Few Amarillo-based cultural exports had as much influence as Hastings Entertainment. There are generations of Americans who have distinct memories of browsing new music at the local Hastings on a Friday night in the 1970s, buying the latest Stephen King thrillers during the horror heyday of the 1980s, and renting VHS movies at Hastings during the 1990s.
At one point, Hastings had nearly 150 retail stores across 23 states, with nearly 4,000 employees—and it was headquartered in Amarillo. Many of today’s prominent musical acts, in a very real way, owe their careers to Hastings. From Willie Nelson to Jimmy Buffett, they used to come to Amarillo to give private performances for Hastings employees, hoping to capture retail magic.
The magic lasted until Hastings sold and closed its doors in 2016, putting an end to a uniquely Amarillo story. Many of those former employees returned to the region this fall for “Hastings Homecoming 2025,” a much-anticipated reunion event.
In mid-October, not long after the reunion, Brick & Elm sat down with John Marmaduke, former Hastings President and CEO, to hear about the history of his family’s company. Joining us for the conversation were Sandra Vandivere, Marmaduke’s long-time assistant, and former Hastings marketing executive Jim Whitton.
What’s in a Name?
In 1961, pioneering wholesaler Sam Marmaduke turned his father’s small magazine distribution enterprise, West Texas News Agency, into the expanded Western Merchandisers, which distributed books and music.
In 1968, Marmaduke opened the first Hastings Books & Records in Amarillo at a brand-new shopping center called Western Plaza. He intended it to serve as a test market for the wholesaler.
John Marmaduke: My dad was a wholesaler. He started with magazines and later got into this new thing called “records” when Elvis Presley broke and rock ’n’ roll became a reliable business. So we had magazines, books and music. Every wholesaler would love to be a retailer and every retailer would love to be a wholesaler. The grass is always greener.
So he had this brainstorm of putting all those products together. He had seen a newsstand in London that had them all together. He just thought, “Bingo.” It really made a lot of sense.
That [London] newsstand was called Hastings. Later, he said [the Hastings chain was named for] the Battle of Hastings, and that was certainly his privilege. But the real issue was we wanted a name that wouldn’t tie us back to Western Merchandisers, because we were afraid our good customers might get mad at us.
Early Contraction
For three years, that Amarillo location was the only retail store in the company. In 1971, Sam Marmaduke added three additional stores: one in Plainview, one in Wichita, Kansas, and another in Del City, outside Oklahoma City. A second store in Wichita opened in 1973. Four of the five stores were unprofitable. After the Del City store closed, it was moved to Roswell, New Mexico, where business tripled.
Marmaduke: I was graduating from the University of Texas and interviewing with some other companies. [My father] wanted me to come back. So I took over five Hastings stores, only one of which was making money because they didn’t really understand retail. The one in Amarillo was doing really, really well. The one in Plainview showed some promise.
By the process of elimination, I closed all the losers and started focusing on the small markets. Plainview and then Roswell [New Mexico], those were our first small-town stores. They were underserved. It’s the Vince Lombardi school of retail: You run to daylight. There was nobody serving those people. When we would open up, [customers] would ask to borrow our phone so they could call their friends.
I was just talking to Nate Duckett at our reunion. He’s now the mayor of Farmington [New Mexico]. He was the manager at our Hastings there. He said every week somebody tells him they miss Hastings, because in Farmington, that’s where everybody met on a Friday night. We were going where we were needed.
Acquisition and Growth
John Marmaduke became president of Hastings in 1973, which opened its second Amarillo store in Wolflin Village and spent the 1970s expanding into other small, regional markets like Snyder, Kerrville, Abilene and College Station. Hastings then began to acquire music-store chains, like Record Town (25 stores), Mr. Music (6 stores) and Flipside (15 stores). It closed the unprofitable stores but continued to expand its footprint, with a retail presence from Texas to Colorado to Florida. By the end of the 1980s, Hastings had become the fifth-largest retail chain of music stores in the United States.
John’s brother, Steve, worked for Western Merchandisers during this period. Sandra Vandivere joined the company in 1983.
Sandra Vandivere: I actually was on the payroll for Disc Records. I worked for Hastings but my payroll came from Disc Records.
John Marmaduke: We made a lot of acquisitions.
Vandivere: We had Disc Records and Record Town and later we combined all those stores and made them Hastings. When I first started, we didn’t even have computers in the office. We had to look up everything on paper. We had an operations manual but it was all hand-typed. Later, we acquired one computer and you had to fight for that computer to use it.
[Stores] always had to call in sales to keep track of what kind of sales they were doing during the holiday season. There were four of us who would go in at 6 a.m. in the morning. The store managers would get up, figure their sales from the week, and call it in to us. We would talk to each and every store manager. All of the stores all over the nation. It was manually intensive.
Marmaduke: A lot of those old-fashioned systems worked really well, they were just labor-intensive.
Music Influence and Video Heyday
Western Merchandisers grew into one of the largest music distributors in the United States. In 1989, Garth Brooks released his self-titled debut album as a relative unknown from Oklahoma. Within just a few months, mostly through Hastings stores, Western Merchandisers reported sales above 100,000 units, which was a huge music-industry milestone.
But those numbers didn’t show up on the Billboard charts because Hastings wasn’t included among the reporting retailers, most of which were large urban stores. It became a famous example of how some record sales in secondary markets—sometimes known as “heartland sales”—remained invisible to the industry, despite careers like that of Garth Brooks. Because of this, Hastings helped transform how labels and chart services thought about data.
Garth Brooks often credited Hastings for helping him break out. He wasn’t the only one.
Marmaduke: We basically started the hat band trend in College Station. That’s where it first broke out. We were the first people to even get on the George Strait bandwagon. I remember doing an autograph session [in Salt Lake City] with George Strait and only about 12 people showed up, and I just said, “Hang in there. It’s going to take awhile.”
Vandivere: I remember George Strait coming into the office. There was a tap on my shoulder and I turned around and there he was. He had just made a hit and had come into the office that day.
VHS video rental also boomed in the 1980s, but most were independent mom-and-pop operations until Blockbuster arrived. By the late 1980s, Blockbuster was opening new stores almost daily, mostly in large markets. Hastings added video rentals alongside books and music, serving the smaller markets Blockbuster ignored.
That kind of cross-merchandising was central to its business model. As John Marmaduke once said in an interview with another publication, the company wanted to sell books to people who came in to buy music, and music to people who intended to buy books.
Around that time, in the early 1990s, Jim Whitton joined the executive team at Hastings. He and his wife, Barbara Harter Whitton, had been living in New York City and were ready for a change. Barbara is the sister of Marty Harter Marmaduke, John’s late wife.
Jim Whitton: I remember coming from back east, I had lots of friends talking about “You’re going where? What kind of company?” I finally figured out that the best way to describe it was small and medium towns that didn’t really have much of a bookstore or a record store or a video store. That was Hastings.
It was Blockbuster and Tower Records and Barnes & Noble under one roof. It really worked.
Marmaduke: We really didn’t need a lot of advertising because we had the wow factor. When you have something that people really want, you don’t have to advertise it very much.
Vandivere: News traveled fast.
Marmaduke: Remember, if you were living in Farmington, New Mexico, what were you doing on the weekend? Those markets were our very best markets. They were isolated. They often had extreme weather. We did really well in Arizona and really well in Montana. In Montana, they were watching movies five months out of the year because it was really cold.
We were the place everybody went to on Friday night. If you look at our transactions, around 3:30 or 4 on Friday evening, it just shot off like a Geiger counter detecting uranium. We had to have all these part-time people come in and work that crunch time. People would try to rent all the movies for the weekend.
And inclement weather? If they were forecasting big snows, you couldn’t find a movie to rent.
In 1991, Western Merchandisers became a wholly owned subsidiary of Walmart and began distributing books and music through that rapidly growing chain as well. Steve Marmaduke retired at this point, having served as VP of purchasing. Walmart was beginning to dominate nationally and would become the world’s largest retailer by the end of the decade, but Hastings continued to thrive in small markets. This made Western Merchandisers, as well as Hastings, extremely powerful in the music industry. 
Marmaduke: We had broken so many acts that we were sort of golden. Remember Tracy Chapman and “Fast Car”? We broke her out, believe it or not, in Colorado of all places. Here was a Black lesbian singer and we broke her out in Hastings stores because she was really good. That means the first significant sales they had anywhere were with us, and that encouraged the record label to put more marketing dollars behind [the artist], which they did, and they were successful.
Everybody has to break out somewhere. You don’t break out nationally if you’re a new act. It was very regional.
Throughout the companies’ history, major record labels would send their artists to the Hastings and Western Merchandisers headquarters in Amarillo—for management conferences and eventually the two companies’ combined annual meetings—to perform private concerts in front of some of the most powerful music retail buyers in the nation. Willie Nelson introduced his music at a 1977 conference during his rise to superstardom. Publishing companies got into the act, too. A young novelist named Stephen King once spoke to employees at a meeting in the early 1980s.
Founder Sam Marmaduke spent 20 years on the board of the Country Music Association, which increased the companies’ stature among country acts. Over the following decades, the roster of artists who quietly performed in Amarillo is astonishing.
Marmaduke: Managers from every store, middle management, all our rack sales people would come in [for these meetings]. The first one, we had Waylon Jennings, Ronnie Milsap and Dottie West all in a small little room at one of the I-40 hotels which is no longer there. They were all nervous, because they’re playing for people who sell their product—not fans, not people in bars. But we had a really good time. 
It was like a who’s who of country music in those days because that was what we sold.
Vandivere: Alabama was one of my first ones.
Whitton: Brooks & Dunn was a favorite. There were so many.
Vandivere: I remember The Judds playing. They came into our office and set up in the warehouse and we all went out there.
Marmaduke: Then we moved it to the Civic Center and they brought their whole road show. The record labels would sponsor them. As Hastings got to be a bigger piece of the pie and as Walmart became more ubiquitous as a record store, then we had a lot more pop acts come through.
Whitton: As an employee, it just made you think I’m working for the coolest company that ever was.
Marmaduke: Jimmy Buffett was a funny story. I was just by chance reading one of these esoteric southeastern quail hunting magazines at a friend’s house, and there’s an article by Jimmy Buffett about quail hunting. He was really different. But he was coming here [to perform] for our convention during quail season, so I wrote him a letter and said, “Would you like to hunt wild quail in the Texas Panhandle?”
And he wrote back and said, “Hell, yes. I’d love to. Let’s do it the day before the concert.”
I locked my calendar but never heard from him again. Getting ahold of someone like that, when they’re touring, is impossible. So as the day approached, I tried to get ahold of him. I never reached him.
That night, at the hotel in Amarillo, the band was having a drink
and [complaining] about the fact that they were booked in Amarillo 48 hours before the concert. Jimmy Buffett had booked everything, then got busy and forgot all about quail hunting.
We didn’t end up hunting.
Fundamentals of Business
Founder Sam Marmaduke was 73 when he died of a heart attack in 1993, after which Walmart sold Western Merchandisers to Anderson News Corp. Hastings became a fully independent company in 1995 and went public on the NASDAQ in 1999.
Whitton: Hastings had a private plane and they wore it out. I mean, John and three or four other folks—maybe from another store, another department—were, twice a week, going to these far-flung places and engaging with all the employees and managers and learning, teaching, visiting stores. It was this ongoing process. In some ways, John spent very little time in his office.
The next decade brought a series of seismic shifts to the entertainment industry, as the rise of online retail competed with brick-and-mortar stores. Then digital streaming arrived. Amazon, Netflix and iTunes transformed the ways people consumed books, movies and music. Famously, Blockbuster had 9,000 stores worldwide in 2004 but had to file for bankruptcy in 2010.
Hastings was hit hard, too, though its ongoing attempts at diversification kept it profitable into the early 2010s. By 2013, Hastings had pivoted into toys, gifts, skateboards and comics—making it, at one point, the largest comic book chain in the nation.
Marmaduke: It was really obvious what was happening, and once you’re in the river, you can’t get out of it. The last five years were sort of, “Houston, we have a problem” once a quarter. We would have to do some heroic thing just to keep our heads above water. And that’s exhausting.
When you work hard and you’re opening stores and successful, that’s reinforcing. You go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning, ready to go. But when you’re [constantly] drowning and have to save yourself one more time, and then know the same thing is coming up again in another three months, that’s hard.
I was so exhausted when we sold that I really didn’t do much for the next six months but rest. It had been brutal.
During that period, John’s wife, Marty, had suffered a stroke, which dramatically reduced his ability to travel. [Marty eventually passed away in 2019.] So when a buyer came along in 2014, Marmaduke sold Hastings and retired. Hastings Entertainment filed for bankruptcy protection in 2016 and closed all 126 stores—including its two remaining stores in Amarillo—that year. It also closed its corporate headquarters, which at that point still employed more than 400 local people.
Today, those alumni remain in touch and were thrilled to relive the good old days at the recent reunion. They still represent some of the brightest business minds in Amarillo, having transferred their hard-earned skills to new employers, from Caviness Beef Packers to Panhandle PBS.
Vandivere: I stayed until the very end. It was very depressing to me because it was my family. When [John] walked out of the door, I walked out of the door. [Note: She still works as Marmaduke’s personal assistant.] Everybody was looking for jobs and some of them got better jobs with the vendors we had dealt with all those years. They went to music companies and book companies and still have good jobs, because of all the training and experience they had.
Whitton: The kind of meaning and loyalty that brought this many people back [for the reunion], I don’t know too many other companies that can do that.
Marmaduke: Some of those people [at the reunion] worked for us 25 years ago.
Vandivere: From the ’90s.
Whitton: That really says something about the company.
Marmaduke: It was built out of necessity. Because we were in Amarillo, we didn’t have a large labor pool, a skilled labor pool, to draw from. So we had to create our own. We really taught those people the fundamentals of business.
I hear, over and over again, “The lessons I’ve learned at Hastings, I’ve used in all of my business career.”
The great thing about young people is you’ve got a blank slate. They’re open to [instruction]. How to be organized. Why you should answer your email on a timely basis. How to treat people. How to reprimand someone. What was the rule?
Vandivere: Three to one.
Marmaduke: You’ve got to compliment someone three times as often as you criticize, or people are going to resent you.
Vandivere: You weren’t just thrown into the company and given a job. They were always giving you training and supervision. [John] had an open-door policy. If you had any questions or problems, come to him.
Marmaduke: I ran into a lot of CEOs who didn’t have facetime with their employees and I was sort of shocked by it. But I’m reminded of when Sam Walton was being interviewed by a reporter from the New York Times, and he said, “Mr. Walton, you’re in the stores three or four days a week. How can you possibly do that?”
And Sam said, “Stores is what we do.”
He was right: Stores is what we do.
