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1674-6 Mitchell Wolfson 16 SUN JAN 30 1983 ED: STATE SECTION: GLF PAGE: 1B LENGTH: 1173 LONG ILLUST: SOURCE: MICHAEL BROWNING and NEIL BROWN Herald Staff Writers DATELINE: MEMO: also ran in KYS MITCHELL WOLFSON: BUSINESSMAN, HORSEMAN TO END I Gleaming Channel was paying $6 .50 to one in the seventh at Gulfstream Saturday afternoon and a dead man was betting $60 on him: his owner, Mitchell Wolfson. The five-year-old horse was named after Channel 4 , the oldest TV station in the state, founded by Wolfson in 1949 . It was a hot race over a one and one-sixteenth mile track. Gleaming Channel crossed the finish line first. Then a flashing warning light appeared next to the horse ' s name and the judges rewound the films of the race, to doublecheck them. Tough luck: they decided Gleaming Channel had kicked another horse, Jacksboro, who finished fourth. Wolfson' s horse was disqualified. The winner was Wicked Will. Wolfson died Friday night at 8 p.m. , aged 82 . His horses were the one business venture in his life that didn't make him rich, although he turned a tidy profit on them. Gleaming Channel alone has won $205,287 in his racing career. The suspender-popping, grandfatherly tycoon from Key West, who amassed millions in the entertainment and soft-drink industry, loved his horses nearly as much as he loved his family. Portraits of both adorned his downtown Miami office. Last year another Wolfson horse, Royal Roberto, ran in the Kentucky Derby. It didn' t win either. A memorial service for Wolfson will be held Monday at 11 a.m. at the Gusman Cultural Center, 174 E. Flagler St. Funeral arrangements are being handled by the Philbrick Coral Way Chapel. The burial will be private. Though he had been ailing for nearly a year, Wolfson' s death nonetheless left friends and employes groping for words to express their loss. People in Key West spoke of him as though he never left town. Wolfson was born in Key West on Sept. 13, 1900, in a house that stood on the site of the La Concha Motor Inn. In 1959 Wolfson bought and restored the old Audubon House and endowed it with copies of John James Audubon' s so-called "elephant folios, " the gigantic I twin volumes measuring 30 by 50 inches that contained color plates of Audubon ' s bird painting. The books cost $600, 000, were stolen in 1977 and later recovered. Known as "The Colonel" to his friends, Wolfson was a folksy man who once proudly submitted his mother' s recipe for chopped chicken livers to a 0 magazine. He came to Miami from Key West in 1913 and, by the time he died, was an inseparable part of both cities ' lives. Involving himself in dozens of civic, business, and charitable ventures, Wolfson was a powerful, prominent and seemingly indestructible man who lived to work, survived two heart attacks and kept his $420-million-a-year business so secret that his own daughter once asked a meeting of stockholders who was going to succeed her father when he died. She wasn' t told. "I have taken care of that, " he once said. "I have confidence in the executors of my will. . . . The company will not be sold and it will not be broken up. " Despite these assurances, people continued to speculate the exceptionally profitable company might be put on the market after Wolfson died. The news of his first heart attack on Feb. 3, 1982, was enough to shoot the price of Wometco stock up by 24 per cent. Wometco earned $20 . 8 million in 1980, $24 .4 million in 1981 and $18.2 million during the first nine months of 1982 . Wolfson began with one movie theater in 1926 . By the time he died, Wometco owned 104 theaters, 16 Coca-Cola bottling plants, 100 race horses, 2 , 700 video game machines and 22 , 500 vending machines. Its work force numbered 7 , 200 . Almost to the very end, it was a one-man show. Even though his Wometco stock alone was worth more than $32 million, Wolfson came to work in an inexpensive compact Chevrolet every day at 10 a.m. and left at 4 p.m. He was devoted to his family, naming his summer estate in Asheville, N.C. , "Milofran, " after his three children, Mitchell Jr. , Louis and Frances. Acronyms like this tickled his fancy. Wometco was short for "Wolfson-Meyer Theater Company, " the firm he founded together with his brother-in-law, Sidney Meyer, in 1925 . "He had terrible sadness in his life but he didn' t wear it on his sleeve. He just kept working, " said Zink. "I never saw a guy refuse to give up the way he did. " Wolfson was the son of a Russian Jewish dry goods merchant, Louis Wolfson, who came from New York to Key West in 1884 . Wolfson attended the Ruth Hargrove Institute in Key West from 1907-1913, the Erasmus Hall public school in Brooklyn, N.Y. , from 1914-1917 , and Columbia University for two years before dropping out. He went to work for his father and by the time he was 21 was treasurer of the East Coast Wholesale Corp. in Miami. The dry goods store was located on the same corner of downtown Miami occupied by Wometco headquarters today: 306 North Miami Ave. It was a location he clung to stubbornly, long after it was fashionable to move to the suburbs. In 1939 he successfully ran for a seat on the Miami Beach City Council with the rather flat slogan: "Elect Mitchell Wolfson, a Successful Business Man. " He won and was twice re- elected. He resigned in 1943 and joined the Army, serving in England, North Africa, France, Germany and Austria. When he was honorably discharged in 1945 he was a lieutenant colonel attached to the general staff of the Sixth Army Group. He won a Bronze Star with an oak leaf cluster, five battle stars and the Croix de Guerre. In 1949 Wolfson started WTVJ, the first television station in Florida. He hired veteran newscaster Ralph Renick that same year. Over the years Wolfson built up a chain of theaters stretching from Alaska to the Caribbean. He built the Capitol, the firiP movie theater in Miami, as well as the Gateway Theater in Fort Lauderdale. He expanded into other ventures including cable telvision and attractions like the Miami Seaquarium and the Key West Conch Train. He once said that no Wometco product or service should cost more than $5 and should be the sort of thing people would buy, consume and buy again -- like the soft drinks and popcorn sold in Wometco theaters. In 1981 Wolfson hired a consultant, Charles Simons, to streamline Wometco. One of the people Simons streamlined out was Wolfson' s own nephew, Richard Wolfson. The older Wolfson didn' t lift a finger to save him. But in the end it was this pertinacity that made him rich and admired. People somehow felt they could count on Wolfson, that he would always be there to serve on a committee, chair a board or head up a fund drive. Now, finally, he is not. Said attorney Dan Paul: "There was always a stimulating aliveness about him and a sort of defiant resiliency. He was the longest-running and most effective member of the local power structure. The community will miss him. " ADDED TERMS: wolfson obituary END OF DOCUMENT.