An overhead view of a parade procession celebrating Howard Hughes' completion of his round-the-world flight.

An overhead view of a parade procession celebrating Howard Hughes' completion of his round-the-world flight.

“So my board basically said, ‘Yes, you can start that community [Summerlin] out there, but you will have to raise the money to do it.’” Thus began John Goolsby’s adventure in master planning and developing Howard Hughes’s 25,000 acres of raw Clark County land. In 1980, four years after Hughes died intestate, Hughes’s Summa Corporation hired Goolsby, a San Antonio, Texas, accountant and real estate professional. His task was to manage Hughes’s extensive portfolio of real estate, the value of which was tied to and dependent on Southern Nevada’s continued economic growth. In this interview, Goolsby and his wife, Judy, recall their first impressions of Southern Nevada’s neighborhoods and schools; share their experiences of building two custom homes—one in Green Valley and one in Summerlin; and Judy describes her early meetings with John’s boss (and Summa’s president and Howard Hughes’s cousin), the genteel William R. Lummis: “I was scared to death of the man. I had never been exposed to anybody like him.” Hughes’s acreage to the West of Las Vegas offered Goolsby the unique opportunity to master plan and build an entire new community from the ground up. He assembled a team that spent two years visiting, researching, and questioning why some master-planned communities succeeded and others did not. They eventually evolved a strategy that included “good schools, good parks, open space, community activities, all the things that Summerlin has today.” They began planning in 1983 and broke ground in 1989. Goolsby’s tenure with Summa reveals larger trends in corporate restructuring in the 1990s through the real estate collapse of 2009. Corporate name changes tell the story: in 1980 Goolsby was hired by Summa Corporation as vice president for real estate; in 1988 the board named him president and in 1990 president and CEO. In 1994 Summa renamed itself The Howard Hughes Corporation. Hughes Corporation was acquired in 1996 by the Rouse Company, although Rouse maintained Summerlin as a separate economic entity with an earn-out agreement. Goolsby retired from Rouse in 1998, but he continued to help manage the earn-out agreement to insure that the Hughes owners received all they were entitled to. In 2004, General Growth Properties purchased Rouse, but a 2009 GGP bankruptcy ended the earn-out agreement. Since 2011, Summerlin has been owned by a GGP spinoff named—ironically—the Howard Hughes Corporation.