Pub. 1 2018-2019 |Issue 1

14 Gail Miller Inducted into the Utah New Car Dealers Hall of Fame L arry H. Miller has a big name in Utah. His financial empire includes successful car dealerships, sports teams (with the Utah Jazz getting star billing), movie theaters, investment companies, and charities designed to give back to the community where he lived. The company now consists of more than 80 different businesses. Until Larry died, however, his widow, Gail Miller, was largely unrecognized for her contributions to building and running this conglomeration. That isn’t true anymore. Today, everyone knows about the contribution she made to his life and the professional achievements she has made on her own since he died. Gail and Larry met in seventh grade. They were dating by ninth grade and in 1965 they got married, a short three years after their graduation from West High School. Their professional start was modest. Gail worked as a telephone operator at the beginning of their marriage. Larry tried six different jobs in his effort to find something that would be a good career. He was invited to play softball for a Colorado team when they had been married five years and had two children. The opportunity required them to move to Colorado. He found a job that would pay enough for Gail to stay home with their children. He was then offered a job as a Toyota dealership parts manager, and he took it. When Gail was pregnant with their third child, Larry was at work 90 hours per week but still had time for softball on the weekends. Gail did everything else: she managed the money, cleaned the house, and took care of their children. To give her children as normal a relationship with their almost-always-absent father as possible, the family would go to the softball tournaments where he was spending his weekends. If there was a family portrait, she would pack his clothes, pick him up, get the picture taken, drive him back to work afterward, and then go home. Family dinners were often the same: pick Larry up, take him to dinner, and then drive him to work again afterward, while she went home with the children. They stayed in Colorado eight and a half years. The dealership expanded from one location to five, and Larry became the general manager of the Toyota store and then the operations manager over five stores. But the future of those dealerships became clear when the owner asked Larry to train his sons to take over the dealerships someday. The owner was willing to pay him the same money as always, but Larry saw it (correctly) as a demotion, and decided it was time to go back to Utah with their then- family of five. Larry had made friends with a man who owned a Toyota dealership in Utah. He used to joke with this friend about buying the dealership from him, and the friend usually said no, but during the next spring vacation to Utah, which was in April 1979, his friend had a different answer. He was willing to sell the dealership to Larry if Larry wanted to buy it that very day. They made the deal. Larry and Gail had $88,000 in savings from the previous eight and a half years. They borrowed the balance and Larry began running his new dealership May 1, 1979. Gail went back to Colorado until August so their children could finish the school year. Gail and Larry had thought they understood the commitment of running a dealership. They found out there was more to learn. Making payroll for their 30 employees was a bigger challenge than they had expected, and Larry’s hours at work expanded to the point when their son Bryan could hear his father leaving to go to work before Bryan got up for the day, and only coming home again after Bryan had gone to bed for the night. These were difficult years for Gail, who continued not only running the home and mothering their children, but also talked to Larry about each aspect of the growing business. They saw themselves as co-owners, and she took the business just as seriously as he did. They made the time to talk about the business with each other regularly and in depth because he wanted her to understand what he was