On a mild winter's afternoon in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., H. Wayne Huizenga slams the door of his Mercedes and bounds into a video store on U.S. 1. The stocky, 53-year-old chairman of Blockbuster Entertainment Corporation is engaged in an unannounced inspection of a part of his empire, and he is not one for dawdling. In shirt sleeves, red tie swinging, he marches along the spotless blue-carpeted aisles under bright fluorescent lights. Every so often Huizenga stops -- to punch up a film preview on a television monitor or to ask the store manager about potato chip sales -- and then he soldiers on.

Along the way, the chairman allows that he himself watches films just twice a month and rarely ventures inside a movie house. That in turn reminds him of a former rival in video retailing who had a different attitude toward the product. "He felt it was his job to go to the movies every day in the middle of the afternoon," Huizenga says. "Then at night he'd watch two more. He couldn't understand why I didn't do the same thing."

Huizenga pauses a beat. "Well, we bought him out." Another pause, a chuckle, a steady gaze from ice-blue eyes. "He'd have done better if he stayed in the office."

Wayne Huizenga (it's pronounced HIGH-zing-a) tends to business. Since 1987, he has made Blockbuster the largest national video-store chain, with 1,582 company-owned and franchised stores last year. And Blockbuster is just the latest example of Huizenga's growth complex. He bought dozens of garbage haulers to create Waste Management, his first billion-dollar company. Another buying frenzy transformed a handful of his own holdings into a prosaic potpourri, including a portable-toilet rental business (Port-O-Let) and a lawn care company (Tru Green).

At first glance, Huizenga's acquisitive ways may seem to be the only common denominator in a career that has caromed from garbage to videos. Not so. In

virtually all cases, he has been attracted to companies that are part of a fragmented industry filled with small, undercapitalized operators. What he adds is a determination to cobble together a company with a national presence -- plus the capital and managerial muscle to make that happen.

Though Huizenga shows no great intellect or charisma in everyday conversation, those who have worked with him paint a different picture. In the business setting, they say, he is an irresistible force -- disciplined, demanding, inspired. J. Ronald Castell, Blockbuster's senior vice president of programming and communications, describes his boss as "a classic skip thinker. He takes your thoughts one step further and you have to work hard to catch up with him." Says Luigi Salvaneschi, a former president of Blockbuster: "Wayne creates discontent. He leaves you feeling what you've done isn't good enough, that you can do more -- quicker."

However they express the thought, Huizenga's associates point to the remarkable fit between his abilities and his expansionist goals as an entrepreneur. "Wayne's skills," says Dean L. Buntrock, a co-founder and the

current chairman of Waste Management, "require a business ready for change."

Huizenga has worked his changes on the video market and lately he has turned his restless energies in an unlikely new direction -- professional sports. Having bought 50 percent of Joe Robbie Stadium, as well as 15 percent of the home football team, the Miami Dolphins, he proceeded to organize and underwrite an all-out campaign to bring major league baseball to the stadium. Many a high-flying entrepreneur has been drawn by the glamour and excitement of big-time sports; not Huizenga. What attracted him, he says, was the stadium, itself: "It's an underutilized asset." Wayne Huizenga's capacity for hard work was bred in the bone. His grandfather, born in the Netherlands, founded Huizenga & Sons, a Chicago garbage-hauling company, in 1894. Wayne's father, G. Harry Huizenga, was a cabinetmaker and house builder, and as a teenager Wayne was called upon to help out in his father's shop and to truck dirt from local construction sites. He was 15 when his family moved to Fort Lauderdale, where he played center on his high school football team. His parents were members of the Dutch Christian Reformed Church, and he remembers sneaking out of the house to see a movie or go dancing.

In 1955, Huizenga went back north and ran a bulldozer for two years before enrolling at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich. He left before his sophomore year, eventually finding his way back to Florida. Then a family friend persuaded

him to manage his three-truck trash-hauling operation in Pompano Beach, and Huizenga was intrigued. First and foremost, it was a simple, basic business that required no elaborate training, had repeat customers and minimal overhead. When he had an opportunity to buy a garbage route of his own in 1962, he took it.

Each day Huizenga set out on his route at 2 A.M., picking up garbage and toting it to the dump until the early afternoon. Then he'd shower, dress up and spend the rest of the day calling on homeowners, supermarkets and retail stores, soliciting new business. As his accounts increased, he hired helpers and bought more trucks -- until he started buying other haulers. By 1969, his Southern Sanitation Service operated 20 trucks on routes in Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Tampa and Key West.
The year before, Southern Sanitation had joined with three Chicago-based companies -- Ace Partnership, Acme Disposal and Atlas Refuse Service -- to create Waste Management. For Huizenga, it was a kind of reunion: Both Ace and Atlas were successors to Huizenga & Sons, his grandfather's operation, and Ace was now run by Dean Buntrock, who had married one of Wayne Huizenga's cousins. In 1971 Waste Management went public at $16 a share.

The vision of a nationwide sanitation company had been Buntrock's. Huizenga was to be the deal maker, the grand acquisitor, though the intention was to

proceed at a moderate pace. "We had a three-year plan," Huizenga says. "It called for selective acquisitions of people we knew." But the plan went out the window as the industry was roiled by a wave of buyouts. Browning-Ferris Industries was snapping up the small- to medium-sized haulers -- $3 million to $8 million companies -- that Waste Management craved.

So over a dazzling nine-month stretch in 1972, Huizenga and Buntrock bought 90 trash haulers, some with their own landfills. All too often, Huizenga recalls, he would eat each of the day's three meals in a different city. But it was during this frenzied time that he developed some of the key strategies and skills that he would later use to run his other companies.

The buyouts were made primarily with Waste Management stock, not debt: Huizenga and Buntrock preferred to dilute their ownership stakes rather than risk onerous interest payments that could bury the company in a downturn. And they generally kept the former owners on as managers, reasoning that if their companies were good enough to acquire, so was their expertise.

Early on, Buntrock had recognized the impact the environmental movement could have on their business, and Huizenga positioned the company to capitalize on the coming flood of Federal and state regulations governing solid and hazardous

waste. The company also moved rapidly into international trash disposal and street cleaning.

Then and now, Huizenga is quick to defend the waste disposal industry. An unpleasant business? "I liked it," he says. "It's not scrounging around in the garbage anymore." Mob-controlled? "That reputation," he says, "comes from your part of the country, up north." As it happened, Huizenga and Waste Management did have their share of legal problems.

Accusations ranging from illegal dumping to price fixing to mob connections to bribery were leveled against the company by many states and cities, and a number of fines resulted. A Georgia subsidiary, for example, was fined $375,000 for conspiring to violate Federal monopoly laws. Last November, the company paid $19.5 million to settle class-action suits filed in Philadelphia that accused Waste of price fixing between 1978 and 1987. Waste Management -- now a $6 billion company -- remains under attack by environmental groups and government agencies for alleged violations. In 1976, Huizenga himself signed a consent decree -- without admitting guilt -- on charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission that the company had made improper political contributions in Florida.

By 1980, Huizenga was ready to move along. He was commuting weekly from company headquarters in Oak Brook, Ill., to Fort Lauderdale to be with his

second wife, Marti, a former secretary at Southern Sanitation. (The family includes two sons from his first marriage, and a son and a daughter from hers.) Weary of being office-bound, he found himself living vicariously through his managers. "These guys would come back from the field," he says, "and I'd ask, 'What did you do? How did things go?' You think to yourself, I wish I was there."

When Huizenga stepped down as vice chairman in 1984 and the Fort Lauderdale-to-Oak Brook shuttle finally ended, he considered retiring from business altogether. "A frightening thought," says Marti Huizenga. "It lasted five weeks."

The notion that Huizenga could remove himself from the world of business was not credible. He is totally devoted to the chase. Seated at the cluttered desk in his headquarters -- a rented, two-story stucco building in downtown Lauderdale -- he defines his goals in a typically simple fashion: "I enjoy building something good and having a successful product and making money."

Everything else is trappings, and Huizenga is not interested. His office is decked out with scratched furniture and framed Audubon bird prints, acquired at

an auction of the assets of South Florida Savings; the furnishings serve as a constant reminder that he lost his $1 million investment in the thrift when it became insolvent. Lunch is a turkey-on-croissant with potato chips at the desk. The only symbols of power are a framed 50th birthday greeting from then-Vice President George Bush and photographs of Huizenga with Bush and former President Gerald R. Ford. A Republican fund-raiser, Huizenga has hosted dinners for Vice President Dan Quayle and other party stalwarts.

Huizenga's small features and sober mien invite comparisons with British actor Donald Pleasence. He sits with his arms folded, seemingly unflappable; only his eyes suggest banked fires. When Huizenga is upset, says one associate, his eyes become "very purposeful" and several other aides describe them as "Wayne's lasers."
In 1983, Huizenga had formed a holding company called Waco Leasing (later renamed Huizenga Holdings because people pronounced it "Wack-o"). Borrowing against his Waste Management stock (he is still the largest individual share holder), he began buying small businesses and then tapping their cash flow to pursue more businesses. Over a frenetic three years he acquired more than 100 companies that provided such services as auto-parts cleaning, dry cleaning, lawn

care and portable toilet rentals.

The Huizenga formula was apparent. Despite the seeming variety, each company satisfied his criteria: a pedestrian service business, with a steady cash flow, in an industry of under-capitalized mom-and-pop companies ripe for consolidation.

Huizenga methodically shopped until he found the right set of circumstances, and then he pounced. He was attracted to bottled water, and he purchased a company in the industry that was grossing about $4,000 a month; before he was done, he had acquired 16 more bottlers.

As he built up his list of companies, Huizenga also made substantial investments in commercial buildings, shopping centers and undeveloped Florida acreage. By the end of 1986, he says, his collection of prosaic businesses had annual revenues of $100 million. And he would soon spot his next great opportunity.

Just a year earlier, a 34-year-old Texas entrepreneur named David P. Cook had set up the first Blockbuster video store. It was built on the premise that consumers were unhappy with the usual mom-and-pop video store's selection, often

limited to current hit titles, and their short hours; dissatisfied with the nondescript ambiance of the stores; tired of having to bring empty video boxes to a clerk who would then have to find the appropriate tapes -- assuming they were still in stock.

To meet these objections, Cook developed the video superstore concept that remains to this day the heart of the Blockbuster approach. The typical store is spacious, a brightly lit 6,000-square-foot browser's feast, with a minimum of 6,500 titles. Video boxes, with the tapes inside them, are displayed face forward within easy reach. A typical rental costs $3 for three evenings. X-rated videos, a longtime staple of the business, are not available.

Blockbuster had been forcefully brought to the attention of Wayne Huizenga by a former Waste Management colleague, John J. Melk, who had invested in a Blockbuster franchise in Chicago. "I had no interest," Huizenga recalls. "But he kept raving about it." So on his next trip to Chicago in February 1987, he visited one of the stores.

Huizenga rarely went to a movie. When the family watched television, he could be found sitting in front of the set, working. He did not own a VCR and he thought of video stores as dingy little retailers that purveyed porno from

behind windows splattered with peeling movie posters. His visit to Blockbuster rearranged some of those notions. What he saw was an easy one-product concept that could be aggressively copied nationally.

Together, Huizenga, Melk and Donald F. Flynn, another Waste Management executive, bought 35 percent of Blockbuster for $18.5 million. It soon became apparent that Huizenga and Cook were on different wave lengths. By April, Cook had departed.

When Huizenga bought into Blockbuster, it owned 8 stores and franchised 11. By the second quarter of 1991, the store count had reached 1,654. There are also 27 stores in the United Kingdom, 51 in Canada and plans for 10 in Japan by December of this year. Revenues from its own stores, franchisee fees and product sales to franchised stores in 1990 were $632.7 million, up 57 percent from 1989; if the franchisees' revenues are included, the chain's total sales were $1.1 billion. Net income of $68.6 million in 1990 represented a 55 percent increase over the previous year, though long-term debt was also increasing by 180 percent.

Overall, Blockbuster stores account for 10 percent of the home video sales and rental market, with revenues larger than the combined sales of its 99 closest competitors. Last January Blockbuster replaced Pan Am on Standard &

Poor's 500 Index

As was true at Waste Management, the pace of Huizenga's frantic acquisitions grew in part out of fear. "We felt we had to go fast because we had nothing proprietary," he recalls. "We had to get the locations in each area before somebody else moved in. So it was a mistake, but it turned out okay. We have the locations, the people are trained and the customers are ours. Now if somebody else comes in, they have to take it away from us."

As usual, Huizenga has sought to pay for Blockbuster's acquisitions by issuing new shares of stock and plowing back cash flow, rather than by taking on debt. Its $30 million purchase of the 200-store Erol's chain last April, for example, was primarily a stock deal. All of the 160 new company-built stores scheduled for this year, Huizenga says, will be paid for with operating cash flow. Stores cost an estimated $500,000 to $700,000 to equip, and gross an average of $70,000 to $80,000 a month.
Meanwhile, Huizenga has signed up some impressive franchisees, including the Zale family, who once controlled the nation's largest jewelry chain (they have 23 Blockbuster stores), and George W. Baker, a former senior executive of

Kentucky Fried Chicken (who leads a group with 26 stores). Marvin Bush, a son of President Bush, is a member of an investor group that operates four.

Huizenga recognizes his own limitations. "I enjoy building more than managing," he says. "What you learn from that is you ought to bring good people in." In the case of Blockbuster, acknowledging that he knew little about the retail business, he looked for expertise in the ranks of the fast-food giants.

After 23 years at McDonald's and 4 at Kentucky Fried Chicken, 58-year-old Luigi Salvaneschi was just settling into a long-anticipated move to college teaching in November 1987 when Huizenga recruited him.

"He came to breakfast and he talked and talked and we had lunch and he talked and talked," says the urbane Salvaneschi. "Then he made me an offer and I accepted. When you deal with him, you have no choice."

Salvaneschi's major contribution was the McDonald's site-selection mindset: blitz major markets, add stores fast and never say "market saturation." Huizenga's special skills, says Salvaneschi, are in finance and accounting but, beyond that, "he knows what makes things go, hires good people and stands back to let them work."

Huizenga adds a caveat. "You always hear about delegation," he says, "but

people make the mistake of delegating and not following up. I give authority, but I stay in touch. Otherwise it doesn't work."

In the process, he logs 12- to 14-hour workdays. "This place," says Thomas A. Gruber, another McDonald's veteran who is Blockbuster's chief marketing officer, "is run like a presidential campaign, 24 hours a day. We get in early, go home late, travel after hours, have meetings on the plane. Wayne sets the pace and everybody needs to move at that pace."

Huizenga writes few memos, keeps meetings short, masters his executives' areas of expertise and constantly challenges them. "Wayne always liked to take the adversary position on an issue," Buntrock says, recalling Huizenga's days at Waste Management. "He'd take both sides and argue them well. That forced you to always think through a decision." The newest part of Huizenga's empire is Joe Robbie Stadium, north of Miami. Last year, he paid a reported $40 million for 50 percent of the stadium and his stake in the Dolphins; now he is spending another $10 million to make the stadium usable for baseball as well as football.

Huizenga is trying to garner one of the two National League expansion teams

due to be awarded this month. He has spent more than $500,000 of his own money to promote the virtues of the South Florida market and the attractions of Robbie stadium; his South Florida Big League Baseball group has been named one of the six finalists. Should he win, the entrance fee to the major leagues will be $95 million.

Huizenga actually prefers football to baseball, but the Dolphins fill his stadium only 10 times a year. He acknowledges that his contact with baseball may turn out to be fun, and he thinks a team would be good for the area, but his major concern is to wring the most financial return out of his investment.

Until his sports foray, Huizenga's energies had been totally concentrated on Blockbuster; he owns 19.4 million shares, a 12 percent stake. (In 1990, his salary and bonus payments totaled $398,077; he also exercised options on 320,000 shares of Blockbuster that netted him $1,077,499, according to the latest proxy statement.) Most of the pieces of Huizenga Holdings have been sold off, including Port-O-Let and Tru Green, which were bought by Waste Management.

In fact, Blockbuster and the video business in general seem to require renewed concentration. The rate of growth of VCR ownership in the United States has been slowing down, and new technologies could hammer the retail video

market.

In March, the stock-quote computer outside Huizenga's office showed that Blockbuster's shares had dropped more than 10 percent in three days, after Time Warner announced an upgrade of its cable system in Queens from 75 to 150 channels. Investors feared that the move presaged a new era in which growing numbers of pay-per-view channels would provide cable subscribers with the equivalent of a video store in their living rooms.

The replacement of coaxial cable with fiber optic cable, as in the Time Warner instance, is just one of the new technologies. A technique known as digital compression, which is close to being perfected, will allow up to five channels to be transmitted on the same bandwidth now devoted to one channel.

Huizenga seems unfazed by the pay-per-view threat. He points out that, thus far, only a third of the nation's cable homes have access to pay-per-view channels, and that fiber optics, in particular, is an expensive proposition. "Mainly," he says, "pay-per-view hurts the little guys. Whatever we lose from compression, we'll gain from the little guys."

Last month, Blockbuster's volatile stock was hammered from 11 3/8 to 9 7/8 when Cox Cable Communications, one of Huizenga's largest franchisees, reported

that it was trying to sell its 82 Blockbuster stores. Says Huizinga, "We think those franchises will be absorbed rather quickly."

Huizenga continues to be optimistic, his restless mind churning out new ideas. Lately, he's been talking about using Blockbuster's excess cash flow -- he estimates it at $100 million this year -- for new businesses. "We have the best locations in town," he says. "We've got a plain vanilla box. We can sell shoes there if we want to. Maybe we'll build a music store that's green and white. We could call it Chartbusters."

Photos: Wayne Huizenga in one of his Blockbuster stores in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He also owns 15 percent of the Miami Dolphins (Antonin Kratochvil for The New York Times) (pg. 23); Huizenga (in suit) with Saudi officials, 1975. Waste Management successfully bid for Riyadh's garbage contract. (Blockbuster Entertainment Corporation) (pg. 24) Graph: "Blockbuster's Meteoric Growth," tracks revenues and net income, 1985-1990 (Source: Company reports) (pg. 23)