Jim Click Jr., Tucson’s best-known auto dealer and one of the city’s most prominent business leaders and philanthropists, is getting out of the car business to begin his “next chapter” at age 81.
He announced Tuesday that the 16 auto dealerships owned by Jim Click Automotive Team and Tuttle-Click Automotive Corp. are being sold to Gee Automotive Companies of Spokane, Washington.
The sale, for an undisclosed sum, is expected to close later this year.
The dealerships, including Click Automotive’s 10 in Southern Arizona and Tuttle-Click’s six in Southern California, will continue operating with their existing names, brands and locations, and their employees are expected to join the Gee workforce, Click Automotive said in a news release.
While Click will no longer have an ownership stake in the dealerships, he will remain active in the community and committed to maintaining the Click Family Foundation’s philanthropy, the news release said.
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At a news conference Tuesday afternoon, Click said the roughly 900 employees at his Southern Arizona dealerships were informed of the acquisition Tuesday morning, and that he and business partners planned to fly to Orange County, California to inform employees there on Wednesday morning. Sam Khayat, who has been with the Click team for 40 years, will continue to oversee local operations as president.
A definitive agreement has been entered into with Gee Automotive, which is “taking everything,” Click said, “lock, stock and barrel,” he said.
But Click isn’t calling it a retirement.
“Next chapter, maybe. I was lucky enough to buy a really nice ranch up in Idaho. My granddaughter is 17, my wife (Vicki) and I are both 81.”
While there might be some travel in their future, “Jim Click’s not going anywhere,” he said. “It’s been fantastic. This is a great community and I’m just glad to be a part of it, and I’m going to continue to give back to this community with my children and Vicki. My main goal now is to share some of this money that we’ve earned with our community, and with my children. … I hope to teach them it’s worth it to give back. Hopefully it won’t take me very long.”
“I want most of my money to stay where I made it,” right here in Tucson, Click said.
The Jim Click Automotive Team has owned dealerships in Tucson since 1971.
That’s the year Click, knowing no one in Tucson, moved here to buy his first dealership and, at age 27, became one of the youngest automotive dealership owners in the United States.
He had started in the car business, fresh out of Oklahoma State University, where he was a Scholastic All-American football player, by working in his great-uncle Holmes Tuttle’s Ford dealership in Los Angeles. After buying the former Pueblo Ford in Tucson, Click turned it into one of the Southwest’s largest Ford dealerships and continued to build the enterprise.
He’s a third-generation car dealer; his grandfather and his father were pioneering Chrysler and Plymouth dealers in Oklahoma, the state where Click grew up, in Altus.
His folksy voice in TV commercials with its Oklahoma twang — “Hi, I’m Jim Click of Jim Click Ford!” (or Jim Click Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge Ram, etc.) — was a famous catchphrase in Tucson for decades.
Click said Tuesday that Gee, as a family-owned company, is a good fit for the family-owned Click enterprises.
Gee Automotive entered the Tucson market in 2022 when it bought Tucson Subaru. The company owns 41 dealerships in five states: Washington, Arizona, Idaho, Oregon and California.
The company began in 1983 “when George Gee fulfilled his dream of starting a Pontiac dealership in Spokane,” Gee Automotive’s website says. Under the current leadership of President and CEO Ryan Gee, the founder’s son, the company has been pursuing significant expansion.
“The Click and Gee families share the same spirit and belief system about business, about our valued employees, about family, and about the importance of giving back to our communities,” Click’s news release said.
Click’s Millions for Tucson raffle has raised well over $17 million for Tucson charities over the last 16 years.
Business and philanthropy leader Jim Click Jr., left, getting ready to draw the first-place winner of the Millions for Tucson raffle in 2021.
Talking with reporters after Tuesday’s announcement, Click said he got mad in the past when TV stations were sold because owners “left with all that money and didn’t leave a bunch” in Tucson.
“I’m going to leave mine right here, I promise you,” Click said.
Pima County Supervisor Steve Christy said he was shocked by news of the sale, describing it as bittersweet, although he acknowledged “you kind of had a sense it was coming.”
“In this day of mergers and acquisitions, with larger entities buying up large entities, it makes sense. I’m sure, knowing Jim’s business acumen as well as his cousin Bob Tuttle’s acumen, I’m sure they made a very good deal that was very good for both of them, particularly as it should be,” after more than 50 years, Christy said. “For 55 years of business in Tucson and all of the philanthropic activities that the Tuttle-Click organization did … that legacy, it’s astounding that it’s finally come to (this) point.”
“Jim will be sorely missed. It’s a little hard to grasp and get your head around right now because you can’t imagine a Tucson without Jim,” he said.
The impact the “omnipresent, ubiquitous individual” Click has had on Tucson is one of a kind, Christy said.
Christy, the stepson of longtime Tucson auto dealer Ed Galloway, remembers being in high school when Click arrived in Tucson.
“It was kind of like a tidal wave when Jim Click came in,” Christy said. “(His impact on Tucson business) is certainly one that can’t ever be replicated by anyone else.”
In 2024, the Pima County Board of Supervisors proclaimed Click’s 80th birthday, April 28, as “Jim Click Day in Pima County.” Christy said it was an honor to present that to Click.
“I’m getting kind of welled up a little bit, thinking about all those decades of his presence in Tucson,” Christy said Tuesday. “To think that that’s all changed now, I guess the only thing certain in life is change.”
The Southern Arizona Leadership Council has highlighted another of Click’s business legacies: In 1975, he became one of the first Tucson employers to offer a workstation for people with developmental disabilities through the Beacon Foundation. Click has also employed people with disabilities at his dealerships. In 1999, President Bill Clinton gave him the President’s Award from the Committee of Employment of People with Disabilities.
Click, a former bank owner in Tucson, is also a longtime top donor to Republican campaigns. In 2011, for example, he brought then-GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney to town and introduced him to other local business leaders. Last year a small group of anti-Trump activists started protesting at one of Click’s dealerships, in his neighborhood and near his office on the northeast side; Click declined to comment at the time.
He received the Raytheon Spirit of Education Award in 2012, in particular for his support for San Miguel High School, Boys and Girls Clubs of Tucson, Junior Achievement of Arizona and other nonprofit groups.
Click, who holds a business degree from Oklahoma State University and is in its Hall of Fame, is also an avid Arizona Wildcats supporter. He convened a group of prominent boosters in 2024 to rally behind then-University of Arizona President “Bobby” Robbins, who was under heavy criticism for the university’s budget deficit at the time and eventually stepped down.
One of Click’s biggest community impacts has been his annual Millions for Tucson car raffle, noted Visit Tucson CEO Felipe Garcia. Local nonprofits, many of them youth sports programs, raise money from raffle ticket sales to support their teams. All proceeds from sales go to the teams.
Garcia also credited Click with putting Tucson on the map in the national cycling space, promoting Tour de Tucson and Tucson as a cycling destination.
“So it’s bittersweet,” Garcia agreed of Tuesday’s news. “We hope that the new company continues the legacy of Jim Click here in Tucson, and I think that’s going to be instrumental and very important to the future of the dealerships.”
He noted that Click dealerships also have long donated the courtesy vehicles for Tucson’s PGA Tour Champions events, going back to the Tucson Conquistadores Classic held at Omni Tucson Resort to the current Cologuard Classic at La Paloma Resort & Spa that returns March 15-22.
“He’s been a voice, a leader in our community, and we hope that he continues to do so,” Garcia said, recalling, for example, how Click gathered local business and community leaders in his office six or seven years ago to discuss ways to bolster Tucson’s film industry.
“Tucson being such a small place, there’s a lot of conversations that will happen … but he will be a convener,” Garcia said.
The Star’s Cathalena E. Burch and Norma Coile contributed to this report.
