest women, on the
powerful executive committee of
the university’s governing board.
Hughes has a particular focus
on the athletic department, where
Swann, his longtime friend, was
appointed athletic director three
years ago. Swann’s tenure has been
a rocky one, and over the last year,
as the beloved Trojan football
team has floundered and an ad-
missions scandal rooted in athlet-
ics humiliated USC, some alumni
and boosters have begun debating
Hughes’ sway.
“You could argue that he is the
most powerful person at USC,
more powerful even than the presi-
dent,” said Petros Papadakis, a
sports broadcaster who was cap-
tain of the Trojan football team in
2000.
‘The genius in jeans’
In the early 1970s, storage facili-
ties were mom-and-pop opera-
tions: cinder block stalls with ga-
rage doors, padlocks and, if you
were lucky, a chain-link fence
around the property.
Most were in Texas, and it was
along a Houston highway in 1972
where the idea for Public Storage
was born. A business associate of
Hughes, Kenneth Volk Jr., spotted
a sign for “private storage.” Curi-
ous, he went inside the warehouse
posing as a customer. You’ll have to
get on a wait list, an employee told
him. All the units are taken.
Volk was nearing the end of his
career as a land developer, but he
knew a good idea when he saw it
and he quickly took it to Hughes,
an L.A. real estate executive who’d
recently opened his own firm.
Hughes quickly grasped the po-
tential of self-storage. Units were
cheap to build and delivered a con-
stant stream of rent money with-
out the overhead of apartment
buildings or the hassle of tenants.
If the location became in demand
for development down the line,
Hughes figured, he could bulldoze
the warehouses and turn a tidy
profit. “I saw a method of holding
prime land with income,” Hughes
told The Times in 1990.
Then married with two chil-
dren, Hughes invested $25,000 and
asked friends to chip in as well. One
who did was former NFL lineback-
er Al “A.C.” Cowlings, according to
sworn testimony decades later in
the wrongful death suit against
Simpson. Hughes had befriended
Cowlings at USC, where Cowlings
had played alongside his childhood
friend Simpson.
The first Public Storage opened
in the San Diego suburb of El Cajon
in 1972. Within months, it turned a
profit, and Hughes and Volk began
looking to expand. Unlike many
other storage entrepreneurs of the
time who relied on relatives or
banks for funding, Hughes and
Volk offered limited partnerships
to the public. That gave Public
Storage a scale their competitors
couldn’t match.
“They were able to build the
company quickly, and the larger
they got, the more purchasing
power they got, and they could dothings even faster,” said retired
storage executive Robert Schoff,
who went to work in his family’s Ar-
izona-based storage business at
around the same time. “I remem-
ber they had 100 facilities, and then
all of a sudden they had a thou-
sand. It was like, ‘Wow!’ ”
After being advised to hire a
consultant to choose new loca-
tions, Hughes later told friends, he
opted for a simpler, cheaper plan:
Open a Public Storage in every city
with an NFL franchise.
Volk’s son, Kenneth III, pitched
in at the Glendale headquarters
during high school and recalled
Hughes as a “hip guy” who dressed
in bell-bottom jeans and stylish
shirts and led pep-rally-like meet-
ings for his staff. He “was like, ‘Let’s
go out and do this!’ He was sort of a
cheerleader,” Volk said. “He defi-
nitely installed some flash — with
substance — to excite the internal
workforce.”
Some in the industry began re-
ferring to Hughes as “the genius in
jeans.” Kenneth Woolley, who
founded Public Storage competi-
tor Extra Space Storage, worked
for Hughes in the 1980s and said he
had a gift for devising innovative
and low-risk ways to finance proj-
ects that even Wall Street brokers
had missed.
Woolley said that even counting
his PhD program at Stanford and
40 years in the business world, “I’ve
never met anyone as smart or cre-ative” in finance as Hughes.
Self-storage proved so lucrative
that Hughes’ idea of eventually
selling the properties to developers
fell by the wayside. The warehous-
es were there to stay, and by 1990,
Public Storage was the nation’s
largest provider of self-storage.
Hughes has said he was working so
hard he barely registered the flood
of revenue.
“When we decided to go public
and I saw how much money there
was, I was very surprised,” he told
GQ in 2012, one of the few inter-
views he’s done over his career.
Today, Public Storage is valued
at more than $40 billion, its bold or-
ange signs ubiquitous across the
U.S., Canada and parts of Europe.
Hughes and his relatives did
not respond to queries for this arti-
cle. Provided with a summary, a
lawyer for Hughes, Dawn Eyerly,
said the information was “replete
with many inaccuracies and mis-
characterizations of his relation-
ships,” but did not elaborate.
Hughes stepped down as chair-
man of Public Storage’s board in
2011, but his family retains control
over 14% of the company, according
to corporate filings. Forbes esti-
mates Hughes’ personal wealth at
$3.2 billion; his daughter, 57, who
has a house in Malibu and is Public
Storage’s largest shareholder, is
worth $5.7 billion, and his son, B.
Wayne Jr., 55, is worth $1.7 billion.
Both are USC alumni.Hughes now spends much of his
time on horse racing, having in
2004 purchased and restored
Spendthrift Farm, the Lexington,
Ky., institution legendary for turn-
ing out champion stallions. He
married his third wife, Patricia
Whitcraft, in 2017.‘I might own this place’
People who know Hughes por-
tray him as seemingly unaffected
by his wealth. He has celebrated
racing victories at In-N-Out Bur-
ger, and for years ate breakfast at a
Coco’s near Santa Anita several
days a week.
He lives in faded jeans and
baggy golf shirts.
“I think the clothes he wears
cost maybe 40 bucks,” said jockey
agent Tom Knust, who has known
Hughes for decades. “He is about
as down to earth as anyone you will
see.”
Once when Hughes and three
friends won a Pick 6 worth $120,000,
“he insisted he cash the ticket be-
cause he [said he] had never seen
that much money in cash,” Knust
said, noting, “he was a billionaire at
that time.”
He surrounds himself with men
who knew him before he was rich.
One of his closest friends for dec-
ades was a high school classmate,
Jim Sterkel, who worked as a John-
son Wax salesman.
Hughes and Sterkel, who died
in 1997, often went on camping and
fishing trips. Sterkel’s daughter Jill
recalled one outing that under-
scored Hughes’ nonchalant view of
his wealth.
“They were in a hotel restau-
rant, and Wayne was like, ‘I think I
might own this place,’ ” she re-
called. “As opposed to somebody
who would be like, ‘I own this place
so seat me here.’ ”
Hughes’ upbringing offered lit-
tle opportunity for snobbishness or
extravagance. Raised Bradley
Wayne Hughes on a farm in Okla-
homa’s Kiowa County, Hughes
moved to L.A. with his family in the
1930s, part of the Dust Bowl migra-
tion depicted in “The Grapes of
Wrath.”
The family lived for a time in El
Monte, and he later attended
school in Alhambra. His parents
had eighth-grade educations, and
his father struggled at times to find
work, according to census records.
Hughes graduated from Al-
hambra’s Mark Keppel High
School in 1951 and, after a stop in
junior college, enrolled at USC.
At the time, jet travel was un-
common and expensive, making
East Coast universities outside the
grasp of many L.A. families. USC
seemed to embody the city’s ambi-
tions, and its hard-charging foot-
ball team, with frequent victories
over Eastern schools, was a par-
ticular point of pride.
Hughes pledged a fraternity
popular with athletes, Phi Kappa
Psi, where his high school friend
Sterkel, a member of the Trojan
basketball team, was also a
brother. Hughes graduated in 1957
with a bachelor’s degree from the
School of Commerce, the precur-
sor of USC’s business school.
The next year, Hughes married
Marjorie McKechnie. B. Wayne Jr.
was born in 1959, and Tamara in- The couple divorced in 1975,
and Hughes married Kathleen
Becker in 1983.
A devastating diagnosis
In the early 1990s, the only childB. WAYNE HUGHES, fourth from left, joins others in reacting to his horse Atswhatimtalknbout in May 2003, before a fourth-place finish in the Kentucky Derby.
Jamie SquireGetty ImagesUSC’s silent billionaire benefactor
HUGHES, center, poses with former USC football players and friends, from left, Lynn Swann, Al
Cowlings, Sam Cunningham and Rodney Peete. Hughes has a focus on the athletic department.Alex OrlovHORSE enthusiast Hughes, third from left, receives recognition from timepiece maker Longines
in 2016 at Santa Anita Park after his horse Beholder won the Longines Breeders’ Cup Distaff.Diane Bondareff[Hughes,from A1]
[SeeHughes,A19]