California native Chet Hitt, who has proposed an ambitious development project in downtown Chickasha, admits he’s a dreamer but says that “Basically, I’m in the restaurant and distilling business.”
He was born and reared in California, but his family moved to Oklahoma for a time when he was a teenager. After graduating from high school in Anadarko in 1982 he returned to California.
In 1997 Hitt became a partner in a mortuary company and within three years they bought four more funeral homes in the High Desert of California. His Sunset Hills Family of Mortuaries (which he later sold) was honored with the “Service-Based Spirit of the Entrepreneur Award in 2017 from the Inland Empire Center for Entrepreneurship.
“When you have to help people on the worst day of their life, you become a lot more relationship-oriented,” he said.
Hitt has spent most of his life in Apple Valley, which is about 93 miles northeast of Los Angeles at the southern edge of the Mojave Desert. He was named “Citizen of the Year” in 2002 by the Apple Valley Chamber of Commerce.
During an “aircast” three years ago that was hosted by an aviator/comedian, Hitt said that when he was younger he coordinated three concerts in Apple Valley that featured singers Tim McGraw, Sawyer Brown and Tracy Lawrence.
Hitt is the CEO of the Sunset Hills Children’s Foundation which he established in 2007.
California Congressman Paul Cook’s tribute to Hitt on Feb. 25, 2019, was printed in the Congressional Record.
Hitt said he bought Topock 66, a food and beverage establishment off Route 66 in Arizona on the Colorado River, in 2005. At the time, “I knew nothing about the restaurant and bar business.”
His Town’s End restaurant and bar opened in 2020 in Apple Valley. “I had a building there and figured I’d make lemonade from a lemon,” Hitt said during the aircast; the building was a tire shop “when I was a kid,” he recalled. The distillery features a copper still that Hitt said was custom built in Germany.
“My wife and I were in Comfort, Texas, and they had a little distillery. The guy there gave us a tour, and afterward I said, ‘This is what we’re going to do’” at Town’s End.
Several years ago he and his wife took an eight-week course in Los Angeles in which they learned how to make neon signs, including the ones that illuminate his Town’s End operation in Apple Valley. “It’s a cool hobby,” he said.
Hitt said relationships are vitally important to him, in part because of a health scare a few years ago.
When asked what he attributes his success to, “I tell them ‘spending my high school years in Oklahoma.’ And when they ask why, I tell them, ‘Because the people there are nice, folksy, and friendly. When you drive down the road, they wave at you.’ In California, we’re all in such a hurry to get somewhere we lose that focus.”