Born in Smith Center, Kansas in 1935, R.D. Hubbard was the last of eight children in a family of modest means that ran a local icehouse and cafe. As an 11-year-old, Dee lugged and loaded 25-pound hunks of ice into the town’s iceboxes in the era before refrigerators. After working the wheat harvest and selling Fuller brushes, he landed a basketball scholarship at a nearby community college.

Married with two children and living in a 27-foot trailer, Dee moved to Wichita, where work in an auto windshield-repair outfit brought him into the glass industry. As a revolutionary young CEO, he quickly went on to become a darling of Wall Street after mounting a series of brilliant takeovers and turnarounds. Not content to make his mark in a single industry, Dee Hubbard applied his longstanding love of horses to becoming a leading force in both the American quarter-horse and Thoroughbred communities. Following acquisition of the Hollywood Park racetrack, he also built a substantial position in the gaming industry. BIGHORN Golf Club and residential community, of which Dee is today chairman and managing director, is the latest of the amazing and diverse accomplishments. Regarded by many as the premier development of its sort, Dee has helmed a remarkable series of ingenious management innovations at BIGHORN.

Along the way, Dee Hubbard has assembled an enviable record of civic involvement as a funder of college scholarships for the disadvantaged, a backer of leading medical institutions, and a champion of American art. Dee Hubbard and his wife Joan Dale reside in Ruidoso, New Mexico, and Palm Desert, California. Since its inception, the R.D. and Joan Dale Hubbard Foundation has given away over $36 million, most of it for education and the arts. Mr. Hubbard is a 2014 inductee into the Horatio Alger Association.