Robert West, who built Tesoro Petroleum Corp. from a small regional firm into one of the nation’s largest independent oil producers, died Thursday in San Antonio, Tex. He was 85.

West started Tesoro with a $1,000 investment and said he learned how to make the company succeed in part through buying paperbacks in airports so he could “read about business law, accounting and finance as I traveled around the country to raise money.”

Skeptics told West, who once said he “had oil in my veins since I was a child,” that the company he founded in 1964 as a spinoff of Texstar Petroleum would fail. He took the company public to pay off debts to two banks.

“I was told I was crazy by so many persons who were knowledgeable in the business,” he said in 1982. “First, I was told I would not succeed because the company was so poorly capitalized and, second, that it would never succeed because it was in San Antonio and that it needed to be in oil centers such as Houston.”

West proved the skeptics wrong and eventually led the first Fortune 500 company from San Antonio and boasted a place in oil and gas production in the United States, Europe, Canada, Bolivia, Trinidad, and Indonesia.

Tesoro, which earned less than $250,000 in its first year, reported $507 million in earnings last year.

There were rough spots on the road to success.

Shareholders sued the company over $3,100 paid to a prostitute for a finance minister from Trinidad on a trip to Canada.

West said the payment was a “goodwill gesture” designed to curry favor in future tax matters. After a five-month trial, a federal jury awarded nothing to the shareholders.

West was born in Kansas City, Mo., and grew up in Tulsa, Okla., before settling in Texas. He was active in community and civic groups, serving as chairman of the City Public Service Board and the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation.