Canterbury chairman Curtis Sampson dies at 87

Curtis Sampson, a Minnesota telecommunications entrepreneur who with his son Randy purchased Canterbury Park and turned the track into a popular local destination, died Thursday, according to the track. He was 87.

A native of Hector, Minn., Sampson used the money he had made in the telecommunications business to form a partnership to buy Canterbury Park in 1994, which had been closed two years earlier after losing a reported $10 million in its final year of operation. Sampson and his partners – his son Randy and Minnesota businessman Dale Schenian – took the track public, and it re-opened in 1995.

Curtis Sampson was installed as chairman of the company’s board, with Randy as the company’s president.

Today, Canterbury Park, located within the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metro area, is one of the few minor-league tracks that draws enormous ontrack crowds.

The track’s Thursday night race cards regularly attract more than 10,000 fans.

Canterbury’s financial success is owed, in part, to the opening of a card club at the track in 2000, enabling the track to capitalize on casino-type gambling. In 2012, the track struck a partnership with the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux community, which operates a casino three miles from Canterbury, to cross-promote each other, in a deal that protected the tribe’s casino from competition and sent money from the casino to purses at the track.

Sampson and his son bred and owned horses that they raced at Canterbury in the late 1980s. Opened in 1985, the track initially made money, but it fell on hard times in the beginning of the 1990s.

“I could have lost it all,” Curtis Sampson told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in an interview last year. “But it looked like we had a shot to make it work. And right away, it did. I never lost a minute of sleep.”

After graduating from the University of Minnesota with a business degree in 1955, Sampson ran a string of telecommunications companies for decades. In 2006, he sold Hector Communications Company 16 years after he founded it. He was inducted into the Minnesota Business Hall of Fame in 2012.

Sampson is survived by his wife, Marian, daughter Susan, and sons Randy, Paul, and Russ.