IF Antony ‘Tony’ Hart was a cricketer, he would have been an all-rounder.

Hart entered the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ) Hall of Fame on Thursday. At an induction ceremony that packed the Pegasus hotel ballroom with the cream of the Jamaican business community, the retired ‘godfather’ of Montego Bay commerce was recognised for having been a great entrepreneur and an even greater person.

PSOJ President Christopher Zacca, who made the cricket analogy, described Hart as a “visionary and one of Jamaica’s great business legends”.

Hart, 81, is credited with developing Montego Bay into the second city it is today. He is responsible for a number of major developments in the western Jamaica city, with perhaps the most well-known being the Montego Bay Freeport, which he conceived, promoted and saw through to completion.

The massive project began in 1967 and included dredging of the sea in some areas. It ultimately led to the creation of 350 acres of land and four berths for ships, and is today home to a booming industrial estate, the free zone, upscale residential complexes, numerous resort offerings, a beach club, the Montego Bay Yacht Club and the parish’s largest port.

“Freeport helped to catapult Montego Bay as the island’s tourist centre and the commercial centre of the west,” Zacca noted.

But Hart’s footprint on business is even more diversified and far-reaching.

Born in Montego Bay in 1932, the Munro College alumnus joined his father’s hardware store Samuel Hart and Son at age 18. After only three months, he convinced his dad to buy back a building that was owned by Samuel Hart and Son in the past and established another store there selling radios, refrigerators, housewares and (vinyl) records. The following year, the young Hart started the first record manufacturing company in Jamaica, Records Limited, in Kingston.

He went on to establish Jamaica Electronics, also located in Kingston, and soon after acquired a sub-agency for the dealership of American auto giant Ford in Montego Bay. The car dealership, Northern Industrial Garage (NIG), sold 300 cars in three months, at a time when cars were relatively rare on Jamaican roads.

NIG grew rapidly — with 80 per cent of cars in western Jamaica at the time being Ford — and Hart established branches of the dealership in St Ann’s Bay, St Ann; Savanna-La-Mar, Westmoreland, and another at Bogue, just outside of Montego Bay. In 1958, he became part of Central Motors, another Ford sub-dealership, in Mandeville. By then NIG had become a direct dealership with Ford.

In between stints in politics — Hart managed Dr Herbert Eldemire’s winning campaign in the 1962 elections and ran unsuccesfully himself for a seat in 1972 — Hart began to dream of developing the Montego Bay harbour and started working on the Montego Freeport project, which was approved by Government in 1967.

After the completion of the Freeport, Hart acted as Chairman of the Hart Group of Companies, which at one time included an apparel operation with over 3,000 employees, a savings and loans company, an Avis Car Rental licensee, a stevedoring company, a hardware business, port management, a safety supply company, and five farms — among the farms, Good Hope is now one of the premier visitor attractions in Trelawny.

He also took over the bankrupt Montego Towers Hotel, now the Sunset Beach Resort and Spa and started an all-inclusive programme that filled the 350-room hotel each week in tough economic conditions of the 1970s.

He was Chairman of Air Jamaica in the 1980s and is credited for bringing the world’s fastest commercial plane, the Concorde to Jamaican skies which tripled business for the national airline on the New York leg.

While his successful business ventures speak loudly for themselves, people closest to Hart on Thursday gave attendees at the induction ceremony a more personal insight on the man.

Hart’s son Mark, the master of ceremonies for the evening, described his father as a devoted family person.

“We could not be more honoured to have such a supporting and loving father,” said Mark Hart, who has followed in his father’s footsteps in business.

“And his relationship with our mother is an inspiration that we follow,” he added about his dad’s 53-year marriage to mom Sheila, formerly Desnoes, and the impact it has had on him and siblings Wendy, Bruce and Blaise.

Mark Hart noted that one of the greatest things about being the son of Tony Hart is getting to know his friends, including hotel mogul Gordon “Butch” Stewart.

Stewart said that Hart “…has got to be one of the most reliable friends that any human can have”. He also shared many funny memories of Hart over the years that drew some of the loudest laughter on the evening.

A renowned philanthropist, Hart’s greatest joy, it was said throughout the evening, is to see others succeed. One of his favourite charities is the St Mary’s Preparatory school in Montpelier, St James, which has grown from 70 to 430 students in four years, and in academic status.

Hart, in his response, touched on this passion.

“What gives me most pleasure is seeing people that I have employed move up,” Hart said, as he noted how he once employed a neighbourhood gardener, passionate about accounting, to an accountant position at one of his companies. The one-time gardener now runs his own accounting firm in Los Angeles and employs about 40 people.

Forever a champion of Montego Bay, Hart created history on Thursday by becoming the first person from the west of the island to be inducted into the PSOJ Hall of Fame.

Stewart, who built his fortune on marketing and sales, noted: “Tony is really a super salesman. He is more subtle than most of us, but he sells Montego Bay in a way that nobody can.”View more highlights in our Online Photo Gallery