SEVENTEEN
A Personal Epic
IN THE SUMMER OF 1965 writer Stewart Alsop introduced readers of the Saturday Evening Post to “America's New Big Rich.” They were all men. All had made their big money since the end of World War II. Alsop described them as “a different breed from the old big rich—Astors, Vanderbilts, Morgans, Rockefellers, Mellons, Harrimans, du Ponts, Carnegies, and the like.” They were not conspicuous consumers, at least not on the scale of their predecessors. Most did not seek the fame of being rich. Some even seemed to be embarrassed by their great wealth.
Howard Ahmanson alone seemed to genuinely enjoy being rich, Alsop wrote. “Perhaps being rich gives him a sense of fulfillment. For he has magnificently fulfilled the mission for which the father he worshiped trained him—the mission of making money.”1
Unquestionably, Ahmanson had succeeded at this mission. When asked by reporters how much he was worth, he refused to answer, often saying he hadn't ever totaled it up. Some reporters tried to do it for him. In January 1966, it was estimated that his equity in Home Savings alone was worth $700 million. National American Insurance accounted for another $23 million and the Ahmanson Bank and Trust $35 million. In addition, he held a “commanding” interest in two other financial companies: United Financial Corp. and First Surety Corp. The latter business was a $40 million concern. This article didn't even include his real estate holdings, but it concluded that Ahmanson was the wealthiest man in California.2
STEADY
Like his father before him, Howard Ahmanson dreamed of turning his business over to his son and of his son carrying the empire to greater heights. At an even deeper level, he wanted the same kind of relationship with Steady that he had had with his father. For his part, at a young age, Steady discerned the respect and even obsequiousness that people displayed around his father. In small ways, he aligned himself with his father's greatness, saving newspaper clippings that profiled his father's business and sailing triumphs. He even named his own small sailboat after the Sirius II.
As Steady entered his teenage years, however, the relationship between father and son became strained. When Howard told his son about how his own father had trusted him implicitly, Steady became anxious. Increasingly he feared that he would not be able to live up to the example his father had set or that he would be suffocated inside such a relationship.3
Steady's withdrawal reflected more than the epic story of a son in the shadow of a powerful father. Never an athlete and often bookish to the point of caricature, Steady was intellectually brilliant but prone to explosive emotional outbursts. Outsiders who watched him concluded that he was spoiled and undisciplined. Under stress, he exhibited compulsive behavior and physical tics. He mumbled to himself. When they were together, Howard sometimes put an arm around Steady to try and calm him. Sometimes the boy took comfort in this gesture.4 Other times he resisted this intimacy.
Years later, Steady's condition would be diagnosed as Tourette's syndrome, a neurological disorder that presents itself in adolescence and occurs most frequently in boys. Associated with involuntary tics and vocalizations, the condition was first medically described in 1885 by the pioneering French neurologist Dr. Georges Gilles de la Tourette. In the 1960s, however, it was often considered a psychiatric disorder because psychological stress tended to exacerbate the symptoms and researchers could find no physiological cause for Tourette's various behaviors.5 Most practicing physicians were unfamiliar with Tourette's and often missed its diagnosis.
Without medical insight, Howard held onto the idea that he could resolve Steady's anxieties and mentor his son as his father had mentored him. At an early age he tried to teach his son to read financial statements, but Howard junior had no schema for many of the concepts. Howard also wanted to train Steady to be decisive, but by nature Steady was often indifferent to things. Years later, Howard junior looked back on these interactions and realized, “He was trying to train me in the habit of mind that even if you don't care, one alternative has to be selected when you're in charge.” Howard also tried to train his son to be aggressive about answers and solutions. “'I don't know’ is not an answer,” he often reminded Steady. For Steady, however, “I don't know” was the obvious answer when, in fact, he did not have the information his father wanted.6
Striving to sustain Steady's remarkable cognitive abilities, Howard and Dottie pushed the boy far ahead of his age peers in school. He spent only half a year in each of second, third, fourth, and fifth grades, entering junior high school sixth grade at the age of ten. But the experience was so emotionally trying that after one month in seventh grade he was moved back to sixth.7 When Steady reached high school, Howard thought he needed a highly structured environment to monitor his emotional behavior. He convinced Dottie that they should send him to Black-Foxe Military Institute, an elite prep school for boys founded by Charlie Fletcher's father-in-law, Charles E. Toberman, in 1928.8
Howard shared his concerns with Franklin Murphy. They were both ambitious men who had been mentored by their fathers and hoped to similarly mentor their only sons. Murphy suggested that Howard should look at the example of Paul Mellon, who had rejected a career in the Mellon family's banking and financial companies but had collaborated with his father on the creation of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Murphy suggested that Howard junior might develop a similar passion for nonprofit work. Howard embraced this idea and appointed Howard junior to the board of the Ahmanson Foundation when he was still only seventeen.9
Often after the scotch-infused grand planning was over and Murphy or some other drinking companion had left, Howard wandered into Steady's room to talk. Through the gush of an alcoholic cloud, he tried to bolster his son's confidence by telling him how great he was. Steady hated these “lectures.” “He was able to print praise like presses mint money and devalue it,” he says.10 On other occasions, Howard turned nasty and cruel, especially if he thought Steady was being obstinate. Like many divorced children and especially only children, Steady felt trapped in what he would later describe as a pair of emotionally incestuous relationships where Howard and Dottie relied on him to meet their needs.
Howard referred to Steady's condition as a problem of “nerves” and often gave him lectures on how to control himself.11 At the same time, Howard's concern and embarrassment over Steady's tics reinforced his latent desire to protect his son or keep him in what Howard junior calls “my golden cage.”12 Increasingly, Howard's bewilderment in the face of Steady's condition and his growing realization that the young man might never mature into an adult capable of running Howard's vast financial empire took its toll. Driving across Los Angeles with Richard Deihl in 1967, Howard confessed his fears and broke down.13
MARRIAGE TO CAROLINE
Steady had hoped that if his father remarried it would diminish the emotional pressure. Howard dated a number of women after his divorce was finalized in 1962. There was a notable fling with film star Rhonda Fleming, who accompanied Howard and Steady on a trip to Hawaii. But Howard remained fascinated with Caroline Leonetti.
Although she found him interesting, Caroline was initially skeptical about a long-term relationship with Ahmanson. She was put off by his imperious nature and occasional verbal cruelty—especially when he had been drinking too much. He was always remorseful afterwards, but several times she decided she'd had enough. Once, she told him, “Please don't bother me anymore.” She put pillows over the phone to ignore his calls. But when she went to Europe, he got her itinerary from her secretary and sent a rose a day to the various hotels where she was staying.14
With time, the many fights they had during this off-and-on courtship helped Caroline understand Howard better and led her to establish ground rules that made the relationship work. She admired him for many reasons. His strengths as a businessman were evident. He had a quick mind. When he sat down to the piano, the joyful and creative aspects of his character played through the keys. “I may not play good,” he said with a smile, “but I can sure play loud.”
Howard hinted at marriage, but Caroline felt Steady didn't want her for a stepmother. After a while, however, the teenage Steady looked at the prospect of his father's remarriage as a way to get out from under the pressure he felt from his parents. Finally, late in 1964, Howard called Caroline while she was in Vienna to formally propose. With fourteen-year-old Steady sitting beside him, he told her, “Howard junior is here, and we want to marry you.”15
They were married on January 14, 1965, in a simple ceremony at Bob Ahmanson's home. Just weeks from her forty-seventh birthday, Caroline posed with Howard in front of the mantel. In a sweet ivory knee-length sheath dress with drape sleeves and a scoop neck, she looked very mod. A long single strand of pearls hung around her neck and down to her waist. With a pillbox hat, she seemed to emulate the Audrey Hepburn blend of sophisticated naïveté. With his arm around her, a white carnation in his lapel and his thinning gray hair swept back from his temples, fifty-eight-year-old Howard beamed so that his sunburned apple cheeks swelled beneath his pale blue eyes.
Caroline was effusive and charming but hardly naive. Howard told a reporter from Newsweek: "She's a terrific businesswoman. I married her for security.”16 Howard admired her ability to make quick business decisions. Her style contrasted so sharply from his own careful and deep ruminations.17 Others saw the same thing Howard did. Richard Deihl remembered: “She brought to Howard a business acumen; not that he didn't have it, but she brought to him and to their union a tremendous amount of energy, experience and intellect.”18
Caroline seemed to pivot to her new role. At home in Hancock Park, she quickly took control of the household. The men's club atmosphere with long nights of drinking and poker with Franklin Murphy, Norman Topping, and others came to an end.19 Believing that she could not run her business and embrace the challenges and opportunities opened by her marriage, she talked to Howard about closing her modeling agency and charm school. Ultimately, her daughter Margo, who had grown up in the business, became the leader of Caroline Leonetti, Ltd., while Caroline devoted herself to the roles of wife and civic leader.20
CANDOR BETWEEN FATHER AND SON
To some extent, Steady's strategy worked. While Howard and Caroline entertained and traveled, his friendships at Black-Foxe deepened. After graduating at the age of seventeen, he enrolled at Occidental College in Los Angeles in the fall. But having a stepmother, especially one with so much presence in the world, created its own challenges.
Caroline tried to exercise discretion in her relationship with Steady. She encouraged Howard junior and showed him affection, but it was hard because he was usually stiff and emotionally distant. Dressed in his Black Foxe military academy uniform, with his hair loosely combed over from the side, he looked at her through thick glasses with eyes that seemed to focus inward rather than out. Like her new husband, she worried about how he would transition to life as an adult.
Hoping to find some way to ease his son's anxieties, Howard asked Steady to travel with him and Caroline to Europe in the summer of 1968. Steady resisted. Howard had a tradition of going to Europe every other year to celebrate his birthday. Steady had been expected to travel with him. But he was eighteen now and in college. Why didn't his father expect him to get a summer job like other college students? That spring, Howard wrote Steady a note acknowledging that they had grown apart. He again asked Steady to come to Europe to see if time together would help improve their relationship. Steady reluctantly agreed.
Two days before the Ahmansons were scheduled to leave for Europe, Howard was expected to preside over the grand opening of the new Hollywood branch at Sunset and Vine. The location had magic in Hollywood lore. Cecil B. DeMille had directed the first full-length film, The Squaw Man, on the site. In designing the facility, Millard Sheets and the artists associated with his studio had chosen to celebrate the golden age of Hollywood.21 Expansive mosaics, framed almost like a film screen, overshadowed the main entrance depicting twenty of Hollywood's legendary stars. In a plaza in front of the bank, Paul Manship's sculpture The Flight of Europa hovered on a pedestal surrounded by a fountain.
Several of Hollywood's most famous stars, including Charleton Heston and Elsa Lanchester, were scheduled to appear at the opening on Saturday, June 8. But on Tuesday night, June 4, moments after celebrating his victory in the California primary, Senator Robert Kennedy was gunned down as he passed through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Kennedy's assassination cast a pall over the city. Governor Ronald Reagan proclaimed a state of mourning throughout California to last until after Kennedy's funeral.22 With the funeral slated for the same day as the Hollywood branch opening, Home Savings postponed its celebration. Booked to depart for Europe on June 10, Howard handed the baton to the man he had picked to succeed Ken Childs as president of Home Savings and Loan.
A FIGHTER PILOT
Howard was never comfortable with the day-to-day job of running an organization, but it took him a while to decide who should lead the company after Childs left. Although he was close to his two nephews Bob and Bill Ahmanson, whose family loyalty mattered a great deal, he did not see either as a candidate to lead Home.23 As his friendship and civic collaboration with Franklin Murphy deepened, Howard talked to Murphy about leaving his job as chancellor of UCLA to become chairman of Home Savings & Loan. Recognizing that Ahmanson was too tough and strong-willed to really share leadership with anyone, Murphy politely turned him down.24 “The day I became an associate of yours would be the day our friendship would end,” he told Howard. Ahmanson said Murphy was exaggerating, but Murphy insisted.25
With Murphy's rejection, Ahmanson looked to Home's executives. Richard Deihl had grown up in the business. His father Victor, a professor at Whittier College in the 1920s, had managed the Pico Building and Loan and kept it alive through the Depression. Deihl remembered watching him work at night in the den, calculating and then recording the interest on people's savings accounts on index cards. Like other savings and loan managers, Victor Deihl ran an insurance agency on the side and placed accounts with H. F. Ahmanson & Co.
The younger Deihl graduated from Whittier College and completed all of his coursework for an MBA at UC Berkeley, but with the outbreak of war in Korea he enlisted in the air force. He spent ten months flying close support for infantry in combat. Out of the service, he worked for National Cash Register in Pomona. Deihl met Ahmanson in 1960 at a party for his father's sixtieth birthday. “He asked me who I worked for,” Deihl remembers, “and then says, ‘Oh, yes, one of those very big giant corporations that squeeze everything out and then discard you.’” Turned off by Ahmanson's arrogance, Deihl was surprised when Evelyn Barty called later and told him that Ahmanson would like to meet with him. This time Ahmanson was affable and warm. “When he wanted to be, Howard was probably as charming as any guy I ever met.” The two men talked for two hours, Deihl remembers. “I tried to impress him with how bright I was. He tried to get through the veneer to see who I really was.”26 Afterward, Robert DeKruif called and offered a job.
Deihl worked for Ahmanson first at South Gate Savings and Loan. In this largely blue-collar neighborhood on the south side of Los Angeles, he swept the sidewalks, read the machine totals at night, kept the books by hand, and became the loan service manager. He was also in charge of the radios, silverware, and teapots that the association gave away as premiums to customers with larger accounts. After six months at South Gate, Howard Ahmanson offered him a choice between a job in the controller's office and a sales job. Deihl took the one that made more money—sales.
“I didn't talk to [Ahmanson] again for four years,” Deihl remembers.
After Ken Childs left the company in 1964, three men jockeyed to become the next president. Ahmanson had reservations about all of them. Deihl's big opportunity came when the Federal Home Loan Bank began to have problems with Home Savings’ loan portfolio. The company had tried to centralize its loan management operations, but the effort created considerable confusion. According to Deihl, the regulators declared that Home was unauditable. Deihl found out about the problem one day in an executive staff meeting. When one of the senior executives announced that the company had lost yet another manager of loan servicing, Ahmanson asked who was going to fill the slot.
When the executive hesitated, Ahmanson turned to Deihl and asked, “What do you know about loan servicing?”
“Not a lot,” Deihl responded, “but I can learn.”
“Okay, you're the new head of loan service,” Ahmanson decreed.
Deihl took over the management of a staff of nearly two hundred demoralized employees. “You can't imagine the chaos,” Deihl remembers. Immediately, he began offering prizes, “a belt, a blouse, or a pair of hose,” to whoever could post the most payments in a week. He paid for the prizes from his own pocket. Almost overnight, the number of postings per day doubled. He also reorganized the staff into teams that included a poster, a collections person, and an insurance person. These teams were responsible for a certain number of specific accounts. This way, the risk that someone would get multiple calls on the same issue was greatly reduced. Customers could build relationships with individuals who were managing their accounts. With these reorganizations of the work flow, Home's books were back in order within months.
Ahmanson appreciated Deihl's work and the fact that he wasn't afraid of Ahmanson or any job he might give him. After becoming disenchanted with and firing his head of Lending, Ahmanson looked for a replacement. This was one of the most important roles in the organization. This time, the executive meeting at Ahmanson's house went into the wee hours of the morning. Still the scotch flowed. Finally, near six in the morning, Ahmanson looked at the group and said, “Deihl is going to be the head of Lending.”
Ahmanson's decision reflected his growing confidence that Deihl was the one man who could run all parts of the organization. Ten months later, at lunch in his regular booth at Perino's in October 1967, Ahmanson gathered Deihl, DeKruif, and Bill Ahmanson. Deihl sat to Howard's right. They were in the middle of a conversation where Howard was “chewing out” Bill Ahmanson for something related to the insurance business, when Howard turned and said, “Deihl, you're the new president of Home Savings.”
The announcement silenced the table. Almost impulsively, Ahmanson had picked his new Ken Childs, and it was not his nephew or one of his longtime associates. Still in his thirties, Deihl would be the backbone behind Home Savings operations.
But if Deihl thought that as president he would finally get to know Howard Ahmanson and understand what made him tick, he was disappointed. Most interactions continued to take place during Ahmanson's weekly meetings with the executives. Occasionally, he would get a call from Evelyn Barty relaying a question. Once or twice a complaint letter sent to Ahmanson would land on Deihl's desk. Occasionally, if Ahmanson had to duck out of some public appearance, Deihl would stand in for him. On June 7, 1968, Ahmanson told Deihl he would have to run the show at the Hollywood opening because Howard, Caroline, and Howard junior had a plane to catch. It would be the last assignment that Ahmanson would give to his new president.
BELGIUM
Howard's good friend Maurizio Bufalini chartered a boat for Howard and his friends. They anticipated that they would traverse the Rhine between Amsterdam and Frankfurt. The entourage included a host of Southern California friends.27 When they arrived in Amsterdam, however, Bufalini looked at the boat and deemed it unacceptable. Instead, he hired drivers and a blue bus, and the party drove down to Frankfurt and then up to Luxembourg. Howard planned to highlight the trip with a birthday celebration in Oslo at the home of world champion ice skater Sonja (Henie) and her husband Niels Onstad.
The motorcade was on its way to Brussels and nearing the city of Marche in Belgium on June 17. Riding in the back seat of his chauffeur-driven car, Howard suddenly felt ill.
Turning to look at him, Caroline said: “You aren't feeling very well.”
“No,” he answered, “I'm not feeling very well.”
She found a nitroglycerine pill and put it under his tongue, but it didn't seem to help. She put another one there.
He kept patting her hand. At one point, he said, “You're a very good wife.”
Then it got quiet in the vehicle. Suddenly Caroline realized that Howard had stopped breathing. She screamed, “Stop! Stop!”
The driver pulled to the side of the road.
Steady tried to revive his father with rescue breathing, but Howard didn't respond.
Someone called the closest hospital for an ambulance. At the hospital, they happened to find a surgeon from Boston who attended to Howard, but according to Caroline, “it was no use.” Although Howard had attended a Methodist church on occasion, Caroline, a strong Catholic, asked a priest to administer the last rites.28
A CIVIC FUNERAL
A wildfire raged on Bald Mountain in the Angeles National Forest through the night before Howard Ahmanson's funeral. It was the worst of a half-dozen fires burning in the Southland as temperatures soared to unseasonable highs. At dawn, a blood-red sun rose through the heavy smoke and smog that hung over the Los Angeles basin.29 Across the city, in Howard's honor, flags flew at half mast in front of Los Angeles County buildings by order of the Board of Supervisors.30
As the lavish service started, Howard's rose- and carnation-draped casket lay in state beneath the vaulted Gothic ceiling of the Wilshire United Methodist Church.31 Before this same altar, a number of Hollywood stars had been married, including seventeen-year-old actress Shirley Temple in 1945. For Howard's funeral the mood of the more than five hundred mourners in the congregation was more sober. When Roger Wagner introduced his Chorale and announced that they would perform the old cowboy song “Curtains of the Night,” to honor Ahmanson's “love for the great out-of-doors,” it brought a smile to the faces of some in attendance who remembered Howard's sunburned face as he worked the tiller of his boat.32
The congregation included more than fifty honorary pallbearers who represented much of the power elite of Los Angeles: Supervisors Burton W. Chace and Kenneth Hahn, Assembly Speaker Jesse M. Unruh, Sheriff Peter J. Pitchess, Councilman John Ferraro, former Governor Goodwin Knight, Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler, savings and loan owner Bart Lytton, and television personality Art Linkletter.33 An honorary pallbearer, Richard Deihl couldn't help but think that Howard had organized the event himself, since the speakers included a rabbi, a Catholic priest, and a Protestant minister. “He was covering his bases.”34
Norman Topping and Franklin Murphy, the presidents of L.A.’s two great universities, delivered eulogies. Topping described Howard as “a friend we loved for his dedication to living graciously, giving wisely and loving deeply.” Murphy said Howard was “a complex man; a restive, creative, loyal man who wedded his energy and genius to the dynamics of the West, here in Southern California, and created not only a financial empire, but also a community rich in cultural and spiritual values.”35
Steady sat watching the service, seemingly impassive. He was overwhelmed by a sense of the public significance of his father's demise, as if his father was more historical figure than parent. “I had this feeling that a great personality had been lost,” he recalls. During the service he started to cry. “For the first time and only time,” he remembers. “I'm not sure why. I didn't feel a great sense of personal loss. It was just the grandeur of the whole thing.”
With the service over, Howard junior joined his father's closest friends and collaborators as they lifted the casket. Edward Boland, Maurizio Bu-falini, Hernando Courtright, Franklin Murphy, William Pereira, Millard Sheets, Norman Topping, Thomas Webster, and J. Howard Edgerton, along with his nephews Bill and Bob, helped carry Howard's casket out of the church, past an honor guard of sheriff's deputies and to the waiting hearse.36
DISSOLUTION OF THE EMPIRE
Shortly before his death, Ahmanson had been working on estate planning and the future of H. F. Ahmanson & Co. Long talks with Thomas Webster were focused on two primary goals: preserving control of the Ahmanson empire within the family and ensuring that Ahmanson's family and certain friends would benefit from his estate. These conversations resulted in the creation of a testamentary trust and a new will, which Ahmanson signed two weeks before his death. The plan was one of the most complicated in U.S tax history. Ahmanson did not want his death to lead to a breakup of his empire. And even in death, he wanted to prevent others from gaining control of his companies. As a result, the bulk of the value of the estate, appraised at $105.4 million ($681.6 million in 2011 dollars) passed to the Ahmanson Foundation.37 Control of the empire was less clear.38
Prior to his death, Ahmanson had created a master holding company—Ahmanco Inc. Nearly all of the shares in this company were given to the Ahmanson Foundation, but these were nonvoting shares. The one voting share was awarded to Howard junior. Trust 28, the instrument that controlled most of his estate, gave Howard junior the sole right to vote this share once he reached the age of twenty-eight. From the time he was twenty-one until he was twenty-eight, he would share this right with the Ahmanson Bank & Trust, which acted as the executor for Howard senior's estate.39 But in 1968, Howard junior was not even twenty-one.
Unlike his father, who at the age of nineteen aspired to carry forward his father's legacy, Steady was mentally, emotionally, and developmentally in no position to direct his father's empire. Still struggling to deal with his undiagnosed Tourette's and suffering from grief, he seemed lost. Years later, Steady compared his reaction to a diver who comes up from the deep too quickly. “They get the ‘bends’ when nitrogen bubbles form in the blood vessels which can be extremely painful.” He thought now he had to straighten himself out. Sharing the house on South Hudson with Caroline, he went to work for Home Savings in Beverly Hills, hoping to work his way up to be a teller. But Caroline and Bob Ahmanson felt that he was not coping. After seeing a psychiatrist at UCLA, Steady was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic. He was told he couldn't be treated on an outpatient basis. At Franklin Murphy's suggestion, Robert Ahmanson and Howard's driver, Conway, flew halfway across the country to Kansas City. On the night of July 14, less than a month after his father's death and five months after Howard junior turned eighteen, someone other than Steady filled out the voluntary admission form to the Menninger Memorial Hospital, the world-famous psychiatric clinic, and signed Howard junior's name, authorizing the clinic to perform diagnostic and therapeutic procedures as determined by the hospital.40 Howard junior remained in Kansas for months, eventually taking classes at nearby Wash-burn University so he could continue his schooling while the psychiatric staff at Menninger monitored his condition.41
With Steady too young and incapacitated by his affliction, the future of the Ahmanson empire seemed uncertain. In many ways, Bill and Bob Ahmanson saw themselves as inheritors of their uncle's business empire, if not literally, at least operationally. Caroline believed that she had better insight into Howard's desires and sought to prevent Bill from taking control. She organized a meeting that included Howard's closest business associates and excluded Bill and Bob. She sought to persuade Howard's loyalists to side with her in a struggle for control. Everything turned on the single voting share of Ahmanco, which would be voted by the board of the Ahmanson Bank & Trust. Although they were torn, most of these leaders chose to follow Bill and Bob. Bill became the CEO of H. F. Ahmanson & Co, and in January 1969 was elected chairman of Home Savings & Loan.42
Caroline sought to have the final will overturned in court. Under the terms of the estate, she received $5 million as her share of community property. Taking advantage of a provision of California law that allowed for challenges when a will left gifts to charity and was signed within thirty days of the testator's death, she sought to invalidate the will and at least two of the trusts that Ahmanson and Webster had established.43 Eventually, the foundation settled with her and paid her an additional $750,000 from the funds included in the gross estate.44 Everything that was left went to the Ahmanson Foundation.
The complexity of Ahmanson's estate was also magnified when the tax laws were rewritten in 1969. The Tax Reform Act required private foundations with a controlling share of the ownership of for-profit companies to divest their majority stake. The law essentially forced Ahmanson's heirs and the Ahmanson Foundation to take H. F. Ahmanson & Co. public. When stock in H. F. Ahmanson & Co. was sold on the open market for the first time on October 17, 1972, it was one of the largest initial public offerings in history.45 It also established the Ahmanson Foundation as one of the largest and richest in Southern California.
The foundation board appointed Bob Ahmanson as president. It developed a set of informal giving guidelines to reflect the board's best understanding of Ahmanson's intent: giving would be primarily in Southern California and Omaha. Giving would also follow Ahmanson's historic lead, focusing on institutions like LACMA, the Music Center, and others that he had supported.46 Under Franklin Murphy's influence, the foundation also provided substantial support to academic and private libraries in the region.47 It continued to support medical research and hospitals.48 In 1992, Murphy claimed that the Ahmanson Foundation had played “a greater role in the cultural life of Southern California than any other single force.”49
Charlie Fletcher and Howard Edgerton both lived for many years after Ahmanson's death. For competitive men, it was a lousy way to end the race. Edgerton remained with CalFed for many years. In public, he sometimes rued the fact that he had not acquired his own state-chartered savings and loan like his friend Howard Ahmanson and built it into a financial empire. When he died in 1999 at the age of ninety-one, he was remembered for his long history of service to the community and the thrift industry. Charlie Fletcher turned over the leadership of Home Federal Savings and Loan to his son Kim and moved to Hawaii. Described as a “perpetual motion machine,” he was hardly comfortable in retirement. He went to work for Pioneer Federal Savings and Loan in Hawaii and soon became its president and chairman. He continued to swim nearly every day until three weeks before his death in the fall of 1985.50 In 1991, during the savings and loan crisis and after operating for more than half a century, Home Federal was seized by federal regulators.51 Several years later, Cal Fed and Home Savings disappeared as well in a wave of corporate mergers that came with banking deregulation. The end of these three major Southern California thrifts signaled the end of an era just as the deaths of these three men marked the passing of a generation in the savings and loan industry and in America.