NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1.Josephine Hedges Ewalt, A Business Reborn: The Savings and Loan Story, 1930-1960 (Chicago: American Savings and Loan Institute Press, 1962), 203.

2.Clark H. Woodward, “Admiral Woodward Notes: Japan Marks Time, Watches Russian War,” WP, December 7, 1941, B1.

3.San Diego Hall of Champions, “Charles Fletcher,” n.d.,www.sdhoc.com/sport /diving-and-swimming/charles-fletcher (accessed October 7, 2009)

4.“Hostess at Hollywood Home,” LAT, October 31, 1926, C2; Elizabeth Goodland, “Kim Fletcher to Claim Bride,” LAT, August 15, 1954, C3.

5.Daniel M. Weintraub, “Charles Fletcher, 82, Dies; Founder of Home Federal,” LAT, October 1, 1985.

6.Howard Edgerton to Mr. and Mrs. Charles K. Fletcher and Mr. and Mrs. Howard Ahmanson, November 26, 1943, in accordion file, box 23AV: World War II Era, FA.

7.“Meet Mr. Edgerton,” Savings and Loan News, December 1954, 15-18. See also J. Howard Edgerton, The Story of California Federal Savings (New York: New-comen Society in North America, 1969), 5.

8.Edgerton, Story of California Federal Savings, 5.

9.“J. Howard Edgerton, 91, Official in S&L Industry in California,” NYT, October 30, 1999.

10.Edgerton to Mr. and Mrs. Charles K. Fletcher and Mr. and Mrs. Howard Ahmanson, November 26, 1943.

11.Caroline Leonetti Ahmanson, interview by Roberta Green Ahmanson and Marc Nurre, notes, August 23, 1993, in FA; Richard H. Deihl, interview by author, September 25, 2009.

12.“Mr. and Mrs. H. F. Ahmanson,” Japan News-Week, June 1, 1940, 7.

13.Edgerton to Mr. and Mrs. Charles K. Fletcher and Mr. and Mrs. Howard Ahmanson, November 26, 1943.

14.Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Proposed Message to Congress,” December 7, 1941,www.archives.gov/education/lessons/day-of-infamy/iniages/infamy-address-1.gif.

15.Robert C. Albright, “Calm Congress Accepts Challenge with But One Dissenting Vote; Long Ovation Given President; Packed Galleries Applaud Speech,” WP, December 9, 1941, 1.

16.For background on the evolution of the managed economy, see Louis Galambos and Joseph Pratt, The Rise of the Corporate Commonwealth: United States Business and Public Policy in the 20th Century (New York: Basic Books, 1988). See also Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916: The Market, the Law and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and William G. Scott, Chester I. Barnard and the Guardians of the Managerial State (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992).

17.Leo Grebler, David M. Blank, and Louis Winnick, Capital Formation in Residential Real Estate: Trends and Prospects (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 238-60. See also David L. Mason, From Buildings and Loans to Bail-Outs: A History of the American Savings and Loan Industry, 1831-1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 140-53.

18.Only a limited number of business biographies or corporate histories have explored the theme of the government or political entrepreneur, although examples permeate the history of the American economy. Successful business leaders in this arena leverage government contracts to build market power or use legislative, legal, or regulatory processes to reshape markets to gain competitive advantage. See, for example, Stephen B. Adams, Mr. Kaiser Goes to Washington: The Rise of a Government Entrepreneur (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

19.Between 1951 and 1962, savings and loans increased their share of the residential nonfarm mortgage market from 33.9 percent to 58.2 percent in Southern California, compared to an increase from 38.2 percent to 49.4 percent for the nation as a whole. In Los Angeles County, they accounted for 70.1 percent of all mortgage recordings by 1961. Federal Home Loan Bank data in Leo Grebler and Eugene F. Brigham, Savings and Mortgage Markets in California (Pasadena: California Savings and Loan League, 1963), 33, 41.

20.Data developed by the University of Michigan Survey Research Center (also Center for Political Studies) reflect Americans’ relative confidence in government's efficacy and its ability to serve the interests of all. In 1964, for example, 76 percent of those surveyed said they trusted government to “do what's right” always or most of the time. By 1970, that number had declined to 53.5 percent. In 1964, 64 percent said government was run for the benefit of all, rather than a few big interests. By 1970, that percentage had fallen to 40.6 percent. In 1964, 68.2 percent believed that government officials were smart people who knew what they were doing. By 1970, only a slight majority—51.2 percent—held that view. Arthur H. Miller, “Political Issues and Trust in Government, 1964-1970,” American Political Science Review 64, no. 3 (September 1974): 953. For a discussion of World War II's influence on attitudes toward government and civic engagement, see Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 268-72. For an overview of the scholarly literature on the public's trust in government, see Luke Keele, “Social Capital and the Dynamics of Trust in Government,” American Journal of Political Science 51, no. 2 (April 2007): 241-54.

21.David Vogel highlights the impact of growing consumerism on business regulation in Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 37-59.

22.Neoclassical economics explains regulation as a result of market failure. Theorists associated with the University of Chicago (George Stigler, Richard Posner, and Sam Peltzman) have emphasized regulation as the product of political bargaining by interest groups seeking economic advantage from the state. For a review of regulatory history emphasizing the latter approach, see Claudia Goldin and Gary D. Libecap, The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For a more contingent historical view, see Thomas K. McCraw, “Regulation in America: A Review Article,” Business History Review 49 (Summer 1975): 162-83. See also Thomas K. McCraw, Prophets of Regulation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 216-21.

23.Richard H. Vietor, Contrived Competition: Regulation and Deregulation in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

24.See, for example, S. Liebowitz, “The Real Scandal, How Feds Invited the Mortgage Mess,” New York Post, February 5, 2008, cited in Manuel B. Aalbers, “Why the Community Reinvestment Act Cannot Be Blamed for the Subprime Crisis,” City and Community 8, no. 3 (2009): 346-50.

25.See, for example, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail (New York: Viking, 2009); Scott Patterson, The Quants (New York: Crown Business, 2010); Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, All the Devils Are Here (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2010); and Roger Lowenstein, The End of Wall Street (New York: Penguin Press, 2010).

26.Richard A. Posner, The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Joseph E. Stiglitz, Freefall (New York: Norton, 2010).

27.Kevin Fox Gotham, “Racialization and the State: The Housing Act of 1934 and the Creation of the Federal Housing Administration,” Sociological Perspectives 43, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 291-317.

1. FATHER AS MENTOR

1.Landmarks Heritage Preservation Commission, “Calvin Memorial Presbyterian Church,” n.d., www.co.douglas.ne.us/omaha/planning/landmarks/alphabetical-listing/calvin-memorial-presbyterian-church (accessed October 3, 2009).

2.U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1910 U.S. Census, Douglas County, NE, www .census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1910.html

3.“The Track of the Tornado,” Omaha Bee, special issue, n.d., www.memorial library.com/NE/Tornados/Track/story.htm (accessed September 30, 2009).

4.“How Omaha Was Stricken,” NYT, March 25, 1913, n.p.

5.Amazingly, none of the patrons were killed as they took refuge on the floor, and the seats kept the roof from falling on them. People then crawled to escape. Travis Sing, Omaha's Easter Tornado of 1913 (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2003), 82.

6.The estimated death toll in Omaha from the tornado differs from source to source. This number is taken from ibid., 7.

7.Andrew Jenson, Church Chronology: A Record of Important Events Pertaining to the History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News, 1914), 47.

8.Fieldstad was also sometimes spelled Fjeldstad. George T. Flom, “The Danish Contingent in the Population of Early Iowa,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics, January 1906, 239.

9.[Chris Bone], “Partial History/Chronology Howard Ahmanson,” typescript from the files of Home Savings of America, [1988], copy provided by Robert DeKruif.

10.Ibid.

11.William Harvey King, History of Homeopathy (New York: Lewis, 1905), 399.

12.U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1880 U.S. Census, Douglas County, NE, www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1880.html.

13.See W. H. Ahmanson's World War I draft registration listing at Nebraska State Historical Society, “Nebraska WWI Draft Cards Index Search Result,” http://nshs.hallcountyne.gov/cgi-bin/WWIdraft_search.cgi?co=Omaha (accessed October 3, 2009).

14.“W. H. Ahmanson Dead; Was Ill One Year,” OCCJ, June 6, 1925, 7.

15.“Application for Commission or Warrant, U.S. Naval Reserve,” in file: H. F. Ahmanson-Navy, box 23AV, FA.

16.“Mortality Statistics,” Omaha Daily Bee, April 4, 1899, 12.

17.Harold Tucker, “It's Not All Finance with L.A. Financier,” LAT, June 11, 1961, J1.

18.Seymour Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home,” first draft typescript, March 17, 1958, in FA.

19.Norris Leap, “H.F. Ahmanson, ‘Spoiled Boy,’ Becomes Financial Genius,” LAT, December 28, 1958, part IV, 1.

20.Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home.”

21.Leap, “H.F. Ahmanson.”

22.Ibid.

23.Ibid.

24.Seymour Freedgood, “Emperor Howard Ahmanson of S&L,” Fortune, May 1958, 150.

25.Stewart Alsop, “Multi-Millionaires: How America's New Rich Made Their Vast Fortunes,” Saturday Evening Post, July 17, 1965, 42.

26.“The Hot Rodder,” Omaha World Herald, May 14, 1980, n.p., clipping provided by Mary Jane Bettefreund.

27.Leap, “H. F. Ahmanson.”

28.Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home.”

29.Leap, “H. F. Ahmanson.”

30.“Application for Commission.”

31.Certificate awarded to Howard Ahmanson by International YMCA Bible Study, 1919, in FA.

32.Mrs. Aimee Ahmanson and Florence Hoffman, interview by Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., August 21, 1993, 1, in FA.

33.Ibid.

34.The foreign born and their children accounted for nearly half of the city's population in 1920. For population numbers, see Lawrence H. Larsen et al., Upstream Metropolis: An Urban Biography of Omaha and Council Bluffs (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 205.

35.In 1918 alone, bank clearings increased by 50 percent, the fastest growth in the financial sector of any leading city in the nation. “Omaha's Phenomenal Growth in Bank Clearings,” OCCJ, January 11, 1919, 1.

36.“Nebraska in Banking,” OCCJ, February 8, 1919, 2.

37.Lawrence H. Larsen and Barbara J. Cottrell, The Gate City: A History of Omaha (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 183-84.

38.Larsen et al., Upstream Metropolis, 214-15.

39.Henry Fonda was a little more than a year older than Howard and apparently lived next door to the Ahmansons’ house in Dundee at one time. See Omaha City Directories; “Henry, Too,” Omaha World-Herald, May 14, 1980, n.p., clipping provided by Mary Jane Bettefreund; and Dan Rock, Dundee, Neb.: A Pictorial History (Omaha, NE: Shurson, 2000).

40.Larsen et al., Upstream Metropolis, 218.

41.Alsop, “Multi-Millionaires,” 42.

42.Naomi R. Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

43.Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916: The Market, the Law and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). See also James Willard Hurst, Law and Social Order in the United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).

44.Dalit Baranoff, “Shaped by Risk: Fire Insurance in America, 1790-1920” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2003).

45.The Woodmen of the World, established in Omaha in 1895, was already one of the largest fraternal insurance organizations in the United States. Mutual of Omaha, started in 1909 as the Mutual Benefit Health and Accident Association, was growing rapidly. Larsen and Cottrell, Gate City, 214-15. On Woodmen of the World, see also “Facts Every Omahan Should Know about Omaha,” OCCJ, January 22, 1921, 6-7.

46.Insurance Department, State of Nebraska, Summary of Insurance Business in Nebraska for the Year 1913 (Fremont, NE: Hammond Printing Co./State Insurance Board, 1914), 116, Nebraska State Historical Society, RG 008, Dept. of Insurance, Summaries of Insurance Business, 188-1928, box 1 of 3. They earned just over $4.4 million in insurance premiums, while paying out a little more than $2.7 million in claims. “Nebraska Fire Business,” Weekly Underwriter, September 12, 1914, in The Weekly Underwriter, Volume 91 (New York: Underwriter Printing, 1914), 280.

47.“Omaha, Insurance Center,” OCCJ, February 8, 1919, 3.

48.“C.C. Leaders Know Budgets,” Omaha World-Herald, May 28, 1952, n.p.

49.Omaha City Directory, 1914, http://distantcousin.com/directories/ne/omaha /1914/.

50.For more on the history of regulation in this context, see Thomas K. McCraw, “Regulation in America: A Review Article,” Business History Review 49 (Summer 1975): 162-83. See also Thomas K. McCraw, Prophets of Regulation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 216-21.

51.H. Roger Grant, Insurance Reform: Consumer Action in the Progressive Era (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1979).

52.Baranoff, “Shaped by Risk,” 163, 178.

53.Harry Chase Brearley, The History of the National Board of Fire Underwriters: Fifty Years a Civilizing Force (New York: FrederickA. Stokes, 1916).

54.Guy Ashton Brown and Hiland Hill Wheeler, Compiled Statutes of the State of Nebraska, 1881: With Amendments, 1882-1901 (Lincoln, NE: State Journal Company, 1901), 1182.

55.Baranoff, “Shaped by Risk,” 195.

56.Tim Bartley and Marc Schneiberg, “Rationality and Institutional Contingency: The Varying Politics of Economic Regulation in the Fire Insurance Industry,” Sociological Perspectives 45, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 58. See also, Grant Insurance Reform, 100-107.

57.Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction, 433.

58.The company was initially organized as the American National Fire Insurance Company, but shortly after it was launched the name was changed to National American Fire Insurance.

59.Display advertisement, Evening World Herald, August 28, 1919, 13.

60.Foster joined the Aetna Company at the age of fifteen and stayed for twelve years, working the last six years as auditor. He had managed a local agency and then served as Nebraska state agent for the Sioux Fire Insurance Company before going to work for Columbia. Display advertisement, Evening World-Herald, August 28, 1919, 13. See “J. E. Foster Succeeds to Presidency,” OCCJ, June 6, 1925, 9.

61.Display advertisement, Evening World-Herald, August 28, 1919, 13.

62.“Men Who Are Making Omaha: W.H. Ahmanson,” Omaha Bee, May 22, 1924, clipping in biography file at Omaha Public Library; “ W.H. Ahmanson Dead.”

63.Hayden's testimony comes from Warren Buffett, who knew him in Omaha. Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (New York: Bantam Books, 2008), 210, 860 n. 23.

64.A.M. Best Company, Best's Insurance Reports: Fire and Marine, 1920-1921 (New York: Alfred M. Best Company, 1920), 261.

65.Ibid.

66.OCCJ, November 19, 1919, 3.

67.Meanwhile, as of the end of 1919, the company had nearly $628,450 invested in certificates of deposit, another $334,194 in stocks and bonds, and $150,483 in real estate mortgages. A. M. Best Company, Best's Insurance Reports, 261.

68.“Home Patronage for Fire Insurance,” OCCJ, February 19, 1921, 14-15.

69.Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home.”

70.Rock, Dundee, Neb., 12.

71.Ibid., 2.

72.Ibid., 41.

73.Ibid.

74.Howard P. Chudacoff, Mobile Americans: Residential and Social Mobility in Omaha, 1880-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 122.

75.Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home.”

76.Howard Buffett, Warren Buffett's father, was also a student at the University of Nebraska in these years, a couple of years older than Howard Ahmanson. Warren Buffett guesses that the two men knew each other, but he does not know how well. Warren Buffett, interview by author, December 9, 2010.

77.Unattributed notes in file: Howard F. Ahmanson Sr., box: TAF History, TAFA.

78.Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977).

79.Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964); Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); Robert Wiebe, Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968).

80.“Secretary of Commerce,” OCCJ, April 16, 1921, 8.

81.Ellis W. Hawley, “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an ‘Associative State,’ 1921-1928,” Journal of American History 61, no. 1 (1974): 116-40.

82.Quoted in William E. Leuchtenburg, Herbert Hoover (New York: Times Books, 2009), 64.

83.Wiebe, Businessmen and Reform, 222.

84.“Purely Personal,” Underwriters’ Report, February 17, 1944, n.p., clipping in FA.

85.John Taliaferro, Charles M. Russell: The Life and Legend of America's Cowboy Artist (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996). Russell had goiter surgery at the Mayo Clinic in 1926 and survived.

86.“Jaycees Right on Prediction,” Omaha World-Herald, February 5, 1952, n.p. See also Aimee Ahmanson and Florence Hoffman, interview by Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., August 21, 1983.

87.“Chamber Gossip,” OCCJ, December 20, 1924, 9.

88.Aimee Ahmanson and Florence Hoffman, interview by Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., August 21, 1983.

89.Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home.”

90.Freedgood, “Emperor Howard Ahmanson,” 150.

91.Foster had been secretary and treasurer of the company since it was organized in 1919. See “J. E. Foster Succeeds.”

92.Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home.”

93.Freedgood, “Emperor Howard Ahmanson.”

94.In an article in Forbes in 1965, Ahmanson deadpanned that after the stockholders at National American gained control of the company following his father's death, “My inheritance shrank to a measly half a million dollars. That's why mine is a rags-to-riches story.” He did not detail the specific assets he received. “Faces behind the Figures,” Forbes, July 1, 1965, 26.

95.Freedgood, “Emperor Howard Ahmanson.”

96.Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home.”

97.Alsop, “Multi-Millionaires,” 39.

98.Freedgood, “Emperor Howard Ahmanson,” 150-51.

2. AMONG THE LOTUS EATERS

1.Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946; repr., Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985), 165.

2.Midwestern immigrants romanticized California's Hispanic past but isolated the large Hispanic and Asian minority groups, as well as the smaller communities of African Americans living in Los Angeles. By 1930, minority groups accounted for the following shares of the 1.2 million people living in Los Angeles: Asian American, 2.2 percent (27,838); Hispanic, 7.8 percent (97,116); African American, 3.1 percent (38,894). See table 5, “California—Race and Hispanic Origin for Selected Large Cities and Other Places: Earliest Census to 1990,” www.census.gov/population/www/ documentation/twps0076/CAtab.pdf; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930: Metropolitan Districts, Population and Area, 9, www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/03450421_TOC.pdf (accessed March 8, 2011)

3.Carey McWilliams, “I'm a Stranger Here Myself,” in Southern California, 178–80.

4.“Looking Again into the Future,” advertisement, LAT, October 5, 1925, 7.

5.“—The Second Million,” advertisement, LAT, October 5, 1925, A6.

6.“Automobiles as Indicators,” OCCJ, March 19, 1921, 9.

7.“Omaha Leads World in Telephones,” OCCJ, January 3, 1925, 13.

8.Omaha led all other cities in the nation except Des Moines, Grand Rapids, and Toledo. “Many Omahans Own Homes,” OCCJ, November 12, 1921, 8. Nationally, the rate of home ownership was 45.6 percent in 1920. See “Historical Census of Housing Tables: Homeownership,” October 2011, www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/owner.html.

9.“Facts Every Omahan Should Know about Omaha,” OCCJ, January 22, 1921, 6-7.

10.Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

11.Industrial Department, Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, Special Report to Henry M. Robinson, Chairman of the Board, Security-First National Bank of Los Angeles, California, 2 vols. (Los Angeles: Industrial Department, 1930), cited in Greg Hise, “Industry and Imaginative Geographies,” in Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s, ed. Tom Sitton and William Deverell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 19.

12.Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis.

13.Clark Davis, “The View from Spring Street: White-Collar Men in the City of Angels,” in Sitton and Deverell, Metropolis in the Making, 185.

14.Howard Ahmanson Jr., interview by author, May 27, 2009.

15.Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 153.

16.“Many Enter for Course at College,” LAT, October 28, 1925, 14.

17.“Thurston Ross; Property Appraiser and Economist,” LAT, November 16, 1990.

18.Ross was invited to Washington in 1926 to meet with commerce secretary Herbert Hoover to help arrange the program for national management week. “Goes to Meet Hoover,” LAT, October 1, 1926, A22.

19.Seymour Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home,” first draft typescript, March 17, 1958, in FA.

20.David S. Hannah, interview by Marc Nurre, [1994], in FA.

21.Frank Grannis was the vice president and general manager of the Southern California Music Company in 1927. “School Children to Receive Free Music Lessons,” LAT, March 4, 1927, A4.

22.Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home.”

23.Howard F. Ahmanson to Dorothy Grannis, June 8, 1927, in FA.

24.Howard F. Ahmanson to Dorothy Grannis, July 30, 1927, in FA.

25.Ibid.

26.Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home.”

27.“Pending Changes in Insurance,” Pacific Underwriter and Banker, January 25, 1926, n.p.

28.[Chris Bone], “Partial History/Chronology Howard Ahmanson,” typescript from the files of Home Savings of America, [1988], copy provided by Robert DeKruif. Ahmanson was also appointed as general agent for National American Fire Insurance on August 23, 1926. See James E. Foster, “To Whom It May Concern,” March 20, 1943, in file: H. F. Ahmanson-Navy, box 23AV, FA. For the company's founding date, see “Natl. American Shows Steady Growth,” Underwriter's Report, August 8, 1929, 11.

29.“Permits Issued,” LAT, June 3, 1928, C12. For the office location, see “Natl. American Shows Steady Growth.”

30.National American Fire Insurance did not have deep connections in California. In 1925, the company reached an agreement with A. J. Baldwin to act as its agent but reported no business activity that year. “Pacific Coast Fire Business for 1925,” Pacific Underwriter and Banker, January 25, 1926, 111. The following year, the trade journal reported that National American had premiums of $5,071 and a loss ratio of only 2.7 percent, but no agent was listed for the company. Pacific Underwriter and Banker, March 25, 1927, 87.

31.Robert DeKruif, interview by Margaret Bach, [1992], in TAFA.

32.Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home.”

33.“Application for Commission or Warrant, U.S. Naval Reserve,” in file: H. F. Ahmanson-Navy, box 23AV, FA.

34.Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home.”

35.“Natl. American Shows Steady Growth.”

36.“Agency Supt. Named,” loose clipping, September 22, 1927, in FA.

37.Ahmanson's relationship to Garrigue must have been meaningful to him because after Garrigue's arrest he clipped a series of articles related to the case and saved them. See FA.

38.For his quote, see Margaret Bach, “The Ahmanson Foundation,” June 1993, 11-12, in TAFA.

39.Howard Ahmanson told different versions of this story to a number of reporters over the years, and it was referenced in an oral history with Aimee Ahmanson as well. I conclude that the man was Morgan Adams. In press accounts of these stories, Howard does not mention Morgan Adams by name. In an oral history, Howard Ahmanson Jr. asked Aimee Ahmanson if the individual in the story was Morgan Adams and she seemed to affirm that it was. The transcript is somewhat ambiguous on this point. In a different interview, David Hannah, who worked for Ahmanson starting in the early 1940s, says that Ahmanson and Adams were partners. He is the source for the partnership part of this story. David S. Hannah, interview by Mark Nurre, [1994]; see also Aimee Ahmanson and Florence Hoffman, interview by Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., August 21, 1993; Robert Ahmanson, interview by unknown interviewer, October 11, 1993; all in the FA.

40.Stewart Alsop, “Multi-Millionaires: How America's New Rich Made Their Vast Fortunes,” Saturday Evening Post, July 17, 1965, 39. A different version of this story is offered by David Hannah. Hannah says that Ahmanson and Adams agreed to become partners. Adams convinced Metropolitan Life to provide underwriting for the policies, but when it became clear that the business was highly profitable he tried to buy Ahmanson out. Ahmanson bought Adams out instead, turning to the bank that was next door to Mortgage Guarantee to borrow the funds. David S. Hannah, interview by Mark Nurre, [1994], in FA.

41.Seymour Freedgood, “Emperor Howard Ahmanson of S&L,” Fortune, May 1958, 150.

42.Ibid., 151.

43.Alsop, “Multi-Millionaires,” 39.

44.Freedgood, “Emperor Howard Ahmanson,” 150.

45.David S. Hannah, interview by Mark Nurre, [1994], in FA.

46.Robert DeKruif, interview by Margaret Bach, [1992], in TAFA.

47.This story was told to Warren Buffett by Hayden Ahmanson. See Warren Buffett, interview by author, December 9, 2010.

48.Richard Deihl, interview by author, September 25, 2009.

49.Howard Ahmanson Jr., interview by author, December 15, 2010.

50.Aimee Ahmanson, interview by unknown interviewer, August 20, 1993, in FA.

51.Alan Teck, Mutual Savings Banks and Savings and Loan Associations: Aspects of Growth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968).

52.John Lintner, Mutual Savings Banks in the Savings and Mortgage Markets (Boston: Division of Research, Graduate School of Business, Harvard University, 1948).

53.During this period, savings banks expanded into the mortgage market as well (restrictions were lifted in the 1830s in New York). Between 1875 and 1890, mortgages as a percentage of total assets at savings banks rose from 20 to 40 percent. Teck, Mutual Savings Banks, 45.

54.Kenneth A. Snowden, “The Evolution of Interregional Mortgage Lending Channels, 1870-1940: The Life Insurance—Mortgage Company Connection,” in Coordination and Information: Historical Perspectives on the Organization of Enterprise, ed. Naomi Lamoreaux and Daniel M.G. Raff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 216-18.

55.Ibid., 220. Noninstitutional lenders—families, estates, trust funds, individuals and business firms—continued to extend more than half of all mortgage loans made at the turn of the century. Leo Grebler, David M. Blank, and Louis Winnick, Capital Formation in Residential Real Estate: Trends and Prospects (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), ch. 13.

56.Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 67-68; Jerry Voorhis, American Cooperatives (New York: Harper and Row, 1961).

57.For a valuable analysis of the importance of personal connections and information networks in nineteenth-century banking, see Naomi R. Lamoreaux and National Bureau of Economic Research, Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England, NBER Series on Long-Term Factors in Economic Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

58.David L. Mason, From Buildings and Loans to Bail-Outs: A History of the American Savings and Loan Industry, 1831-1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 32-39.

59.All quotes from Dexter's speech come from Seymour Dexter, “President's Address,” in U.S. League of Local Building and Loan Associations, Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting (Chicago: Financial Review and American Building Association News, 1893), 38-43.

60.The linkage between the home and the Republican ideal has deep roots in American history. Looking at the home as a symbol in the United States, Jan Cohn points out that smaller homes—log cabins and cottages—have been symbols of both individual independence and successful egalitarian communities. Jan Cohn, The Palace or the Poorhouse: The American House as a Cultural Symbol (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1979).

61.Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (NewYork: Pantheon Books, 1989); Richard Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (New York: Basic Books, 1990).

62.Lendol Calder, Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 20.

63.K. V. Haymaker, in U.S. League of Local Building and Loan Associations, Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting (Chicago: American Building Association News, 1916), 144. Haymaker would later play a leading role in the “Own Your Own Home” campaign launched in 1918. Karen Dunn-Haley, “The House That Uncle Sam Built: The Political Culture of Federal Housing Policy, 1919-1932” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1996).

64.Oliver E. Connor, “Home-Owning Halted,” American Building Association News, July 1923, 310.

65.“'Homes First,’ Should Be the Goal,” American Building Association News, December 1923, 552.

66.In a number of places throughout this book I refer to economies of scale and scope in the mortgage business. For many years, scholars generally believed that beyond a certain minimum size banking yielded very few economies of scale. This was especially true in a predigital era before computerization allowed for the aggregation of transaction-processing systems on a single platform. These earlier studies, however, rarely accounted for the ways in which scale could affect levels of risk—a key cost for anyone in financial services. More recent studies suggest that larger banking organizations achieve significant economies of scale by reducing the cost of risk taking (better credit information systems) and risk management (greater diversification). For an overview of studies related to scale economies in banking, see Loretta J. Master, “Scale Economies in Banking and Financial Regulatory Reform,” The Region (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis), September 2010, 10-15.

67.L. L. Rankin, “Building and Loan Growth: Its Benefits, How Obtained,” in U.S. League of Local Building and Loan Associations, Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting (Chicago: American Building Association News, 1905), 66.

68.Ibid., 68.

69.Other cooperatives also made this turn from local mutualism to aggressive market competition at the turn of the twentieth century. Agricultural producer cooperatives like Sunkist adopted “hardheaded” marketing strategies. As Robert Wiebe has described it, “Where the earlier cooperatives had dreamed of surmounting the profit system or returning business from evil men to the people, these [new cooperatives] sought a lucrative place, often a monopoly, within the existing system.” Wiebe, Search for Order, 1877-1920, 127.

70.These contracts represented only one-third of the total value of all residential mortgages in the United States, underscoring the fact that building and loans were still focused on working- and middle-class families. Morton Bodfish, “The Depression Experience of Savings and Loan Associations in the United States,” address given to the Fifth International Congress of Savings, Building and Loan Associations, Building Societies and Similar Thrift and Home Financing Institutions, Salzburg, Austria, September 1935, 1.

71.“Home Building Looms Strong,” LAT, February 17, 1929, E2.

72.State Mutual Building and Loan granted 1,013 mortgages to home owners in the first six months of 1928. “Record Volume Announced in Month's Loans,” LAT, July 8, 1928, E4.

73.Independent insurance agents included building and loans in their ban, but their primary concern was the Bank of Italy. To quell growing criticism, the bank pledged in 1927 that it would not offer insurance in markets where there were established agents (leaving open the question of serving rural communities). The industry's trade journal welcomed this gesture, but some wanted the legislature to license only individuals who made placing insurance their sole business. Pacific Underwriter and Banker, November 25, 1927, 341, 344. The industry's trade journal asserted that such a rigid approach would affect a wide range of industries including, for example, railroad ticket agents who sold travelers’ insurance. Pacific Underwriter and Banker, January 25, 1928, n.p. In the fall of 1928, the California attorney general ruled that it was legal for lenders to also sell insurance as long as they did not “coerce” their customers. Pacific Underwriter and Banker, May 10, 1928, 136.

74.Robert DeKruif, interview by author, May 1, 2009.

75.David S. Hannah, interview by Marc Nurre, [1994], in FA. In a study of management incentives in the mutual savings and loan industry, Alfred Nicols looked at the use of management-owned affiliated businesses, like insurance agencies, as a way for savings and loan executives to increase the rewards from the success of building their organizations. Nicols noted that these businesses were highly profitable because the insurance agency (owned by the savings and loan manager) incurred almost no solicitation costs and there were opportunities to cross-sell insurance for auto, life, etc. Moreover, the due diligence required to qualify the borrower and the property had already been done by the savings and loan in the context of making the loan. Alfred Nicols, Management and Control in the Mutual Savings and Loan Association (Toronto: Lexington Books, 1972), 27-28.

76.“Ex-Omahan Is a Giant in the Loan Industry,” Omaha World-Herald, June 6, 1965, n.p. See also Alsop, “Multi-Millionaires,” 42.

77.Alsop, “Multi-Millionaires,” 39.

78.Freedgood, “Emperor Howard Ahmanson,” 150.

79.“Howard Ahmanson—Biographical Information,” in file: Howard F. Ahmanson, box: TAF History, TAFA.

80.The foray into the petroleum industry may not have been very successful. In 1944, when a friend offered him a similar opportunity to get into the mining business, Howard quickly said no. “I've always been afraid that I would get greedy and try to make money in somebody else's racket,” he wrote. “I have a deep-seated and childish mental picture in my mind of how awfully silly a miner would be if he opened offices across from mine and started running fire insurance companies .... I think I might look the same way going into the mining business.” Howard F. Ahmanson to Gosta Guston, January 10, 1944, in accordion file, box 23AV, FA.

81.“Application for Commission.”

82.“June Bride Will Motor Home,” LAT, July 14, 1933, A6.

83.Freedgood et al, “Croesus at Home.”

3. UNDERTAKER AT A PLAGUE

1.James L. Davis, “Survey Shows Realty Status,” LAT, July 5, 1931, D11.

2.“Home Seizure Relief Urged,” LAT, July 20, 1931, A8.

3.“The Special Session,” LAT, July 13, 1932, A4.

4.“New Loan Plan Details Told,” LAT, April 6, 1932, A1.

5.“Ex-Omahan Is a Giant in the Loan Industry,” Omaha World-Herald, June 6, 1965, n.p.

6.Susan Hoffmann and Mark K. Cassell, Mission Expansion in the Federal Home Loan Bank System (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 30.

7.Kyle D. Palmer, “Millions Hear Hoover Accept His Nomination,” LAT, August 12, 1928, 1.

8.Quoted in William Greider, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country (New York: Touchstone Books, 1987), 300-302. Economic historians still debate the cause or causes of the Great Depression. For one overview, see Ben Bernanke, Essays on the Great Depression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

9.William E. Leuchtenburg, Herbert Hoover (New York: Times Books, 2009), 105-7.

10.Ibid., 129.

11.Ibid., 130.

12.Leon T. Kendall, The Savings and Loan Business: Its Purpose, Functions, and Economic Justification (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 7.

13.William Bartlett, The Valuation of Mortgage-Backed Securities (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), 480.

14.Many building and loans relied on commercial banks for lines of credit collateralized with home loans. As banks struggled, they called in these loans, putting additional pressure on building and loan liquidity and working capital. Viewers of It's a Wonderful Life will remember George Bailey's efforts to get the banker Mr. Potter to extend credit to the building and loan. Hoffmann and Cassell, Mission Expansion, 31.

15.Between 1930 and 1935, real estate as a percentage of the total assets of savings and loans in the United States rose from 2.8 percent to 20.2 percent. Josephine Hedges Ewalt, A Business Reborn: The Savings and Loan Story, 1930-1960 (Chicago: American Savings and Loan Institute Press, 1962), 21, table 1.

16.Herbert Hoover, “Address to the White House Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership,” December 2, 1931, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=22927#axzz1G9hjfrZE.

17.Quoted in Greider, Secrets of the Temple, 299.

18.R. Dan Brumbaugh, Thrifts under Siege: Restoring Order to American Banking (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1988), 25.

19.Hoffmann and Cassell, Mission Expansion, 29.

20.Ibid., 34.

21.Ibid., 35.

22.Political scientists Susan Hoffman and Mark K. Cassell raise two possible theoretical explanations for passage of the act. First, public choice theory suggests that public policy reflects the triumph of particular interests—in this case, the building and loans. But Hoffmann and Cassell argue for a second, more nuanced, behavioral perspective. In this theoretical framework, solutions to public policy problems emerge from the interaction of facts and values and the availability of alternative policy models. In this case, the building and loans had pioneered the long-term, self-amortizing mortgage and Europeans had successfully used the bond markets to provide mortgage capital. The availability of these models, combined with genuine public concern for the problem of mortgage finance, provided the support necessary to pass the act. Ibid.

23.David L. Mason, From Buildings and Loans to Bail-Outs: A History of the American Savings and Loan Industry, 1831-1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 78-86. For Hoover's comment on the passing of the credit crisis, see “The Home Loan Bank,” LAT, August 30, 1932, A4.

24.Scholars have debated the extent to which Hoover had already moved away from cooperation to regulation and whether Roosevelt took credit for the implementation of Hoover's initiatives. R. Gordon Hoxie, for example, argues that with his decision to promote the government-controlled Reconstruction Finance Corporation over a National Credit Corporation organized voluntarily by banks, Hoover “rejected volunteerism” as a way to reform the banking system. His support for the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932 and the creation of the Federal Home Loan Bank provide further evidence of his new thinking. R. Gordon Hoxie, “Hoover and the Banking Crisis,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 4, nos. 3/4-5, no. 1 (Summer/Fall 1974-Winter 1975): 25-28.

25.Herbert Hoover, speech in Des Moines, October 4, 1932, reprinted in “Hoover Tells Inside Story of Battle Which Prevented Economic Disaster in America,” LAT, October 5, 1932, 6.

26.Franklin Roosevelt, quoted in Constance Perin, Everything in Its Place: Social Order and Land Use in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 72.

27.Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Campaign Address on the Eight Great Credit Groups of the Nation,” St. Louis, MO, October 21, 1932, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=88401#axzz1kmBiWOsl

28.“Bank Use Urged by Realty Head,” LAT, February 10, 1933, A8.

29.Hoxie, “Hoover and the Banking Crisis.”

30.Richard H. K. Vietor, Contrived Competition: Regulation and Deregulation in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 239.

31.Vincent Carosso, “Washington and Wall Street: The New Deal and Investment Bankers, 1933-1940,” Business History Review 44, no. 4 (1970): 425.

32.“Farmers’ Army at State House,” LAT, February 17, 1933, 7.

33.For “suffocated with foreclosed property,” see Harry Carr, “The Lancer,” LAT, January 21, 1933, A1. See also Mason, From Buildings and Loans, 89.

34.Franklin Delano Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, in “Text of New President's Address at Inauguration,” LAT, March 5, 1933, 5.

35.Kendall, Savings and Loan Business, 7.

36.Thrifts lobbied hard for FSLIC, in part because earlier legislation had provided deposit insurance to banks through the newly created Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Savings and loans felt they also needed deposit insurance or banks would have a competitive advantage. Ewalt, Business Reborn, 95.

37.FNMA has been characterized as a more permanent successor to the Home Owners Loan Corporation, which also provided a secondary market for loans. Authors Richard K. Green and Susan M. Wachter also assert that “the invention of the fixed-rate, self-amortizing, long-term mortgage was, above all else, a response to a general financial crisis, as opposed to a design for the promotion of homeowner-ship per se.” I argue that the crisis provided the moment for crystallizing the basic mortgage and a policy framework suggested by various reform movements that championed homeownership, including the building and loans. Richard K. Green and Susan M. Wachter, “The American Mortgage in Historical and International Context,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 4 (2005): 95.

38.With the enthusiasm for deregulation in full swing in the early 1990s, historian Richard Vietor concluded that “noncompetitive and inefficient markets were the result” of these new laws. Vietor, Contrived Competition, 246–47.

39.Louis Galambos and Joseph Pratt, The Rise of the Corporate Commonwealth: United States Business and Public Policy in the 20th Century (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 126.

40.Dennis McDougal, Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2001), 115.

41.Howard F. Ahmanson, “Buyer Beware,” speech presented to the Economic Round Table of Los Angeles, 1933, in FA.

42.For background on why the savings and loan executives supported these arrangements, see Robert DeKruif, interview by author, May 1, 2009. For efforts to kill reform efforts in the legislature, see Howard Edgerton, “Memorandum to the Two Prides of the Navy,” December 1, 1944, in box: World War II Era, FA.

43.Robert DeKruif, interview by author, May 1, 2009.

44.David S. Hannah, interview by Marc Nurre, [1994], in FA.

45.“Aunt Lottie” to Aimee Ahmanson, September 16, 1940, in Robert Ahmanson Files, TAFA.

46.Robert DeKruif, interview by author, May 1, 2009.

47.Juana Neal Levy, “Ahmansons Give Gay Grid Party,” LAT, December 7, 1937, A5.

48.See “Application for Commission or Warrant, U.S. Naval Reserve,” file: H. F. Ahmanson-Navy, box 23AV, FA; and “They Leave for Europe Today,” LAT, July 3, 1938, D4.

49.“Mr. and Mrs. H. F. Ahmanson,” Japan News-Week. June 1, 1940, 7, clipping in file: DGA—Japan—1940, in DGA 002, FA.

50.See Howard F. Ahmanson and Dorothy Grannis Ahmanson to Robert Ahmanson, December 21, 1943, in box 23AV, FA.

51.“Suspects Put Up Mail Fraud Bonds,” LAT, June 20, 1941, A11.

52.“J. Howard Edgerton,” n.d. (ca. 1956), unattributed memorandum, in folder: Edgerton, J. Howard, box 18, Correspondence of Chairman Joseph P. McMurray, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank, RG 195, NARA-CP.

53.“Mail Fraud Trial of Seven Starts,” LAT, February 19, 1942, 11.

54.“Jury Convicts Two Attorneys,” LAT, April 6, 1942, A8.

55.“Convicted Lawyer Gets Prison Term,” LAT, April 28, 1942, A3.

56.“Twombly Allowed Prison Probation,” LAT, May 19, 1942, A2.

57.“Local Loans of Prudential Told,” LAT, June 11, 1932, 9.

58.“New Insurance Chief Named,” LAT, June 21, 1939, 6.

59.“Insurance Merger Hit,” LAT, January 12, 1943, A2.

60.Howard F. Ahmanson to H.B. Thomas, January 7, 1944, in accordion file, box 23AV, FA.

61.“Post Will Go to Attorney,” LAT, September 4, 1943, A1.

62.H. B. Thomas to Howard F. Ahmanson, October 26, 1943, in accordion file, box 23AV, FA.

63.One letter refers to “Joe's actions.” This may have been Joe Hoeft. Hoeft worked for Glendale Federal Savings and Loan, was chairman of the Glendale Selective Service Board in 1943, and was also a friend and customer of H. F. Ahmanson & Co. “Glendale Draft Official Quits over Father Call,” LAT, November 2, 1943, A3.

64.Howard F. Ahmanson to H. B. Thomas, January 7, 1944.

65.J. Howard Edgerton to Mr. and Mrs. Charles K. Fletcher and Mr. and Mrs. Howard Ahmanson, November 26, 1943, in accordion file, box 23AV: World War II Era, FA.

66.Ibid.

67.See “Application for Commission.”

68.For Ahmanson's acquisition of the Mayan Theater, see interview with [Robert] Bob Ahmanson, October 11, 1993, in LH files, FA. For an overview of the shows appearing at the Mayan in 1942-43, see LAT.

69.Howard F. Ahmanson to Al Butler, February 7, 1944, in accordion file, box 23AV, FA. See also David S. Hannah, interview by Marc Nurre, [1994], in FA.

4. THE COMMON EXPERIENCE

1.For an analysis of how the war transformed American attitudes toward government through a host of experiences, including military service, see James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

2.Lucy Quirk, in LAT, August 24, 1943.

3.“Savings, Loan League Elects,” LAT, June 7, 1942, A3. See also “Loan League Boosts War Bond Sales,” LAT, August 16, 1942, A14.

4.Quonset Air Museum, “History,” n.d., www.quonsetairmuseum.com/history .html. For information on Nixon's experience at OCS Quonset, see Jonathan Aitken, Nixon: A Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993), 98-99.

5.Howard F. Ahmanson to Dorothy G. Ahmanson, September 24, 1943, in FA.

6.Howard F. Ahmanson to Dorothy G. Ahmanson, n.d., in FA.

7.For example, see Gould Eddy to Howard F. Ahmanson, November 15, 1943, in accordion file, box 23AV: World War II Era, FA.

8.Howard F. Ahmanson to Dorothy G. Ahmanson, n.d., in HFA letters from Quonset, 1943, box 23AV: World War II Era, FA.

9.“R. F. Gross, Ex-Financier, Dies at 78,” LAT, January 26, 1963, 5.

10.Howard F. Ahmanson to H. B. Thomas, January 7, 1944, in accordion file, box 23AV: World War II Era, FA.

11.Howard F. Ahmanson to N. V. Alison, December 8, 1943, in accordion file, box 23AV: World War II Era, FA.

12.Howard F. Ahmanson to G. L. Eddy, January 6, 1944, in accordion file, box 23AV: World War II Era, FA.

13.Howard F. Ahmanson to R.F. Gross, January 3, 1944, and R.F. Gross to Howard F. Ahmanson, January 24, 1944, both in accordion file, box 23AV: World War II Era, FA.

14.Howard F. Ahmanson to R. F. Gross, January 3, 1944.

15.Howard F. Ahmanson to National American Fire Insurance Co., December 21, 1943, in accordion file, box 23AV: World War II Era, FA.

16.Howard F. Ahmanson to Joe Crail, February 4, 1944, in accordion file, box 23AV: World War II Era, FA.

17.Kim Fletcher, interview by author, December 8, 2009.

18.Mark J. Denger, Norman S. Marshall, and John R. Justice, “Lieutenant Commander Morgan Adams,” n.d., www.militarymuseum.org/Adams.html (accessed October 8, 2009).

19.Howard F. Ahmanson to Dorothy Grannis Ahmanson, postcard, June 1[3], 1944; see also Howard F. Ahmanson to Dorothy Grannis Ahmanson, [received June 18, 1944], both in FA.

20.Howard F. Ahmanson to Dorothy Grannis Ahmanson, [received June 3, 1944], in FA.

21.Melinda Hurst, interview by author, December 12, 2009.

22.State of Nebraska, Department of Insurance, “Report of Examination of the National American Fire Insurance Company as of June 30, 1943,” October 1, 1943, 4, Nebraska State Archives.

23.Total net assets increased from $1.884 million to $1.967 million. Ibid., 39.

24.Ibid., 5.

25.Ibid.

26.Howard F. Ahmanson to Dorothy Grannis Ahmanson, February 4, 1943, in FA.

27.Iowa's loss ratio averaged 40 percent. State of Nebraska, Department of Insurance, “Report of Examination of the National American Fire Insurance Company as of June 30, 1943,” 6.

28.Ibid., 7.

29.The state suspended its examination of the company in the fall of 1941 but resumed two years later. When it submitted its report, the total accounting adjustments and analysis of net income for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1943, led to a drop in capital of $50,470. Ibid., 18, 36.

30.Ibid., 17–18.

31.Ted Crane to Howard F. Ahmanson, n.d. [1943], in accordion file, box 23AV: World War II Era, FA.

32.Howard F. Ahmanson to Dorothy Grannis Ahmanson, February 4, 1943.

33.Howard F. Ahmanson to Dorothy Grannis Ahmanson, February 14, 1943, in FA.

34.On Stryker's role, see Ted Crane to Howard F. Ahmanson, n.d. [1943].

35.Howard F. Ahmanson to G. L. Eddy, January 6, 1944, in accordion file, box 23AV: World War II era, FA.

36.Ted Crane to Howard F. Ahmanson, n.d. [1943].

37.Ibid.

38.Seymour Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home,” first draft typescript, March 17, 1958, in FA.

39.Stewart Alsop, “Multi-Millionaires: How America's New Rich Made Their Vast Fortunes,” Saturday Evening Post, July 17, 1965, 39.

40.Howard F. Ahmanson to G. L. Eddy, January 6, 1944. One source put National American's total value at about $1.6 million. See Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home.”

41.Hayden W. Ahmanson to Howard F. Ahmanson, January 14, 1944, in accordion file, box 23AV: World War II Era, FA.

42.Howard F. Ahmanson to B. K. Richardson, February 3, 1944, in accordion file, box 23AV: World War II Era, FA.

43.Ibid.

44.Howard F. Ahmanson to Hayden W. Ahmanson, February 15, 1944, in accordion file, box 23AV: World War II Era, FA.

45.Hayden W. Ahmanson to Howard F. Ahmanson, handwritten note, n.d., in accordion file, box 23AV: World War II Era, FA.

46.Howard F. Ahmanson to G. L. Eddy, January 6, 1944.

47.Howard F. Ahmanson to Dorothy Grannis Ahmanson, [received September 9, 1944], in FA.

48.Howard F. Ahmanson to Dorothy Grannis Ahmanson, [received August 23, 1944], in FA.

49.Howard F. Ahmanson to Dorothy Grannis Ahmanson, [received July 27, 1944], in FA.

50.Howard F. Ahmanson to Dorothy Grannis Ahmanson, [received August 3, 1944], in FA.

51.Ibid.

52.Howard F. Ahmanson to Dorothy Grannis Ahmanson, [received August 19, 1944], in FA.

53.Howard F. Ahmanson to Dorothy Grannis Ahmanson, [received August 14, 1944], in FA.

54.“J. Howard Edgerton,” n.d. [ca. 1956], unattributed memorandum, in folder: Edgerton, J. Howard, box 18, Correspondence of Chairman Joseph P. McMurray, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank, RG 195, NARA-CP.

55.Howard Edgerton to Lieutenant Charles K. Fletcher and Lieutenant Howard Ahmanson, October 31, 1944, in box: World War II Era, FA.

56.Ibid.

57.Quoted in J. Howard Edgerton, The Story of California Federal Savings (New York: Newcomen Society, 1969), 13.

58.Howard Edgerton, “Memorandum to the Two Prides of the Navy,” December 1, 1944, in box: World War II Era, FA.

59.Howard F. Ahmanson to Dorothy Grannis Ahmanson, [received September 1, 1944], in FA.

60.Howard F. Ahmanson to George Davis, February 10, 1944, in accordion file, box 23AV: World War II Era, FA.

61.H.F. Ahmanson to H.W. Ahmanson, Western Union, January 8, 1944, in accordion file, box 23AV: World War II Era, FA.

62.Sparrow, Warfare State, 7.

5. BUILDING HOME

Portions of this chapter appeared in Eric John Abrahamson, “One after Another: Building Homes and Making Loans,” in Carefree California: Cliff May and the Romance of the Ranch Home, ed. Jocelyn Gibbs and Nicholas Olsberg (Santa Barbara: Art, Design and Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara; New York: Rizzoli, 2012). I am grateful to the Regents of the University of California for permission to use this material.

1.Hernando Courtright to H.F. Ahmanson, December 15, 1944, in FA. See also photo and caption, clipping, n.d., “Social” folder; Lucille Leimert, “Confidentially,” LAT, January 18, 1945, both in box 23AV, FA; and Jessie Jean Marsh, “Fetes Given by West Side and Bay Sets,” LAT, February 4, 1945, C2.

2.“The Beverly Hills Hotel: History,” n.d., www.beverlyhillshotel.com/history #30 (accessed November 1, 2010).

3.“Leniency on Midnight Curfew Here Indicated,” LAT, February 23, 1945, 1.

4.“Eviction of 10 Families Halted,” LAT, March 6, 1945, A1.

5.“Mayor Asks F.D.R. Action on Housing,” LAT, March 6, 1945, A1.

6.Roger W. Lotchin, Fortress California, 1910-1961: From Warfare to Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 131-69. See also Gerald D. Nash, The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 62-63.

7.John Lawrence, “The Master Builders of Savings & Loan,” Los Angeles West Magazine, June 15, 1969, 8-11.

8.Quoted in J. Howard Edgerton, The Story of California Federal Savings (New York: Newcomen Society, 1969), 13.

9.Edgerton, Story of California Federal Savings, 13.

10.Richard Deihl, interview by author, September 25, 2009, 19.

11.Nash, American West Transformed, 62-63.

12.Ahmanson was an extremely successful “place entrepreneur,” a category described by Harvey Molotch as including “land speculators, bankers, newspaper publishers, politicians, and public utilities who all had a stake in the economic growth of [a region.]” Harvey Molotch, “The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place,” American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 2 (1976): 309-32. For the application of Molotch's concept to the Los Angeles area, see William Fulton, The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 7.

13.The population would increase another 16 percent in the years between 1946 and 1951, with two-thirds of this growth coming from continued immigration. James Gillies and Clayton Curtis, Institutional Residential Mortgage Lending in Los Angeles County, 1946-1951 (Los Angeles: Real Estate Research Program, Bureau of Business and Economic Research, University of California, Los Angeles, 1956), 8.

14.Robert M. Williams, “The Southern California Economy in Perspective,” in Planning for the Economic Growth of Southern California, ed. Ernest A. Engelbert (Berkeley: University Extension/University of California, 1955), 7-8.

15.Adjusted for inflation, incomes doubled rather than tripled. Gillies and Curtis, Institutional Residential Mortgage Lending, 8-9.

16.Median family income in Los Angeles was $3,669 (equivalent to $31,167 in 2011). The national median was $3,073. Ibid.

17.Nationally, income payments rose 75 percent between 1940 and 1945. Donald S. Thompson, “What Is the Position of the Mortgage Lender Today?” CSLJ, May 1947, 9.

18.California State Chamber of Commerce, Economic Survey of California (San Francisco: California State Printing Office, 1950), 23, cited in Gillies and Curtis, Institutional Residential Mortgage Lending, 8.

19.“Stork Flaps Oftener Than in World War I,” LAT, February 4, 1945, 4.

20.“Births Gain Steadily; Death Rate Decreases,” LAT, October 10, 1951, 19.

21.“More of Almost Everything in L.A., Census Discloses,” LAT, June 8, 1951, A1.

22.“Postwar Housing Boom Predicted,” LAT, February 15, 1945, 4.

23.At the end of his book on mass production in America, David Hounshell notes that Lewis Mumford recognized in 1934 that war was the ultimate consumer for systems of mass production because “quantity production must rely for its success upon quantity consumption; and nothing ensures replacement like organized destruction.” The war, according to Hounshell, ended an era of debate over the ethos of mass production in America but served to solidify its presence in American society. David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 330.

24.Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 306.

25.Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).

26.Ibid.

27.Lester Walker, American Shelter (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1981), 242.

28.Sweat equity played a crucial role in the rise of homeownership in working-class suburbs prior to World War II. See Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). For the number of homes constructed per year by the average builder, see James Thomas Keane, Fritz B. Burns and the Development of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Loyola Marymount University and the Historical Society of Southern California, 2001), 93.

29.Hounshell, From the American System, 314. On stressed-skin plywood, see David L. Lutin, “The Factors Impeding the Mass Production of Prefabricated Homes” (MBA thesis, Syracuse University, 1949), 3. Copy in box 7, Collection 1582, Department of Special Collections, UCLA.

30.Joseph E. Stevens, Hoover Dam: An American Adventure (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988); Donald E. Wolf, Big Dams and Other Dreams: The Six Companies Story (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996).

31.Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth Century Metropolis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 86-116.

32.The Lanham Act of 1940.

33.Keane, Fritz B. Burns, 79.

34.Apparently, the idea of the NAHB had been formulated in 1940 by leadership in the National Association of Real Estate Boards (Herbert Nelson) and leading builders. See Herbert U. Nelson to Fritz B. Burns, February 17, 1943, in box 04-005, F-2, NAHB Archives. For background on the impact of Title VI, see Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven, 191; and Keane, Fritz B. Burns, 93-94.

35.Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven, 191.

36.Lutin, “Factors Impeding the Mass Production,” 1.

37.“Vast Kaiser Home Building Plans for Coast Disclosed,” LAT, May 10, 1945, A1.

38.Across the country, the early exclusive ranks of this new group included W.J. Levitt of Long Island, David Bohannon in the Bay Area, and John E. Byrne in Baltimore. In Los Angeles, they included men like Milton J. Brock, Spiros G. Ponty, and Walter Bollenbacher. Milton J. Brock, “Private Builder Is Solving the Housing Shortage,” CSLJ, April 1948, 9.

39.“Housing: Puny Giant,” WSJ, October 21, 1947, 1.

40.Ibid.

41.Ibid.

42.Ibid.

43.Keane, Fritz B. Burns, 121.

44.Ibid., 131.

45.Ibid., 132.

46.Martin J. Schiesl, “The Politics of Contracting: Los Angeles and the Lake-wood Plan, 1954-1962,” Huntington Library Quarterly 45, no. 3 (1982): 227.

47.Robert Fishman, “Review,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 64, no. 4 (2005): 563.

48.County of Los Angeles Public Library, “Lakewood Community History,” n.d.,www.colapublib.org/history/lakewood/ (accessed March 17, 2011).

49.U.S. Bureau of the Census, Seventeenth Census of the United States, 1950: Population and Housing, 1950, vol. 1, General Characteristics, Part 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1952), 5-92, building permit data, cited in Gillies and Curtis, Institutional Residential Mortgage Lending, 8.

50.Keane, Fritz B. Burns, 75. Unfortunately, Keane does not say who the lender was.

51.After selling out, Tomlinson entered into a partnership with one of his sons, Lloyd W. Tomlinson, in a real estate and insurance agency in Highland Park. “Loan Firm Founder Tomlinson Dies,” LAT, August 6, 1953, A12. At the end of 1946, North American Savings and Loan Association had nearly $1.75 million in assets. Undoubtedly, this was more than it had when Ahmanson purchased it. State of California, Division of Building and Loan, Fifty-Third Annual Report (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1947), 26, CSA.

52.Howard undoubtedly recognized this second name. The original North American had been seized by the California Building and Loan commissioner in 1932 after the manager confessed to embezzling. When the state proposed to liquidate the building and loan, the directors and some of the more than 22,600 investors protested. Their protests gained traction when newspapers reported that after the seizure California governor Rolph's former insurance partners and his son received all the fire insurance business associated with the company's outstanding loans. This was not the first time that Governor Rolph had been accused of steering insurance business to his former partners and sons. When the state took over the Pacific Coast Building-Loan Association, the company of Rolph, Landis & Ellis had received a “binder” to cover fire insurance while the association's affairs were resolved. “Rolph Group Gets Plums Via State Department,” LAT, April 3, 1932, A1. For the specific claims related to North American, see “Loan Company Row Continues,” LAT, October 27, 1932, A8; and “Loan Company Theft Related,” LAT, October 26, 1932, A10. Ahmanson would have paid attention to this story in 1932. It was associated with names that would become all too familiar to him. The investigator for the California Building and Loan Commission was Milton Shaw, who would become deputy commissioner for Los Angeles by 1945. Meanwhile, the deputy commissioner who handled the proceedings in 1932 was a San Francisco attorney who was a relative of one of Howard's best friends.

53.This story and the dialogue appear in Lawrence, “Master Builders.” See also Kim Fletcher, interview by author, December 8, 2009.

54.David S. Hannah, interview by Marc Nurre, [1994], in FA.

55.Hollywood Savings & Loan was run by Howard's friend Mervyn Hope. It had just over $5.2 million in assets in 1945. The Los Angeles Times said Ahmanson bought Hollywood in 1942. “I remember the price, $60,000.” Elsewhere, Ahmanson says he owned 28 percent of the stock of a savings and loan at this time but doesn't specify which one. For Hollywood's assets in 1945, see State of California, Division of Building and Loan, Fifty-Second Annual Report (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1946).

56.By the end of 1952, the company carried more than 50 percent of all the fire insurance written on homes in the region. Bob Bergen, “'Specialist’ Turns Hobby into Profit,” Los Angeles Mirror, January 20, 1953, 46.

57.State of California, Division of Building and Loan, Fifty-Fifth Annual Report (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1949), 18-19, in CSA.

58.Ibid., 4.

59.“Consolidated Statement of Number and Amount of New Loans by California Associations—Members of Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco,” CSLJ, April 1948, 16-17.

60.Crail came from Iowa. In 1946, he was elected president of the Iowa Association of California, a group with more than one hundred thousand members. That same year, Crail served as chairman of the Bill of Rights Commemoration Committee. “Iowans Headed by Joe Crail,” LAT, November 15, 1946, A1. For Crail as a classmate of Ahmanson's, see Seymour Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home,” first draft typescript, March 17, 1958, in FA.

61.“Savings, Loan Assets Climb,” LAT, August 7, 1945, 9.

62.Lawrence, “Master Builders,” 10.

63.Marquis James and Bessie Rowland James, Biography of a Bank: The Story of Bank of America (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), 475. See also Williams, “Southern California Economy,” 8.

64.In 1958, only seventeen states, mostly in the East, allowed for mutual savings banks. Albert L. Kraus, “Savings Bankers Eye U.S. Charters,” NYT, May 4, 1958, F1.

65.Policy makers had long expressed reservations about the development of branch banking in the United States. This antagonism traced its roots to democratic opposition to state-run or national banks that concentrated economic power and were susceptible to manipulation by powerful groups of political insiders. By the early twentieth century, advocates suggested that branch banking offered a way to provide service to rural communities. Opponents believed they undermined local control. The California Bank Act (1909) allowed branch banking, subject to the approval of the state superintendent of banks, upon a finding that it served “public need and convenience.” Richard H.K. Vietor, Contrived Competition: Regulation and Deregulation in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 242-43.

66.Albert H. Schaaf, “The Savings Function and Mortgage Investment by California Banks and Financial Institutions,” in California Banking in a Growing Economy: 1946-1975, ed. Hyman P. Minsky (Berkeley: Institute of Business and Economic Research, University of California, 1965), 252.

67.In 1951, Congress passed a new law subjecting savings and loans and mutual savings banks to federal taxation, but the law allowed savings and loans to avoid income taxes on up to 12 percent of net income by diverting this cash into capital reserves, where it could be reinvested in new loans. J. Richard Elliott Jr., “Savings and Loans: Rapid Growth Can Be Risky Even in Thrift,” Barron's, February 13, 1956, 20, clipping in box 4, Correspondence of Chairman Walter W. McAllister, 1952-1956, RG 195, NARA-CP. See also State of California, Division of Building and Loan, Fifty-Seventh Annual Report (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1951), 10, in CSA.

68.David S. Hannah, interview by Marc Nurre, [1994].

69.Elliott, “Savings and Loans.”

70.Among the states that did allow stock companies organized to benefit a separate group of equity holders, activity was greatest in California, Ohio, and Texas. C. Joseph Clawson et al., The Savings and Loan Industry in California (South Pasadena, CA: Stanford Research Institute, 1960), III-1.

71.David L. Mason, From Building and Loans to Bail-Outs: A History of the American Savings and Loan Industry, 1831-1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 176.

72.In a mutual association, net income after the payment of dividends to depositors was often held as retained earnings in the association's capital reserve. These retained earnings belonged to the association and not to the depositors. For decades courts wrestled with the question of whether depositors were entitled to a share of the surplus upon the dissolution or merger of the thrift. See Dwight C. Smith and James H. Underwood, “Mutual Savings Associations and Conversion to Stock Form,” Business Transactions Division Memorandum, Office of Thrift Supervision, May 1997, http://files.ots.treas.gov/48801.pdf.

73.Initially, the VA was authorized to guarantee up to 50 percent of the principal amount of the loan up to a maximum guarantee of two thousand dollars. To ensure affordability, the government capped the interest rate a lender could charge at 4 percent and guaranteed loans for terms up to twenty years. Leon T. Kendall, The Savings and Loan Business: Its Purpose, Functions, and Economic Justification (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 8.

74.“Straight GI” loans relied on only the VA for the loan guarantee, but a lender could also write a loan insured by the FHA and then use the VA to guarantee a second mortgage for up to 20 percent of the total purchase price. These “FHAGI combination” loans further lowered the barriers to home ownership. Mason, From Building and Loans, 143.

75.Stephen B. Adams, Mr. Kaiser Goes to Washington: The Rise of a Government Entrepreneur (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 8.

76.State of California, Division of Building and Loan, Fifty-Third Annual Report, 8, CSA.

77.State of California, Division of Building and Loan, Fify-Fourth Annual Report (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1948), 28, CSA.

78.Ibid.

79.“Savings-Loan Assets Climb,” A7.

80.The June purchase date comes from “Home Is Biggest in U.S. in Its Field,” Los Angeles Herald Express, September 10, 1956, clipping in Home Clipping File, 1956, FA.

81.At the time of the sale, the company's offices were located at 115 West Ninth Street in Los Angeles. Two months later, the company leased a “storeroom” at 812 S. Spring Street and relocated. See Board of Directors, Home Building and Loan, “Minutes: January 14, 1947—March 15, 1950,” in box: Home Savings & Loan Board of Directors Minutes, JPMCA; Robert E. Nichols, “No. 5 Joins the Select Ranks of Area's Billion-Dollar Firms,” LAT, December 3, 1961, I1.

82.By April 1947, Ahmanson had become the majority shareholder. Elected to the board in January 1948, he became chairman and president soon afterward. Nevertheless, when he attended the board of directors meeting in December 1947, the corporate secretary described him in the minutes as an “invited guest.” In formal documents later in its history, H. F. Ahmanson & Company used 1948 as the year of acquisition. See, for example, H.F. Ahmanson & Company, “Preliminary Prospectus,” October 13, 1972, 3. According to the minutes, he was not elected president of the company until November 17, 1948. Home Savings of America, FSB Minute Book Highlights, 1948-1968, in file: “Minutes,” in LH files, FA; “L.A. Group Elects Two New Officers,” LAT, March 28, 1948, 20.

83.Richard Deihl, interview by author, December 19, 2009, 19.

84.“L.A. Insurance Men in Housing Syndicate,” Insurance Journal, April 1947, clipping in FA.

85.Harold Tucker, “It's Not All Finance with L.A. Financier,” LAT, June 11, 1961, J1; Nichols, “No. 5 Joins” Robert DeKruif to Howard Ahmanson, January 1, 1959, in file “To HFA,” LH files, FA.

86.Home offered 2.5 percent, compared to the going rate of 2.0. By the end of 1948, Ahmanson had increased the association's assets to $15.4 million. “Home Savings Slates Preview of New Building,” Los Angeles Examiner, February 28, 1956, clipping in Home Clippings File, 1956, FA.

87.Lawrence, “Master Builders.” In another article, Ahmanson says they raised four million dollars in a month. “Howard F. Ahmanson,” Finance, February 1966, 10. The friend was J. E. Hoeft, the founder and chairman of Glendale Federal. The campaign was most likely executed by the Elwood J. Robinson Agency. See Board of Directors, Home Building and Loan, “Minutes: January 14, 1947-March 15, 1950,” in box: Home Savings & Loan Board of Directors Minutes, JPMCA.

88.See, for example, Board of Directors, Home Building and Loan, “Minutes: January 14, 1947-March 15, 1950,” 160 and 189, in box: Home Savings & Loan Board of Directors Minutes, JPMCA.

89.Regulators were apparently critical of Home Building & Loan's rapid growth, noting particularly in the fall of 1948 that 96 percent of the association's loans had been made in the previous eighteen months. Ahmanson was flummoxed by this criticism. During a board meeting he said “he knew of no other alternative to making new loans in the face of the heavy increase in share accounts.” Board of Directors, Home Building and Loan, “Minutes: January 14, 1947-March 15, 1950,” 189, in box: Home Savings & Loan Board of Directors Minutes, JPMCA.

90.Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home.” See also David S. Hannah, interview by Marc Nurre, [1994].

91.Regulators later changed the accounting rules to force lenders to take profits over the life of the loan. David S. Hannah, interview by Marc Nurre, [1994], in FA.

92.Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home.”

93.“Richest of the Rich S&Ls,” Business Week, July 1, 1961, 80. Also referred to in Seymour Freedgood, “Emperor Howard Ahmanson of S&L,” Fortune, May 1958, 152.

94.Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home.”

95.“Richest of the Rich S&Ls.” See also Freedgood, “Emperor Howard Ahmanson,” 150.

96.Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home.”

97.Ibid.

98.“Elect Childs Home S&L President,” Los Angeles Herald Express, January 24, 1957, D11. For biographical information on Childs, see Millard Sheets, “Kenneth D. Childs,” on reel 5704, in Millard Sheets Papers, AAA; and David S. Hannah, interview by Marc Nurre, [1994], in FA.

99.Richard Deihl, interview by author, September 25, 2009, 20.

100.See Board of Directors, Home Building and Loan, “Minutes: January 14, 1947-March 15, 1950,” 187, in box: Home Savings & Loan Board of Directors Minutes, JPMCA.

101.“Richest of the Rich S&Ls.” See also Freedgood, “Emperor Howard,” 152.

102.Board of Directors, Home Building and Loan, “Minutes: January 14, 1947-March 15, 1950,” 197-98, in box: Home Savings & Loan Board of Directors Minutes, JPMCA.

103.Board of Directors, Home Building and Loan, “Minutes: January 14, 1947-March 15, 1950,” 214, in box: Home Savings & Loan Board of Directors Minutes, JPMCA.

104.“Richest of the Rich S&Ls.”

105.Freedgood, “Emperor Howard Ahmanson,” 152.

106.David S. Hannah, interview by Marc Nurre, [1994], in FA. See also Freedgood, “Emperor Howard Ahmanson,” 152.

107.“Richest of the Rich S&Ls.”

108.Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home.”

109.Ibid.

110.Banks were also unsettled by the prospect of a lack of liquidity in the secondary market, especially after the Reconstruction Finance Corporation was dissolved in 1953 and strict limits were placed on FNMA's ability to purchase mortgages. Lynne Pierson Doti and Larry Schweikart, Banking in the West: From the Gold Rush to Deregulation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 161.

6. SCALING UP

1.Robert DeKruif, interview by Margaret Bach, [1992], in TAFA.

2.Richard Deihl, interview by author, September 25, 2009.

3.This process was somewhat analogous to the method used by A. P. Giannini in the 1910s, when California law prohibited a bank from buying the stock of another bank but allowed for the transfer of assets belonging to the bank. When Giannini wanted to acquire a bank, a group of individuals representing the Bank of Italy (Bank of America's predecessor) would buy the stock of the target bank. The target bank would then transfer its assets (deposits, loans, real estate, etc.) to the acquiring bank. Bank of Italy would then pay the individuals for the value of their shares in the target bank. Marquis James and Bessie Rowland James, Biography of a Bank: The Story of Bank of America (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), 75.

4.“Home Building & Loan Buys Long Beach Unit,” LAT, January 17, 1951, B4.

5.“Savings Group Resources Jump,” LAT, July 7, 1951, 8. See also display advertisement, LAT, January 5, 1952, 9.

6.State of California, Building and Loan Commissioner, “Fifty-Seventh Annual Report,” 1950, 27, 39, in CSA. One source says that Ahmanson made these moves for tax reasons. See Seymour Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home,” first draft typescript, March 17, 1958, in FA.

7.“Top-Ranking United States League Members,” Savings and Loan News, March 1952, 40.

8.Home Savings of America, FSB Minute Book Highlights, 1948–1968, file: “Minutes,” LH files, FA. See also “Merger Forms Huge Southland Savings-Loan,” LAT, July 1, 1952, 16.

9.“Merger Forms Huge Southland Savings-Loan.”

10.“Home Savings Resources Pass $100 Million Mark,” Los Angeles Herald Express, January 6, 1953, clipping in Home Clippings File, 1953, FA.

11.“Top-Ranking United States League Members,” Savings and Loan News, March 1953, 20.

12.“Home Savings in Acquisition,” LAT, February 9, 1954. 18. For population data on the San Fernando Valley, see Max Lupul and Paul B. Blomgren, “The Current Status and Outlook of the Real Estate Business in the San Fernando Valley,” Bureau of Business Services and Research, School of Business Administration and Economics, San Fernando Valley State College, 1967, 6.

13.S. Oliver Goodman, “Investment Analysts Here Form Society,” WP, February 11, 1954, 16; Robert E. Nichols, “No. 5 Joins the Select Ranks of Area’s Billion-Dollar Firms,” LAT, December 3, 1961, I1. “Home Savings Expansion Set,” LAT, February 18, 1954, A10.

14.David S. Hannah, interview by Marc Nurre, [1994], in FA.

15.Robert DeKruif, interview by Margaret Bach, [1992], in TAFA.

16.John Notter, interview by author, August 20, 2009.

17.Robert DeKruif, interview by Margaret Bach, [1992], TAFA.

18.John Notter, interview by author, August 20, 2009; see also David S. Hannah, interview by Marc Nurre, [1994], in FA.

19.Richard Diehl, interview by author, September 25, 2009.

20.Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home.”

21.“On Coronado Program: Dr. Thurston H. Ross,” CSLJ, May 1948, 13.

22.Richard Deihl, interview by author, December 19, 2009.

23.[Chris Bone],”Partial History/Chronology of H. F. Ahmanson & Company,” [1988], in TAF History files, TAFA.

24.In 1952, 80 percent of National American Insurance Company’s total premium volume came from H. F. Ahmanson & Company, Inc. Alfred M. Best Company, Best’s Insurance Reports (New York: Alfred M. Best Company, 1953), 663.

25.Aimee Ahmanson to Howard F. Ahmanson, [February 1952], FA.

26.Bill was born October 12, 1925. See his obituary, “William Hayden Ahmanson,” LAT, October 17, 2008. See also Hayden Ahmanson to Mrs. H.F. Ahmanson, September 14, 1943, in file: “Gould,” box 23AV, FA.

27.M. Hahn to W. H. Ahmanson, January 17, 1949, in “Correspondence,” USC folder, LH files, FA.

28.Eddy is referred to as president of the North American Savings and Loan Association in “North American Occupies New Home,” CSLJ, October 1948, 21.

29.Wesley Morse, “Eulogy,” December 27, 2000, www.billybartyandfriends.com/eulogy.html.

30.Robert DeKruif, interview by author, May 1, 2009.

31.Charles T. Munger, interview by author, January 13, 2011.

32.It also allowed him to become more and more involved with yachting and socializing. Almost every day, Ahmanson ate lunch at Perinos, where he had a regular booth and held court. Robert DeKruif, interview by author, May 1, 2009.

33.Robert Ahmanson to Aimee and Hayden Ahmanson, various letters, 1951, in Aimee Ahmanson records, TAFA. See also Kenneth Childs to Howard F. Ahmanson, April 19, 1941 [1951], in FA.

34.“Richest of the Rich S&Ls,” Business Week, July 1, 1961, 80.

35.John Notter, interview by author, August 20, 2009.

36.Richard Deihl, interview by author, September 25, 2009.

37.Ibid.

38.Ibid.

39.Alfred Nicols, Management and Control in the Mutual Savings and Loan Association (Toronto: Lexington Books, 1972), 247.

40.Richard Deihl, interview by author, September 25, 2009.

41.“New Money Merchants: Saving & Loan Men Teach Bankers Lesson,” Time, November 29, 1954, 92.

42.Life insurance’s share of all savings rose from 27.5 to 31.4 percent. Edwin L. Dale, “Our Saving Ways,” NYT, March 15, 1956, 56.

43.Leo Grebler and Eugene F. Brigham, Savings and Mortgage Markets in California (Pasadena: California Savings and Loan League, 1963), 70.

44.Ibid., 80.

45.Howard Ahmanson, “Some Bosses Forget Customer Is King,” Los Angeles Examiner, October 21, 1956, 10.

46.“Richest of the Rich S&Ls.”

47.This was part of a series of ads featuring historic photos of Los Angeles with copy focused on the same theme. Display advertisement, LAT, January 2, 1951, A7.

48.Display advertisement, LAT, January 9, 1950, 27.

49.Display advertisement, LAT, January 4, 1952, 16.

50.Display advertisement, LAT, July 29, 1952, 6.

51.David Rees, “Home S&L’s Ahmanson to Become Banker,” Los Angeles Mirror-News, January 23, 1957, pt. 3, 5.

52.Robert DeKruif, interview by author, May 1, 2009.

53.David S. Hannah, interview by Marc Nurre, [1994], in FA.

54.Richard Deihl, interview by author, September 25, 2009.

55.Display advertisement, LAT, July 6, 1954, 12; display advertisement, LAT, September 7, 1954, 20.

56.Display advertisement, LAT, July 5, 1955, B10.

57.Richard Deihl, interview by author, September 25, 2009.

58.Ibid.

59.Ibid.

60.Rufus Turner, interview by Adam Arenson and author, October 7, 2010.

61.Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 290–99. See also Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

62.Good data for this argument are hard to come by. As standardization and government guarantees lowered the cost of lending related to risks and due diligence on the loan, profitability should have risen. In a competitive market, however, these excess profits should have disappeared and the ultimate reward should have been passed on to borrowers, making home loans generally more affordable regardless of interest rate conditions.

63.Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home.”

64.The difference in attitudes between Edgerton and Ahmanson may also have derived from the difference in corporate form. Officers of federal savings and loans had no equity stake in the business. As a result, they tended to divert some profits to nonsalary forms of compensation. Nicols, Management and Control, 27–28. For Ahmanson’s quote, see Seymour Freedgood, “Emperor Howard Ahmanson of S&L,” Fortune, May 1958, 149–50. See also Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home.”

65.Warren Buffett, interview by author, December 9, 2010.

66.“Ahmanson Cut Nice Figures In Savings, Loan Business” [Omaha World-Herald], June 19, 1968, n.p., clipping provided by Mary Jane Bettefreund.

67.Robert DeKruif, interview by author, May 1, 2009.

68.John Notter, interview by author, August 20, 2009.

69.“Home Savings Loans Reach All-Time High,” Los Angeles Mirror and Daily News, January 20, 1956, clipping in Home Clipping Files, 1956, FA.

70.Robert DeKruif, interview by author, May 1, 2009.

71.Richard Deihl, interview by author, September 25, 2009.

72.“Old Home Town Look . . .,” [Omaha World Herald], March 19, 1958, n.p., clipping provided by Mary Jane Bettefreund.

73.“Howard F. Ahmanson,” Finance, February 1966, 21.

74.Richard Deihl, interview by author, December 19, 2009.

75.Guy Stuart, Discriminating Risk: The U.S. Mortgage Lending Industry in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 29–69.

76.Raymond M. Foley to Community Homes, July 3, 1947, in Helen Gahagan Douglas Collection, Carl Albert Center, Norman, OK, cited in Anthony Denzer, “Community Homes: Race, Politics and Architecture in Postwar Los Angeles,” Southern California Quarterly 87, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 281.

77.“Negroes to Get 1200 Houses,” LAT, January 3, 1945, 11.

78.Josh Sides, “ ‘You Understand My Condition’: The Civil Rights Congress in the Los Angeles African-American Community, 1946–1952,” Pacific Historical Review 67, no. 2 (May 1998): 236. See also Lawrence B. De Graaf, “The City of Black Angels: Emergence of the Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890–1930,” Pacific Historical Review 39 (1970):323–52.

79.U.S. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census, 629; Seventeen Decennial Census, 1:5–100, and Seventeenth Decennial Census, 2/5:100, all cited in Shana Bernstein, “Interracial Activism in the Los Angeles Community Service Organization: Linking the World War II and Civil Rights Eras,” Pacific Historical Review 80, no. 2 (May 2011): 231–67.

80.Sides, “ ‘You Understand My Condition,’ “ 237.

81.Clement E. Vose, Caucasians Only: The Supreme Court, the NAACP, and the Restrictive Covenant Cases (1959; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

82.Quoted in Bill Boyarsky, Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 81.

83.For years, realtors and property owners had asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment banned only discrimination by the government. Private property owners were free to reach binding agreements with one another, including racial covenants. In the case of Shelley v. Kraemer, they argued that government enforcement of these private contracts did not constitute state action. Arguing on behalf of a black couple named Shelley, who had purchased a home in a racially restricted neighborhood in Missouri and were denied the right to occupy that property by the Missouri Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall insisted that state action, even in the context of enforcing private agreements, remained a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the court agreed. See Shelley v. Kraemer (334 U.S. 1, 1948); Hurd v. Hodge (334 U.S. 24, 1948). For background on how cases in California helped provide the foundation for Marshall’s argument, see Mark Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), ch. 4.

84.“Jim Crow Is Dying,” Los Angeles Sentinel, October 7, 1948, cited in Daniel Wei HoSang, “Racial Propositions: ‘Genteel Apartheid’ in Postwar California” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2007), 12.

85.Brilliant, Color of America, 123. See also Kevin Roderick, Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles (Santa Monica, CA: Angel City Books, 2005), 9.

86.At the end of 1957, the combined assets of these four institutions equaled nearly $50 million. See “Negro Operated Savings, Building and Loan Associations that are Members of the FHLB System,” December 31, 1957, in box 8, Correspondence of Chairman Robertson, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank, RG 195, NARA-CP. See also Josh Sides, “Straight into Compton: American Dreams, Urban Nightmares, and the Metamorphosis of a Black Suburb,” American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2004): 583–605.

87.D. A. Squire to Dean Chamberlin, May 21, 1963, in box 58, files of FHLBB Chairman McMurray, RG 195, NARA-CP.

88.A. V. Ammann to William K. Divers, October 13, 1953, in folder: California Federal Savings & Loan, Branch Applications, 1953, box 4, Correspondence of Chairman William W. McAllister, 1952–1956, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank, RG 195, NARA-CP.

89.Robert DeKruif, interview by Margaret Bach, [1992], in TAFA.

90.Freedgood, “Emperor Howard Ahmanson,” 148.

91.Ibid.

92.Albert H. Schaaf, “The Savings Function and Mortgage Investment by California Banks and Financial Institutions,” in California Banking in a Growing Economy: 1946–1975, ed. Hyman P. Minsky (Berkeley: Institute of Business and Economic Research, University of California, 1965), 249.

93.Ibid.

94.Refers to nonfarm mortgages valued at less than twenty thousand dollars. See ibid., 258.

95.By comparison, home ownership rose from 39.4 percent to 61.3 percent in New Jersey, 45.9 percent to 68.3 percent in Pennsylvania, and 40.5 percent to 61.9 percent in Connecticut in the same period. See U.S. Census Bureau, “Historical Census of Housing Tables: Home Ownership,” n.d., www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/owner.html (accessed September 18, 2011).

96.The home ownership rate in the Los Angeles–Long Beach SMSA was higher than that in the San Francisco–Oakland SMSA (54.5 percent). See U.S. Census, 1960, reported in Leo Grebler, Metropolitan Contrasts: Profile of the Los Angeles Metropolis, Its People and Its Homes, Research Report no. 3, Real Estate Program, Division of Research (Los Angeles: Graduate School of Business Administration, University of California, 1963), 34–35.

7. HOME AND THE STATE

1.Scholars have also described this system as “segmented and sedated.” Louis Galambos and Joseph Pratt, The Rise of the Corporate Commonwealth: U.S. Business and Public Policy in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 105–6.

2.I’m grateful to Zachary Abrahamson for this analogy.

3.For “interventionist state,” see Theodore Levitt, “The Johnson Treatment,” Harvard Business Review 45 (January–February 1967): 114, cited in David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 24. For “corporate commonwealth,” see Galambos and Pratt, Rise of the Corporate Commonwealth.

4.Stephen B. Adams, Mr. Kaiser Goes to Washington: The Rise of a Government Entrepreneur (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 11.

5.The commissioner could require a savings and loan to submit its advertising at least five days prior to publication. In general, the commissioner required this only of new associations “until they become familiar with the rules and ethics of advertising savings and loans.” He could also bar an association from using a particular advertisement. Milton O. Shaw, “Commissioner Launches Course in Savings and Loan Law,” CSLJ, March 1955, 7.

6.Ibid., 5.

7.California, Division of Building and Loan, Fifty-Fifth Annual Report (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1949), 12, in CSA.

8.Howard P. Stevens, “President’s Message,” CSLJ, June 1950, 6.

9.Ibid.

10.LeRoy Hunt to Earl Warren, March 10, 1953, in folder F3640:2525, box 1 (2515–31), Earl Warren Papers, Administrative Files, Department of Investment, Building and Loan, 1949–1953, CSA.

11.Hunt to Warren, March 10, 1953. See also California, Division of Savings and Loan, Sixty-First Annual Report (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1955), 12.

12.On the national context for state regulation of building and loans, see David L. Mason, From Building and Loans to Bail-Outs: A History of the American Savings and Loan Industry, 1831–1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 69–74. For industry efforts to seek regulation as a way to standardize services and products and temper competition, see the discussion of the fire insurance industry in chapter 1.

13.When Frank Mortimer left his position as commissioner after eight years, he became executive vice president of Pioneer Savings and Loan in Los Angeles. California, Division of Savings and Loan, Sixty-Third Annual Report (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1957), 41. After Milton Shaw retired in 1958, he became a consultant to the industry.

14.Home also purchased the troubled Burbank Savings and Loan under similar circumstances. Home Savings of America, FSB Minute Book Highlights, 1948–1968, in file: “Minutes,” LH files, FA.

15.J. Howard Edgerton to Goodwin J. Knight, January 4, 1954, in Goodwin J. Knight—Administrative Files, Department of Investment, Division of Savings and Loan, box 35/8-35/9, C114.106-E5990 b2, folder 35/8, CSA.

16.“Typortraits: Milton Otis Shaw,” CSLJ, March 1950, 21. See also California, Division of Savings and Loan, Sixty-Third Annual Report (Sacramento: State of California, 1957), 10.

17.Seymour Freedgood, “Emperor Howard Ahmanson of S&L,” Fortune, May 1958, 149.

18.California, Division of Savings and Loan, Sixtieth Annual Report (Sacramento: State of California, 1954), 20.

19.“Savings, Loan Firm of L.A. Drops S.F. Bid,” San Francisco Call-Bulletin, January 25, 1956, 39.

20.Anonymous to Earl Warren, January 26, 1952, in folder F3640:2525, box 1 (2515–31), Earl Warren Papers, Administrative Files, Department of Investment, Building and Loan, 1949–1953, CSA.

21.Milton O. Shaw to M. F. Small, February 26, 1952, in folder F3640:2525, box 1 (2515–31), Earl Warren Papers, Administrative Files, Department of Investment, Building and Loan, 1949–1953, CSA.

22.M. F. Small to Milton O. Shaw, April 7, 1952, in folder F3640:2525, box 1 (2515–31), Earl Warren Papers, Administrative Files, Department of Investment, Building and Loan, 1949–1953, CSA.

23.A.T. Purtell to Earl Warren, June 8, in folder F3640:2525, box 1 (2515–31), Earl Warren Papers, Administrative Files, Department of Investment, Building and Loan, 1949–1953, CSA.

24.Milton O. Shaw to M. F. Small, April 23, 1952, in folder F3640:2525, box 1 (2515–31), Earl Warren Papers, Administrative Files, Department of Investment, Building and Loan, 1949–53, CSA.

25.J. Howard Edgerton to Walter W. McAllister, September 27, 1954, in folder: California Savings and Loan Association, box 4, Correspondence of Chairman Walter W. McAllister, 1952–1956, RG 195, NARA-CP.

26.Ibid.

27.Federal Home Loan Bank Board, Savings and Home Financing Chart Book: No. 5 (1960), in box 7, Correspondence of Chairman Robertson, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank, RG 195, NARA-CP.

28.Josephine Hedges Ewalt, A Business Reborn: The Savings and Loan Story, 1930–1960 (Chicago: American Savings and Loan Institute Press, 1962), 104–8.

29.J. Howard Edgerton, The Story of California Federal Savings (New York: Newcomen Society in North America, 1969).

30.Walter McAllister, Dwight Eisenhower’s first chairman of the FHLBB, had been active in the U.S. Savings and Loan League and, like Edgerton, served a term as president. Like Edgerton, he was a hunter, and their letters back and forth kept each other informed of various hunting trips.

31.Walter W. McAllister to J. Howard Edgerton, September 24, 1954, in folder: California Federal Savings and Loan Association, box 4, Correspondence of Chairman Walter W. McAllister, 1952–1956, RG 195, NARA-CP.

32.Ibid.

33.All this correspondence is summarized in Walter W. McAllister to J. Howard Edgerton, November 4, 1954, in folder: California Federal Savings and Loan Association, box 4, Correspondence of Chairman Walter W. McAllister, 1952–1956, RG 195, NARA-CP.

34.Walter W. McAllister, [speech text for California Savings and Loan League conference], Los Angeles, 1953, in folder: California Savings and Loan Association, box: 5, Correspondence of Chairman Walter W. McAllister, 1952–1956, RG 195, NARA-CP.

35.Kevin Starr, foreword to Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles, by Don Parson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

36.Gayle B. Montgomery and James W. Johnson, One Step from the White House: The Rise and Fall of Senator William F. Knowland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 63.

37.“U.S. Housing Plan Hit as Leading to Socialism,” LAT, November 13, 1947, 10.

38.Kim Fletcher, interview by author, December 8, 2009.

39.Dan Normark, Chávez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999), 18.

40.A number of scholars have written about the fight over public housing in Chávez Ravine. See Parson, Making a Better World; Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2008).

41.Ibid.

42.Charles G. Mayo, “The 1961 Mayoralty Election in Los Angeles: The Political Party in a Nonpartisan Election,” Western Political Quarterly 17, no. 2 (1964): 32–37.

43.Normark, Chávez Ravine, 1949.

44.Edwin M. Eaton, “It’s Time to Do Something about It,” CSLJ, April 1950, 13.

45.Stevens, “President’s Message,” 6.

46.“Capitol Federal History,” n.d., www.capfed.com/site/en/home/about/history.html (accessed August 8, 2011).

47.Henry A. Bubb, “Our Role in the 1952 Elections,” CSLJ, March 1952, 9–10.

48.Mason, From Building and Loans, 144. Leon Kendall says that in 1946, “the first year of substantial volume,” savings and loans accounted for $1.25 billion of the $2.3 billion loaned to GIs. Leon T. Kendall, The Savings and Loan Business: Its Purpose, Functions, and Economic Justification (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 8.

49.C.J. Burns, “We Don’t Make Veterans’ Loans OR We Won’t Make Them,” CSLJ, April 1947, 29.

50.“Brief Chronology of the Loan Guaranty Program and Related Statutory Functions,” 3, in file: Loan Guaranty Service: Benefits: Appraisal History, re: Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, box 33, RG 15: A1.1017, NARA-DC.

51.Donald S. Thompson, “What Is the Position of the Mortgage Lender Today?” CSLJ, May 1947, 11.

52.Edgerton, Story of California Federal Savings, 14.

53.Walter J. Ray, “Home Building and Financing in a Mobilized Economy,” CSLJ, September 1951, 7–8.

54.NAHB, Washington Letter, March 10, 1954, 3. NAHB Archives.

55.Burns, “We Don’t Make Veterans’ Loans,” 28. The NAHB criticized lenders who refused to make VA loans because the interest rates weren’t high enough. After Congress passed the Housing Act of 1950, which authorized the VA to make direct loans to borrowers, the NAHB noted, “It would appear that the time has come for somewhat less concern by lending institutions with ¼ of 1% interest and somewhat greater concern for this dangerous encroachment by government in the field of private mortgage lending.” “Direct Federal Lending for G.I. Home Loans,” Washington Letter, June 29, 1951, 4.

56.Mason, From Building and Loans, 144–45.

57.J. Richard Elliott Jr., “Savings and Loans: Rapid Growth Can Be Risky Even in Thrift,” Barron’s, February 13, 1956, 20.

58.Sterling W. Ellis and Harold F. Dunton, The Big Promise (Altadena, CA: Veteran’s Organizations Council of Altadena, [1950]), in John Anson Ford Papers, box 65, folder B III, 14.d.cc, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

59.Ibid.

60.“Action Taken to Spur GI Loans,” LAT, May 27, 1953, 21.

61.“L.A. County Leads U.S. in V.A. Volume of Loans,” LAT, November 14, 1954, E5. For national statistics, see Veterans Administration, GI Loans: The First 10 Years (Washington, DC: Veterans Administration, 1954), in folder: Loans to Veterans, box: 19, Correspondence of Chairman Walter W. McAllister, 1952–1956, RG 195, NARA-CP.

62.“Home Savings Loans Reach All-Time High,” Los Angeles Mirror and Daily News, January 20, 1956, clipping in Home Clippings File, 1956, FA. It’s also interesting to note that in 1959 only 16 percent of the total mortgage loan balances held by thrifts were insured by either the FHA or the VA. C. Joseph Clawson et al., The Savings and Loan Industry in California (South Pasadena, CA: Stanford Research Institute, 1960), II-15.

63.“Home Savings Assets Show Jump in ‘56,” Highland Park News Herald, December 27, 1956, clipping in Home Clippings File, 1956, FA.

64.Home’s VA loan strategy stood in sharp contrast to its participation in the FHA-insured loan program. Like many other savings and loans, Home wrote very few FHA loans in the 1950s (less than 2 percent). Savings and loans generally paid more than commercial banks to acquire loanable funds (reflected in the higher interest rates they paid to savers). With their higher cost of capital, the FHA insurance program simply didn’t pay. The VA program would have been the same, except that profits could be enhanced by charging fees, which builders were happy to pay because the VA loan program was more attractive to borrowers and the cost of the fees could be included in the total purchase price of the home.

65.Freedgood, “Emperor Howard Ahmanson.”

66.Warren Buffett, interview by author, December 9, 2010.

67.Kenneth Childs to Howard Ahmanson, April 19, 1941 [1951], in FA.

68.The first building codes and standards were adopted by the State of California in 1909 and 1911. Statewide regulation began with the establishment of the Commission (later Division) of Housing and Immigration in 1913 along with the first state and local “planning stimulation” laws that same year. Gerald N. Hill, “A History of Housing Law in California,” in Governor’s Advisory Commission on Housing Problems, State of California, appendix to the Report on Housing in California, April 1963, 3.

69.Hill, “History of Housing Law,” 13.

70.Ibid., 4.

71.During the war, standards for war housing were so low that, according to builder Fritz Burns, they were rejected by the public and lending institutions. Fritz Burns, “Article on New Revised War Housing Standards,” ms., in file 19: 1943–1944 Speech Material, box 1, series 1, CSLA-4, Burns Collection, Special Collections, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles.

72.Carl F. Boester, “The Home of Tomorrow,” CSLJ, February 1947, 5.

8. POLITICAL ECONOMY

1.Al Morch, “GOP’s Ahmanson Topped Heap on ‘Chicken Feed,’” NewsLife, August 19, 1954.

2.Jeff Crawford, “Inventory of the Goodwin J. Knight Papers,” 2, Collection No. C114, CSA.

3.“Goodwin J. Knight, a Biographical Sketch,” February 23, 1954, in 1954 Campaign Scrapbook, Goodwin J. Knight Papers, Special Collections, Stanford University Library.

4.Howard F. Ahmanson to Goodwin J. Knight, n.d., and Goodwin J. Knight to Howard F. Ahmanson, April 25, 1951, both in folder 201, box 30, Goodwin J. Knight Papers, Special Collections, Stanford University Library.

5.Howard F. Ahmanson to Goodwin Knight, July 3, 1951, folder 201, box 30, Goodwin J. Knight Papers, Special Collections, Stanford University Library.

6.“New Savings, Loan Head Lauds Group,” LAT, February 28, 1953, 10.

7.Verne Scoggins to Milton O. Shaw, December 17, 1952, in folder F3740:2525, box 1 (2515–31), Earl Warren Papers: Administrative Files, Department of Investment, Building & Loan, 1949–1953, CSA.

8.“Merger Forms Huge Southland Savings-Loan,” LAT, July 1, 1952, 16.

9.For background on the politics that led to Earl Warren’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, see Jim Newton, Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006) and Gayle B. Montgomery and James W. Johnson, One Step from the White House: The Rise and Tall of Senator William T. Knowland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 123.

10.Harry Farrell, San Jose—And Other Famous Places (San Jose, CA: San Jose Historical Museum Association, 1983), 12.

11.Knight for Governor, press release, March 22, 1954, in folder 28.47—Southern California Primary, box 28, Whitaker-Baxter Collection, CSA.

12.Quoted in Peter Lyon, Eisenhower: Portrait of a Hero (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 586, and cited in Montgomery and Johnson, One Step, 188.

13.Arthur Krock, “The Knight-Nixon Feud,” NYT, August 22, 1956, 14.

14.Montgomery and Johnson, One Step, 162–63.

15.Clint Mosher, “Caldecott Choice of Gov. Knight for State GOP Leader,” San Trancisco Examiner, July 24, 1954. See also C. Lyn Fox, “Knight Explains Stand in GOP State Control Bill,” San Trancisco Call Bulletin, August 11, 1954.

16.“Goodwin J. Knight, 1954 Campaign Scrapbook,” in Goodwin J. Knight Collection, Special Collections, Stanford University Library.

17.Jackson Doyle, “Knight and Powers Differ on GOP Post,” San Trancisco Chronicle, July 24, 1954.

18.“Skirmishes Seen in Two Party State Committees,” LAT, July 16, 1954. See also “Knight Backs Caldecott as State GOP Head,” LAT, July 24, 1954.

19.Earl C. Behrens, “Knowland for Caldecott as GOP Leader,” San Trancisco Chronicle, July 28, 1954.

20.Vernon O’Reilly, “Knight Takes Party Control Battle to Ike,” San Trancisco News, August 6, 1954.

21.Clint Mosher, “Knight Wins GOP Battle; Demos in Rebuff to Graves,” San Trancisco Examiner, August 9, 1954.

22.Fox, “Knight Explains Stand.”

23.Mosher, “Knight Wins GOP Battle.”

24.Earl C. Behrens, “Knight Ready to Forget GOP Row,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 11, 1954.

25.Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter to Howard Ahmanson, August 12, 1954, in folder 28.48, box 28, Whitaker-Baxter Collection, CSA.

26.“Itinerary,” in folder 25.24—Governor’s Itineraries, box 25, Whitaker-Baxter Collection, CSA.

27.Knight for Governor, press release, September 10, 1954, in folder 28.48, box 28, Whitaker-Baxter Collection, CSA.

28.Montgomery and Johnson, One Step, 164.

29.Nathan L. Fairbairn to Clem Whitaker Sr., September 16, 1954, in folder 24.15, box 24, Whitaker-Baxter Collection, CSA; Howard Ahmanson to Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, August 27, 1954, in folder 31.1, box 31, Whitaker-Baxter Collection, CSA.

30.Ibid.

31.“Itinerary,” in folder 25.24—Governor’s Itineraries, box 25, Whitaker-Baxter Collection, CSA.

32.“U.S. League Convention Events,” Savings and Loan News, October 1954, 22–23.

33.“Howard Ahmanson—Biographical Information,” in file: Howard F. Ahmanson, box: TAF History, TAFA.

34.Don Shannon, “Californians Hail GOP Choice for Convention,” LAT, February 17, 1955, 19.

35.NAHB, Washington Letter, January 17, 1956, 2, NAHB Archives.

36.Press release, source unknown, March 7, 1956, in folder 398, box 56, Goodwin J. Knight Papers, Special Collections, Stanford University Library.

37.“Home Acquires Pasadena Loan,” LAT, March 13, 1956, 22.

38.The house had been designed by Lloyd Wright, son of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, in 1937. Seymour Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home,” first draft typescript, March 17, 1958, in FA.

39.Howard F. Ahmanson Jr. to author, e-mail, March 19, 2012. See also “Beach House History,” Newport Beach/Costa Mesa Daily Pilot, April 24, 1995.

40.In a letter to Howard written October 21, 1943, Hegg mentions that he just bought a new sailboat: sixteen meters (fifty-eight feet long), draws eight feet, twenty thousand pounds of lead in the keel, with an eighty-foot mast, “and does she sail.” Hegg was eager to enter this boat in “the Honolulu race.” He mentions that the boat was getting “a complete going over.” Roy E. Hegg to Howard F. Ahmanson, October 21, 1943, in FA.

41.Executives at San Diego Federal made side deals with builders that guaranteed them a share of the profits on housing developments in violation of Federal Home Loan Bank regulations that barred lenders from having an interest in a construction company. After he was indicted, Hegg resigned as president and chairman of the company. “Attorney Faces Housing Charges at San Diego,” LAT, June 24, 1952, 19. See also “Deal for $111,000 Profit Cited in Housing Inquiry,” LAT, December 5, 1951, A11.

42.The conspirators bribed VA appraisers, bought loan qualifying certificates from veterans, and then used them fraudulently to help nonveteran borrowers get GI loans. “Chairman Resigns,” LAT, March 4, 1953, 18.

43.William P. Ficker, interview by Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., Frank Trane, and Steven Ferguson, August 24, 2009, in FA.

44.Bob Ruskauff, “Compete Today on Newport Bay,” LAT, April 14, 1956, pt. III-3. See also “Boats Will Sail Today in Pt. Fermin Regatta,” LAT, April 15, 1956, pt. II-2.

45.Miscellaneous notes in “Stories of HFA” file, TAFA.

46.Seymour Freedgood, “Emperor Howard Ahmanson of S&L,” Fortune, May 1958, 148–152.

47.Howard F. Ahmanson to Lawrence Cooper, May 14, 1956, in HFA files, LH files, FA.

48.Peg Childs to Howard Ahmanson, January 27, 1957, in LH files, HFA Correspondence, FA.

49.Alphonzo Bell with Mark L. Webert, The Bel Air Kid: An Autobiography of a Life in California (Victoria, Canada: Trafford, 2002), 82–83; Sydney Kossen, “Labor behind Knight’s Dim View of Nixon,” San Francisco News, August 6, 1956.

50.Correspondence in folder 404, box 57, series 1—Correspondence, Goodwin J. Knight Papers, Special Collections, Stanford University Library.

51.Krock, “Knight-Nixon Feud,” 14.

52.Montgomery and Johnson, One Step, 228–30.

53.Ibid., 235.

54.Carl Greenberg, “Knight Gains Ex-Backers of Knowland; Will Crossfile,” Los Angeles Examiner, August 21, 1957, n.p. Clipping in FA.

55.Goodwin Knight to Howard and Dorothy Ahmanson, October 2, 1957, in FA.

56.Quoted in Montgomery and Johnson, One Step, 239.

57.Ethan Rarick, California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 93–97; and Montgomery and Johnson, One Step, 238–43.

58.Rarick, California Rising, 106–10.

59.“Howard F. Ahmanson,” Finance, February 1966, 21.

60.Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home.”

61.Freedgood, “Emperor Howard Ahmanson,” 149.

9. BIG BUSINESS

1.Milton O. Shaw to J. Alston Adams, April 26, 1955, in box 7, Correspondence of Chairman Robertson, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank, RG 195, NARA-CP.

2.“California Savings and Loan Associations, Assets as of June 30, 1955,” CSLJ, September 1955, 42–43.

3.J. Alston Adams to Walter W. McAllister, May 12, 1955, with attachments, in box 7, Correspondence of Chairman Robertson, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank, RG 195, NARA-CP.

4.Walter W. McAllister to J. Alston Adams, May 23, 1955, in box 7, Correspondence of Chairman Robertson, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank, RG 195, NARA-CP.

5.Charles Wellman to Walter W. McAllister, June 20, 1955, in box 7, Correspondence of Chairman Robertson, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank, RG 195, NARA-CP.

6.Estes Kefauver to Walter W. McAllister, November 17, 1956, in box 7, Correspondence of Chairman Robertson, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank, RG 195, NARA-CP.

7.State-chartered thrifts had rushed to convert to federal charters in the New Deal years, but federal thrifts were required to be mutuals. By the 1950s, as entrepreneurs realized how profitable thrifts could be, many managers of federal thrifts sought to convert back to state charters and then transform themselves from mutuals to guaranteed stock companies. Milton O. Shaw to A. C. Newell, August 9, 1955, in box 7, Correspondence of Chairman Robertson, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank, RG 195, NARA-CP.

8.The meaning of the “moratorium” is a little unclear. According to the 1956 annual report of the California Division of Savings and Loan, the state licensed ten new associations in 1956 and approved thirty new branches statewide, including several in Los Angeles and Orange Counties. California, Division of Savings and Loan, Sixty-Third Annual Report (Sacramento: State of California, 1957), 8–9.

9.The moratorium is referred to extensively in the papers of Albert Robertson. Curiously, it is not mentioned in the annual reports of the California Division of Savings and Loan for 1955 and 1956. Albert J. Robertson to Estes Kefauver, December 28, 1956, in box 7, Correspondence of Chairman Robertson, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank, RG 195, NARA-CP.

10.Percentage calculated using figures reported in the annual reports of the California Division of Savings and Loan. In February 1957, the LAT reported that the company’s loan portfolio had increased 36.7 percent in 1956. “Home Savings Loans Up 36.7%,” LAT, February 10, 1957, A17.

11.California, Division of Savings and Loan, Sixty-Third Annual Report, 1957, 6–7, 50; California, Division of Savings and Loan, Sixty-Second Annual Report (Sacramento: State of California, 1956), 50.

12.Milton O. Shaw to Albert J. Robertson, December 5, 1956, in box 7, Correspondence of Chairman Robertson, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank, RG 195, NARA-CP.

13.Ibid.

14.David Rees, “Gold Rush On for S&L Offices,” Los Angeles Mirror-News, January 31, 1957, n.p., in box 7, Correspondence of Chairman Robertson, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank, RG 195, NARA-CP.

15.Keystone S&L (Anaheim), Lifetime S&L (Granada Hills), Baldwin Park S&L (Baldwin Park), Harbor S&L (Redondo Beach), Sherman Oaks S&L (Los Angeles), Victory S&L (Los Angeles). California, Division of Savings and Loan, Sixty-Fourth Annual Report (Sacramento: State of California, 1958), 7, 21–22.

16.Ibid.

17.“Home Savings Gets Approval for New Offices,” Los Angeles Herald Express, March 15, 1957, clipping in Home Clippings File, January–March 1957, FA.

18.California, Division of Savings and Loan, Sixty-Fourth Annual Report, 7, 21–22.

19.California, Division of Savings and Loan, Sixty-Third Annual Report, 5, 57.

20.“Stock Offering Is Filed,” NYT, August 2, 1955, 33. See also House and Home, March 1956, 74–75, cited in James Gillies and Frank G. Mittelbach, Mergers of Savings and Loan Associations in California, Research Report no. 1, Real Estate Research Program, Division of Research (Los Angeles: Graduate School of Business Administration, University of California, Los Angeles, 1959), 26.

21.“Savings, Loan Firm of L.A. Drops S.F. Bid,” San Francisco Call-Bulletin, January 25, 1956, 39.

22.Guaranty was an attractive target because the thrift had made loans in fifty-four counties in California before laws had been passed restricting the geographic territory of state savings and loans. Seymour Freedgood et al., “Croesus at Home,” first draft typescript, March 17, 1958, in FA. In 1958, Ahmanson sold his substantial interest in Guaranty Savings and Loan Association of San Jose to Great Western. “California Savings, Loan Sold,” NYT, October 30, 1958, 45.

23.John Lawrence, “The Master Builders of Savings & Loan,” Los Angeles West Magazine, June 15, 1969, 10. American became the fifth-largest thrift in the country when it merged with Inter-Valley Savings and Loan the following year. Gillies and Mittelbach, Mergers of Savings and Loan Associations, 26.

24.Alfred J. Schneider, “Svgs.-Loan Merger Protested,” San Francisco Examiner, December 29, 1955, clipping in Home Clippings File, 1955, FA. See also California, Division of Savings and Loan, Sixty-First Annual Report (Sacramento: State of California, 1955), 22.

25.“Saving-Loan Unit Urges Home Rule,” NYT, January 26, 1956, 41.

26.The FHLBB apparently had some concerns about this issue. After learning that Ahmanson had agreed to withdraw his application, Chairman Walter McAllister, wrote Howard: “I personally appreciate very much your graciousness and cooperation under the circumstances.” He did not elaborate on how he viewed the circumstances. Walter W. McAllister to Howard Ahmanson, January 10, 1956, in file: “A,” box 1, Records of the Office of the Chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, Correspondence of Chairman Walter W. McAllister, 1952–56, RG 195, NARA-CP. See also “Savings, Loan Firm of L.A. Drops S.F. Bid.”

27.Walter W. McAllister to Milton O. Shaw, January 5, 1956, in folder: California, State of—1953, box 5, Correspondence of Chairman Walter W. McAllister, 1952–1956, RG 195, NARA-CP.

28.Sarkis J. Khoury, The Deregulation of the World Financial Markets: Myths, Realities, and Impact (New York: Quorum Books, 1990), 69.

29.“Bill to Regulate Savings-Loan Holding Units,” LAT, March 22, 1957, C8.

10. THE CREST OF A NEW WAVE

1.Howard Edgerton to Howard F. Ahmanson, July 1, 1957, in HFA files, in LH files, FA.

2.Kim Fletcher, interview by author, December 8, 2009.

3.“Home Savings & Loan Largest in Nation,” LAT, February 24, 1959, G7.

4.“U.S. League Convention Events,” Savings and Loan News, October 1954, 22–23.

5.Howard Edgerton, interview by Marc Nurre, September 7, 1993, notes, in FA.

6.Kim Fletcher, interview by author, December 8, 2009.

7.“Prosperous Omaha Should Turn to Culture—Ahmanson,” [Omaha World-Herald], February 11, 1961, n.p., clipping from Mary Jane Bettefreund.

8.U.S. Supreme Court, United States v. South-Eastern Underwriters, 322 U.S. 533 (1944).

9.California Legislature, “A Preliminary Report on Alleged Coercive Insurance Practices,” Assembly of the State of California, 1950, 15–16.

10.Ibid., 42.

11.M.F. Small to Clark F. Wake, November 3, 1949, in box 1 (2515–31), folder F3640:2525, Earl Warren Papers, Administrative Files, Department of Investment, Building and Loan, 1949–1953, CSA.

12.California Legislature, “Preliminary Report,” 5.

13.Ibid., 17.

14.Ibid., 36.

15.Ibid., 60–61.

16.Rex W. Hendrix, “Revolutionary Changes in Insurance Regulations,” CSLJ, June 1948, 19.

17.At the end of 1949, the company became the Southern California agent for Pacific National Fire Insurance Company, based in San Francisco (owned by Transamerica). With the addition of Pacific National, H.F. Ahmanson’s combined underwriting facilities swelled to more than three hundred million dollars. “Ahmanson and Co. Expands Insurance Facilities,” CSLJ, February 1950, 16.

18.Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist (New York: Broadway Books, 1995), 49.

19.Lowenstein tells this story without putting a specific date on it, though it’s set in the context of the narrative in 1957 or 1958. Lowenstein says the Ahmansons were offering $50 a share for National American Fire Insurance. Lowenstein, Buffett, 65. See also Warren Buffett, interview by author, December 9, 2010.

20.Warren Buffett, interview by author, December 9, 2010.

21.Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (New York: Bantam Books, 2008), 211.

22.Warren Buffett, interview by author, December 9, 2010.

23.Lowenstein, Buffett, 65.

24.Ibid., 58–59.

25.Warren Buffett, interview by author, December 9, 2010. See also Lowenstein, Buffett, 65.

26.Lowenstein, Buffett, 65. See also Schroeder, Snowball, 210–12. Schroeder points out that “under the Williams Act, passed in 1968, one could not do this today, nor could Howard Ahmanson buy back the stock piecemeal. The act requires buyers to make a ‘tender offer’ that puts all sellers on a level playing field under the same price and terms” (861 n. 27).

27.Warren Buffett, interview by author, December 9, 2010.

28.Ibid.

29.Howard was negotiating with Jack M. Kaplan in March 1959. The negotiations began with Kaplan claiming that Howard had “absconded with five or six million dollars.” The conversation improved and Kaplan asked Ahmanson to help him buy a savings and loan. See Howard Ahmanson to Hayden Ahmanson, March 13, 1959, in file: Howard F. Ahmanson Sr., box: TAF History, TAFA.

30.Lowenstein, Buffett, 65.

31.David Rees, “More on Plans of Financier Ahmanson,” Los Angeles Mirror-News, January 24, 1957, pt. 3, 5.

32.Alfred M. Best Company, Best’s Insurance Reports—Fire and Casualty (New York: Alfred M. Best Company, 1957), 698.

33.Seymour Freedgood, “Emperor Howard Ahmanson of S&L,” Fortune, May 1958, 150.

34.“One Firm to Handle Cal Vet Insurance,” no source, December 3, 1960, clipping in file: “Articles and Abstracts,” Folder “Articles,” LH files, FA.

35.Robert DeKruif, interview by Margaret Bach, [1992], in TAFA.

36.Ahmanson Bank and Trust Company display advertisement, LAT, January 1, 1960, 20.

37.Robert DeKruif, interview by Margaret Bach, [1992], in TAFA. Actually, Ahmanson realized, Home did well in financial services that related to the process of buying a home, so in 1958 he launched Southern Counties Title Company. Three years later, he diversified the insurance business by creating National American Life Insurance Company of California. This business specialized in selling mortgage term life insurance to customers of savings and loans and mortgage bankers. Chris Bone, “A Chronology of Home Savings of America, F.A., the First 100 Years—1889 to 1989,” [1989], JPMCA.

38.John Notter, interview by author, August 20, 2009.

39.Cover, Business Week, July 1, 1961.

40.“Richest of the Rich S&Ls,” Business Week, July 1, 1961, 80.

41.“Home Savings and Loan Celebrates,” CSLJ, January 1962, n.p.

42.“Howard Ahmanson,” notes compiled in file: Howard F. Ahmanson Sr., box: TAF History, TAFA.

11. SOUTHLAND PATRICIAN

1.Millard Sheets, interview by George M. Goodwin, in “Los Angeles Art Community: Group Portrait,” by UCLA Oral History Program, 1977, copy in folder: Howard F. Ahmanson Sr., box: The Ahmanson Foundation, TAFA.

2.Robert DeKruif mentions that Ahmanson and Sheets both attended a Friday morning breakfast club (the Economic Round Table) and had gotten to know each other a little this way, though the timing is unclear. Robert DeKruif, interview by Margaret Bach, [1992], in TAFA.

3.Carolyn Sheets Owen-Toole, Damngorgeous: A Daughter’s Memoir of Millard Owen Sheen (Oceanside, CA: Oceanside Museum of Art, 2008), 95.

4.Millard Sheets, interview by George Goodwin, 1977, in TAFA.

5.Christy Fox, “Face-Lift for Beverly Club,” LAT, June 11, 1972, E3.

6.Patricia K. Craig, “A Finding Aid to the Millard Sheets Papers, 1907–1990,” in AAA.

7.“Office Building Project Is Set,” LAT, January 10, 1954, clipping in Home Clippings File, 1954, FA.

8.“Home Savings Name Millard Sheets to Design New Bldg.,” Los Angeles Herald Express, January 5, 1954, clipping in Home Clippings File, 1954, FA.

9.“Office Building Project Is Set,” F2.

10.Millard Sheets, interview by George Goodwin, 1977, in TAFA.

11.Jarvis Barlow, “Art Matters,” LAT, undated clipping [1954], in FA. For information on Barlow, see “Jarvis Barlow Institute Aide,” LAT, July 24, 2954, 16.

12.Millard Sheets, interview by George Goodwin, 1977, 384, in TAFA.

13.Chris Bone, “A Chronology of Home Savings of America, F.A., the First 100 Years—1889 to 1989,” [1989], JPMCA.

14.“Home Savings New Beverly Hills Bldg. under Construction,” Los Angeles Herald & Express, October 27, 1954, clipping in Home Clippings File, 1954, FA.

15.“New $2,000,000 Savings Loan Unit Completed,” LAT, March 4, 1956, F21.

16.Millard Sheets, interview by George Goodwin, 1977, 385, in TAFA.

17.Jarvis Barlow, “Art Matters,” Pasadena Independent, April 10, 1955, clipping in Home Clippings File, 1955, FA.

18.“Family Group Statues Adorn Wilshire Blvd.,” Los Angeles Herald-Express, February 24, 1956, clipping in Home Clippings File, 1956, FA.

19.Home Savings & Loan brochure, Beverly Hills Branch, on reel 5692, in Millard Sheets Papers, AAA.

20.“Home Savings & Loan Dedication,” Los Angeles Building News, April 5, 1956, clipping in Home Clippings File, 1956, FA.

21.Home Savings & Loan brochure, Beverly Hills Branch.

22.“News, Views of Art,” LAT, November 18, 1956, clipping in Home Clippings File, 1956, FA.

23.Several of the artists who worked with Sheets on this first Home Savings project became part of a studio group that continued to work on Home Savings and other commercial building projects. See Adam Arenson, “Marketing Banks by Telling History: Howard Ahmanson, Millard Sheets, and the Art and Architecture of Home Savings Banks,” paper presented at the 2011 Business History Conference, St. Louis, MO. See also “ ‘New Look’ Boom in Stained Glass,” North Hollywood Valley Times, November 6, 1956; “New Edifice Hailed for Decorative Features,” LAT, February 26, 1956, clippings in Home Clippings, file 1956, FA.

24.Home Savings & Loan brochure, Beverly Hills Branch.

25.Ibid.

26.Howard F. Ahmanson to Lawrence Cooper, May 14, 1956, in HFA files, LH files, FA.

27.“600 Workers Guests at Home Savings Fete,” Los Angeles Examiner, March 15, 1956, clipping in Home Clippings File, 1956, FA.

28.The builders included Adrian Wilber of McDonald Brothers, Walter Bollenbacher, Louis Kelton, Don Metz of Aldon Construction Co. (eighth in the country), Max Levine of Midwood Homes (rated twelfth), Don Wilson of Kauffman-Wilson (rated fourth), and Richard Diller (rated seventh). Photo caption, Los Angeles Mirror and Daily News, March 16, 1956, clipping in Home Clippings File, 1956, FA.

29.Display advertisement, LAT, March 9, 1956, B9.

30.Millard Sheets, interview by George Goodwin, 386, in TAFA.

31.“Howard Ahmanson,” Valuator, fall 1966, 12, clipping in FA.

32.“New Outside for Building,” Long Beach Independent Press Telegram, March 15, 1957, clipping in Home Clippings File, January–March 1957, FA.

33.Millard Sheets, interview by George Goodwin, 388.

34.Ibid.

35.Ibid.

36.Millard Sheets, “Art Must Serve Two Masters,” LAT, September 4, 1955, C5.

37.Howard Ahmanson to Millard Sheets, October 8, 1960, on reel 5676, in Millard Sheets Papers, AAA.

38.“Ex-Omahan Is a Giant in the Loan Industry,” Omaha World-Herald, June 6, 1965, n.p.

39.Arthur Millier, “Painting-by-Numbers Craze Sweeps Hobby-Happy America,” LAT, April 4, 1954, D7.

40.Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., interview by author, December 15, 2010.

41.Howard Ahmanson to Millard Sheets, October 8, 1960.

42.“Art Institute Board Shifted,” LAT, January 1, 1947, A2.

43.“County Art Institute Advisory Board Named,” LAT, January 24, 1947, A3.

44.Suzanne Muchnic, “Art; Pay Attention, Class; Otis Chief Samuel Hoi Has Big Ideas for the Reinvigorated Art School,” LAT, September 23, 2001, F4.

45.Robert Irwin, interview by Frederick S. Wight, UCLA Oral History Program, 1977, 7–9, in Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

46.Arthur Millier, “Plan to Move Art Shows Climaxes Row at Museum,” LAT, June 1, 1947, C1.

47.“Art Tempest Brings Shift,” LAT, May 28, 1947, A1.

48.“Los Angeles Art History: A Timeline,” Los Angeles Times, October 26, 2008.

49.Millard Sheets, interviews by Paul Karlstrom, October 1986–July 1988, in AAA.

50.Ibid.

51.“Millard Sheets Named Art Institute Director,” LAT, August 20, 1953, A1.

52.Millard Sheets to John Anson Ford, August 25, 1953, in box 38 / B III 9 a cc (8), John Anson Ford Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

53.New faculty recruited by Sheets included ceramicist Peter Voulkos, who inspired a generation of artists in the Los Angeles area. See Andrew J. Perchuk, “From Otis to Ferus: Robert Irwin, Ed Ruscha, and Peter Voulkos in Los Angeles, 1954–1975” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2006), 51 and 169.

54.“Millard Sheets Named Art Institute Director.”

55.“Accreditation Granted to County Art Institute,” LAT, April 2, 1956, 5.

56.Sheets, “Art Must Serve Two Masters.”

57.“Rediscovery of World of Mind Urged,” LAT, April 21, 1956, A1.

58.Ibid.

59.Arthur Millier, “Institute Making Impressive Gains,” LAT, July 25, 1954, D7.

60.Margaret Bach, “The Ahmanson Foundation,” June 1993, 16. TAFA.

61.Norma H. Goodhue, “Mrs. Chandler Tells of Life in Russia,” LAT, December 16, 1955, B1.

62.Robert Wernick, “Wars of the Instant Medicis,” LIFE, October 26, 1966, 102.

63.Perchuk, “From Otis to Ferus,” 9.

64.Richard Brown, “The Art Division,” photocopy from LACMA, no source, 14. See also “Exposition Park Called Plague Spot Years Ago,” LAT, October 23, 1955, A2.

65.The donors were Mr. and Mrs. William Preston Harrison.

66.Brown, “Art Division,” 17.

67.Arthur Millier, “L.A. Museum Future Aired,” LAT, April 3, 1955, E6.

68.Caroline E. Liebig, “The Past Twenty Years,” unpublished manuscript, library of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, n.d., 10; Norris Leap, “Curator’s Love of Art Began at Age of 3,” LAT, August 19, 1958, A1. See also Wernick, “Wars of the Instant Medicis,” 105; and Kevin Starr, Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950–1963 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 164.

69.Wernick, “Wars of the Instant Medicis,” 105.

70.Suzanne Muchnic, Odd Man In: Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 51–53.

71.Ibid., 48–51.

72.“Board Delays Action on New Art Museum,” LAT, April 2, 1958, 2.

73.“$1,000,000 Gift Planned for Museum,” LAT, April 16, 1958, B1.

74.Museum Associates, Board Minutes, September 16, 1958. Photocopy provided by TAFA.

75.Ibid.

76.Ahmanson’s legal team cited a law passed in the mid-1950s that allowed the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to contract with a donor of a building to entrust its administration to a special, nonappointed body. This model would allow Museum Associates to oversee the day-to-day management of the building. Ibid.

77.Ibid.

78.Ibid.

79.Several sources make reference to this point, but no one elaborates. Given Ahmanson’s tendency to do favors for state and federal regulators in the savings and loan business, it wouldn’t be surprising if he or Home had done the same for the County of Los Angeles. It’s also unclear as to whether these sources are suggesting that some of the supervisors were personally in debt to Ahmanson for some reason.

80.Muchnic, Odd Man In, 53. See also “He Gives $2 Million for New Gallery,” Los Angeles Examiner, December 9, 1958, n.p., clipping in FA.

81.Ahmanson proposed a complicated structure for his gift. The funds would be provided as a loan extended by one of Ahmanson’s corporate entities. Ahmanson would then make seven annual gifts of stock in the company, which would eventually equal about four-fifths of the equity in the business. “Excerpts from Meeting of Museum Associates, September 16, 1958,” in file: LACMA, box: TAF History, TAFA. See also “County Receives Offer of Gallery of Fine Arts,” LAT, December 3, 1958, 5.

82.“Ahmansons Identified as Art Museum Donors,” Los Angeles Evening Mirror News, December 9, 1958, n.p., clipping in FA. See also Suzanne Muchnic, “A Little Historical Context Please: It’s Never Been Easy,” LAT, October 3, 1993, calendar section, 7.

83.Wernick, “Wars of the Instant Medicis,” 106.

84.Museum Associates, Board Minutes, November 18, 1958, [2].

85.Months after the announcement of Ahmanson’s gift, the Los Angeles Times was still reporting Simon’s gift as one million dollars. See, for example, “Fund 80% Raised for Art Museum,” LAT, April 15, 1959, B1. For information on Simon’s decision to reduce his gift, see Muchnic, Odd Man In, 53.

86.“County: Work May Start by Year’s End,” Los Angeles Examiner, April 15, 1959.

87.“Name for Museum Rends Art Circles,” Los Angeles Examiner, March 1, 1960, 12.

88.Muchnic, Odd Man In, 53.

89.This article pointed out that the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco included the De Young Museum, which had been named for a generous donor. “Park Museum Named Ahmanson Gallery,” [no publication identified], March 2, 1960, n.p., clipping in FA. See also “Ahmanson Chosen as Museum Name,” Los Angeles Evening Herald Express, March 2, 1960, n.p., clipping in FA. On Bright, see “Row Flares on Naming of Museum,” [no publication identified], March 3, 1960, n.p., clipping in FA. Meanwhile, the concept for the museum expanded to include two additional buildings, each to be named for a major donor who would contribute at least half of the cost of the building, although the board also considered naming one of the buildings after Captain George Allan Hancock, who had donated the land. Museum Associates, Board Minutes, March 8, 1960, 2–3.

90.Muchnic, Odd Man In, 54.

91.“Gallery Name,” no publication, March 3, 1960, n.p., clipping in FA.

92.“Giving Money Away,” Newsweek, March 21, 1960, n.p., clipping in TAFA.

93.Harold Tucker, “Outlook Profile: It’s Not All Finance with L.A. Financier,” LAT, June 11, 1961, J1.

94.Photograph and caption, clipped from Los Angeles Herald Examiner, May 29, 1966, n.p.

95.Los Angeles was full of dubious old masters in the 1950s, some of which were in the collections of the County Museum. Often a masterpiece attributed to Rubens or some other old master was in fact done by “the workshop of” or “the school of” the artist. Or in Ahmanson’s case, a painting attributed to Breughel was actually done by the master’s son. For background on art collecting in Los Angeles, see Winifred Haines Higgins, “Art Collecting in the Los Angeles Area, 1910–1960” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1963), 440–42. On Breughel, see Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., interview by author, December 15, 2010. After Ahmanson’s death, Franklin Murphy persuaded the board of the Ahmanson Foundation to help finance the acquisition of “absolutely first-grade works of art that will honor the Ahmanson name and erase forever this blemish that had spread upon him.” Franklin D. Murphy, interview by Margaret Bach, November 16, 1992, in TAFA.

96.Starr, Golden Dreams, 165.

97.John Dreyfuss, “New LACMA Building: Orchid or Daisy,” LAT, August 17, 1979, IV:19.

98.Ibid.

99.Franklin D. Murphy, interview by Margaret Bach, November 16, 1992, 14, in TAFA.

100.Ahmanson had also been given veto power over the location and the builder. “Excerpts from meeting of Museum Associates, September 16, 1958,” in file: LACMA, box: TAF History, TAFA. See also Dreyfuss, “New LACMA Building.”

101.Allen Temko, quoted in Scott Johnson, “William Pereira,” Forum Issue 7, January 7, 2010, Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, www.laforum.org/content/online-articles/william-pereira-by-scott-johnson. For more on Pereira, see James Steele, ed., William Pereira (Los Angeles: Architectural Guild Press, 2002).

102.Starr, Golden Dreams, 164.

103.Richard F. Brown, “ Progress Report on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,” Quarterly of the Los Angeles County Museum, Summer 1961, 7. LACMA’s trustees apparently approved the award on February 16, 1960. Dreyfuss, “New LACMA Building.”

104.“Art Leaders Appointed to Museum Associates,” Quarterly of the Los Angeles County Museum, summer 1960, 44–45. Ric Brown, Vincent Price, and Mrs. Stuart E. Weaver Jr. were also added at this time. Museum Associates, Board Minutes, March 8, 1960, 3.

105.Museum Associates, Board Minutes, January 17, 1961, 2.

106.Wernick, “Wars of the Instant Medicis,” 107.

107.Robert Wiebe, Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), 223–24.

108.Ibid.

12. INFLUENCE

1.Mackin coordinated Brown’s campaigns for state attorney general and became one of Brown’s top deputies after the first victory in 1946. After he was elected governor in 1958, Brown named Mackin commissioner of savings and loans. “Municipal Judge Named to Fill Court Vacancy,” LAT, December 30, 1960, B12.

2.Fred Dutton to Warren M. Christopher, January 21, 1959. See also Hale Champion to Warren M. Christopher, May 30, 1959. Both in file: Savings & Loans, Sept–Dec., 1959, carton 321—Investment, Department of, Edmund G. Brown Papers, BL.

3.Warren M. Christopher to Fred Dutton, January 26, 1959, in file: Savings & Loans, Sept–Dec., 1959, carton 321—Investment, Department of, Edmund G. Brown Papers, BL.

4.Edmund G. Brown to Clair Engle, August 29, 1959, in file: Savings & Loans, Sept–Dec., 1959, carton 321—Investment, Department of, Edmund G. Brown Papers, BL.

5.Edmund G. Brown to Clair Engle, September 4, 1959, in file: Savings & Loans, Sept–Dec., 1959, carton 321—Investment, Department of, Edmund G. Brown Papers, BL.

6.In his testimony before the Senate, Charles Hughes argued that holding companies offered an important path for smaller, local entities to raise the capital needed to compete against the dominant players in the savings and loan industry in Los Angeles, including Home Savings, California Federal, Coast Federal, and Glendale Federal Savings and Loan. Charles M. Hughes to Edmund G. Brown, August 28, 1959, in file: Savings & Loans, Sept–Dec., 1959, carton 321—Investment, Department of, Edmund G. Brown Papers, BL. For Pauley’s relationship to Brown, see Ethan Rarick, California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 46–47, 93–95.

7.Rarick, California Rising, 115.

8.Edmund G. Brown to Frank Mackin and Helen Nelson, October 13, 1959, in file: Savings & Loans, Sept–Dec., 1959, carton 321—Investment, Department of, Edmund G. Brown Papers, BL.

9.Frederick G. Dutton to Frank J. Mackin, August 26, 1959, in file: Savings & Loans, Sept–Dec., 1959, carton 321—Investment, Department of, Edmund G. Brown Papers, BL.

10.James Allen Smith, The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite (New York: Free Press, 1991), 113–21.

11.“Stanford Research Institute Worked on 30 Programs in 1958,” LAT, February 9, 1959, B3.

12.Los Angeles County alone was home to more than a third of all associations and 65 percent of assets. C. Joseph Clawson et al., The Savings and Loan Industry in California (South Pasadena, CA: Stanford Research Institute, 1960), II-2–3.

13.Ibid., II-6.

14.Some California thrifts actively solicited deposits by investors in other parts of the country and hired brokers to pursue these investors. According to SRI, “broker savings” in California thrifts accounted for about 6 percent of all assets. Ibid., II-12.

15.Curiously, federally chartered associations “showed no consistent relationship” between their size and relative efficiency. Ibid., II-6–7.

16.Ibid., VI-4.

17.Ibid., II-8.

18.“15 Named to State Museum Committee,” Los Angeles Mirror News, May 18, 1956.

19.University of Southern California, “The Story of the California Museum of Science and Industry,” n.d., www.usc.edu/CSSF/History/CMSI_History.html (accessed October 31, 2010).

20.Bill Boyarsky, Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 54.

21.Lou Cannon, Ronnie and Jesse: A Political Odyssey (New York: Doubleday, 1969), 9–13, 20–26, 58–67.

22.Boyarsky, Big Daddy, 72–73.

23.Cannon, Ronnie and Jesse, 98.

24.Thomas M. Rees, oral history interview by Carlos Vasquez, December 9 and 11, 1987, Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, 239–40, in Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

25.Jesse M. Unruh, “California’s Fiscal and Legislative Future,” CSLJ, November 1961, 21.

26.Cannon, Ronnie and Jesse, 99.

27.Boyarsky, Big Daddy, 84.

28.For example, Ahmanson connected Unruh to the Chandlers and the Carters. Thomas M. Rees, interview by Carlos Vasquez, December 9 and 11, 1987, 242, in Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

29.Ibid.

30.Several authors have searched for the source for this quote famously attributed to Unruh, but none have been successful. For a discussion, see Jackson K. Putnam, Jess: The Political Career of Jesse Marvin Unruh (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005), 21.

31.Lou Cannon, interview by author, March 3, 2011.

32.Harry Farrell, “Political ‘Angel’ Plays Dual Role,” San Jose Evening News, May 16, 1963, 1.

33.To open the commissioner’s position, Brown appointed Mackin to a municipal judgeship. “Municipal Judge Named,” B12.

34.California, Division of Savings and Loan, Sixty-Ninth Annual Report (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1963), 17. See also “Municipal Judge Named.”

35.California, Division of Savings and Loan, Sixty-Ninth Annual Report, 10.

36.Preston N. Silbaugh, “Supervision, Safety and Sustained Growth,” CSLJ 35, no. 11 (November 1962): n.p.

37.James Bassett, “Nixon-Knight Feud Born of Old Rivalry,” LAT, November 5, 1961, G2.

38.Gladwin Hill, “Coast G.O.P. Fight Could Be Costly,” October 8, 1941, 58.

39.Rarick, California Rising, 230; see also 427 n. 3.

40.James Bassett, “Nixon Will Tell Plans in 60 Days,” LAT, July 12, 1961, 1.

41.James Bassett, “Nixon Firmly Refuses to Declare Himself Now,” LAT, July 14, 1961, B4.

42.“Goodwin Knight,” LAT, September 12, 1961, 13.

43.“Nixon View,” LAT, September 13, 1961, 25.

44.James Bassett, “Brown and Knight Ask Equal Time with Nixon,” LAT, September 25, 1961, 1.

45.Drew Pearson, “Press Balked at Nixon’s Demand,” Washington Post-Times Herald, October 29, 1961, E5.

46.Seymour Korman, “Knight Names Banker as Nixon ‘Voice,’” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 5, 1961, 3.

47.“California Imbroglio,” Washington Post–Times Herald, October 6, 1961, A16.

48.Richard Bergholz, “Knight to Stay Clear of GOP Endorsement,” LAT, January 18, 1962, 2.

49.Carey McWilliams, “Has Success Spoiled Dick Nixon?” Nation, June 2, 1962, 491.

50.Ibid.

51.Ibid.

52.Rarick, California Rising, 246.

53.Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, “Second Inaugural Address,” January 7, 1963, http://governors.library.ca.gov/addresses/32-Pbrown02.html.

54.Edward S. Shaw, Savings and Loan Market Structure: A Study of California State-Licensed Savings and Loan Associations ([Sacramento]: California Savings and Loan Commissioner, 1962).

55.Ibid.

56.Jack Searles, “S&L’s,” LAT, February 20, 1963, C8.

57.Jerry Gillam, “S&Ls Win Round in Shaw Dispute,” LAT, February 20, 1963, C8.

58.Jack Searles, “Key to S&L Dispute: The Role of the Commissioner,” LAT, February 24, 1963, M1.

59.The political power of the growing consumer movement became especially apparent in Washington in the late 1960s. David Vogel suggests that a “decline in the relative political influence of business” began in 1966 with the passage of new federal laws regulating corporate social conduct. These new laws undermined the concept of the managed economy, or what Vogel calls “creative federalism,” and tended to increase the power of both business and government. David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 37–58.

60.“Leo Grebler, 90, Dies; Authority on Land Use,” NYT, April 5, 1991.

61.Leo Grebler and Eugene F. Brigham, Savings and Mortgage Markets in California (Pasadena: California Savings and Loan League, 1963), 8.

62.Ibid., 9.

63.Ibid., 13.

64.Ibid., 181.

65.Ibid., 14.

13. SHORT OF DOMESTIC BLISS

1.Norris Leap, “H.F. Ahmanson, ‘Spoiled Boy,’ Becomes Financial Genius,” LAT, December 28, 1958, pt. IV, 1.

2.Seymour Freedgood, “Emperor Howard Ahmanson of S&L,” Fortune, May 1958.

3.Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., interview by author, December 15, 2010.

4.Ahmanson’s property near San Bernardino was bounded by Barton, Waterman, Hunt and the railroad, just north of Montecito Memorial Park cemetery. Ibid.

5.[Dorothy Grannis Ahmanson], [unsourced notes for introduction of Howard Fieldstad Ahmanson], March 22, 1954, in FA.

6.Leap, “H. F. Ahmanson.”

7.Ibid.

8.Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., interview by author, December 15, 2010.

9.Leap, “H. F. Ahmanson.”

10.Howard F. Ahmanson to Hayden Ahmanson, March 13, 1959, in FA.

11.[Dorothy Grannis Ahmanson], [unsourced notes for introduction of Howard Fieldstad Ahmanson], March 22, 1954, in FA.

12.Howard F. Ahmanson to A. J. McIntyre, March 26, 1959, in file: Steady, box HFA 10, FA.

13.Howard Ahmanson to Giuliana Liquori, April 16, 1959, and June 24, 1959, in Foster Parents’ Plan file, TAFA.

14.Norman Topping, interview by Marc Nurre, November 1, 1993, in FA.

15.Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., interview by Marc Nurre, [1993], in FA.

16.David S. Hannah, interview by Marc Nurre, [1994], in FA.

17.Ibid.

18.Diane Wedner, “Real Estate: Home of the Week,” LAT, September 28, 2008, C12.

19.Howard and Dottie actually maintained separate bedrooms—as did many wealthy couples in this era. Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., interview by author, December 15, 2010.

20.Instruments are listed in “Howard Ahmanson: Biographical Information,” in file: Howard F. Ahmanson Sr., box: TAF History, TAFA.

21.Howard Ahmanson Jr. says the dogs were always French poodles. See Wanda Henderson, “Confetti,” Los Angeles Examiner, November 2, 1959, which says that they included a German Shepherd and a Pomeranian.

22.Ferd Borsch, “Sirius II Is First in Trans-Pac,” Honolulu Advertiser, July 1, 1961, 1.

23.But Howard did nothing to enhance the boat’s competitive capabilities. “He didn’t even add new or larger winches,” remembers crew member Bill Ficker. Bill Ficker, interview by Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., Frank Trane, and Steve Ferguson, August 24, 2009; Norman Topping, interview by Marc Nurre, November 1, 1993, both in FA.

24.See crew list, FA. For information on Schenck, see Thomas Atkinson, “For Hustle and Plain Fun,” Sports Illustrated, August 3, 1959.

25.Howard Ahmanson, “The First and Last Profound Words from the Skipper,” June 29, 1961, in FA.

26.“Art First Love for Ahmanson,” Los Angeles Mirror, July 3, 1961, n.p.

27.Bill Ficker, interview by Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., Frank Trane, and Steve Ferguson, August 24, 2009.

28.Ibid.

29.Borsch, “Sirius II Is First.”

30.Bill Ficker, interview by Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., Frank Trane, and Steve Ferguson, August 24, 2009. See also W. Bradley Avery, “Commodore’s Column,” Hard on the Wind, March 2010, 2; and Borsch, “Sirius II Is.”

31.“Ahmanson Kin Dies in Omaha,” LAT, March 9, 1960, B30.

32.Aimee Ahmanson and Florence Hoffman, interview by Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., August 21, 1993, in FA.

33.Several people told me of Ahmanson’s affair with actress and singer Rhonda Fleming in 1962. Fleming got her first big break in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and was a major box office attraction for the next ten years. Married six times, Fleming was single from 1958 to 1960 and again from 1962 to 1966. See “Rhonda Fleming,” n.d., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhonda_Fleming.

34.“Wife Suing to Divorce Ahmanson,” LAT, May 7, 1960, 6. See also Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., interview by author, December 15, 2010.

35.Howard Ahmanson to Giuliana Liquori, September 26, 1960, in Foster Parents’ Plan file, TAFA.

36.Dorothy Grannis Ahmanson calendar, 1961, in FA. See entries for March 11, April 7, and September 5.

37.Ibid. See entry for March 18.

38.Howard F. Ahmanson to Dorothy Grannis Ahmanson, [August 1961], in FA.

39.Franklin D. Murphy, interview by Margaret Bach, November 16, 1992, 10, in TAFA.

40.Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., interview by author, December 15, 2010.

41.Dorothy Grannis Ahmanson calendar, 1961. See entry for October 2.

42.Ibid. See entry for October 23.

43.Ibid. See entry for November 24.

44.Ibid. See entry for November 25.

45.Paul Ditzel, “Special People: Caroline Leonetti Ahmanson,” clipping, no source, [1983], in FA.

46.Ibid.

47.“Nonnie Book,” unpublished manuscript provided by Margo Leonetti O’Connell.

48.Display advertisement, LAT, February 14, 1947, 7.

49.“Hedda Hopper Denounces Long Skirts in Ad Club Talk,” LAT, September 9, 1947, A1.

50.Marie McNair, “Will Cupid Disturb Singing Jim’s Date with Fifth Avenue?” WP, September 16, 1952, 21.

51.“TV Tidbits,” LAT, October 12, 1950, 26.

52.For the Linkletter show, Leonetti created the “Cinderella Story” segment. Each week she chose three women from the audience. Over the next week, these women took daily classes at her school and received a clothing allowance to purchase a new outfit. When the contestants returned to the show a week later, dressed and styled for glamour, one was named the “Cinderella” of the week.

53.Henry A. Bubb to Howard F. Ahmanson, March 17, 1960, in box 4, file 18, collection 363, Franklin D. Murphy Papers, UCLA Special Collections.

54.Margaret Leslie Davis, The Culture Broker: Franklin D. Murphy and the Transformation of Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), xii.

55.Ibid., 1–17.

56.Ibid., 47.

57.Ibid., 59.

58.Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., interview by author, December 15, 2008, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Oral History project.

59.Davis, Culture Broker, 59.

60.Norman Topping, interview by Marc Nurre, November 1, 1993, in FA.

61.Ibid.

62.“Ahmanson Named SC Trustee,” Los Angeles Mirror, December 15, 1960, n.p., clipping in FA.

63.Dick Turpin, “$1 Million Given to USC by Howard Ahmanson,” LAT, May 17, 1962, A1.

64.Norman Topping, interview by Marc Nurre, November 1, 1993, in FA.

14. BREAKDOWN OF CONSENSUS

1.Preston N. Silbaugh, “Supervision, Safety and Sustained Growth,” CSLJ, November 1962, n.p.

2.Paul S. Nadler, “A Look at Future Competition,” CSLJ, November 1962, n.p.

3.David L. Mason, From Buildings and Loans to Bail-Outs: A History of the American Savings and Loan Industry, 1831–1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 159–60.

4.Hyman P. Minsky, “Commercial Banking and Rapid Economic Growth in California,” in California Banking in a Growing Economy: 1946–1975, ed. Hyman P. Minsky (Berkeley, CA: Institute of Business and Economic Research, 1963), 87. To some extent, thrifts were protected from this slowing economy because the average annual rate of personal savings in the United States continued to rise through the 1950s, reaching 5.7 percent by the end of the decade. But thrifts were increasingly challenged to find places to invest this cash, given the slowing demand in the mortgage market. Mason, From Buildings and Loans, 159–60.

5.Howard Edgerton, interview by Marc Nurre, September 7, 1993, in FA.

6.By 1948, there were approximately one hundred different mutual funds companies managing approximately $1.5 billion in assets. Mary Rowland, A Common Sense Guide to Mutual Funds (Princeton, NJ: Bloomberg Press, 1996), 142. By 1965, mutual fund assets had risen to $17 billion. Mason, From Buildings and Loans, 162.

7.Howard P. Stevens, “President’s Message,” CSLJ, June 1950, 6.

8.While savings and loans faced increasing competition on the savings side of their business, they were squeezed on the lending side as well. By 1963, thrifts accounted for 73 percent of California’s new loan volume for residential construction. F. E. Balderston, “A New Service Program of the Division of Savings and Loan: Comprehensive Market Reports for the Savings and Loan Industry,” speech to the California Savings and Loan League Convention, September 16, 1964, 5, in folder: California State 1964, July–December, box 10, Correspondence of the Office of the Chairman, Joseph McMurray, RG 195, NARA-CP. See also Mason, From Buildings and Loans, 183.

9.Oliver M. Chatburn, “The President’s Message,” CSLJ, October 1961, 10.

10.Ibid., 12.

11.“Sixteen Holding Firms in Savings-Loan Field Form Trade Association,” WSJ, June 14, 1965, 11.

12.Jack Miller, “S&L’s in Banking—A Mistake,” San Francisco News-Call Bulletin, September 21, 1962, n.p.

13.Richard L. Vanderveld, “Money: An Embarrassment of Riches in ‘63,” LAT, January 7, 1964, E2; Robert T. Allen, “Current Outlook for the California Savings and Loan Stock: A Special Institutional Report” (Shearson-Hammill & Co., March 1964), 2, in folder: California State-1964, box 10, in Correspondence of the Office of the Chairman, Joseph McMurray, 1965–1968, RG 195, NARA-CP.

14.See Marc Allen Eisner, Regulatory Politics in Transition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); and Marc Allen Eisner, Antitrust and the Triumph of Economics: Institutions, Expertise and Policy Change (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 19.

15.“Report on 4-Year Study of Money and Credit,” CSLJ, August 1961, 15.

16.Ibid.

17.Edward L. Johnson to Preston N. Silbaugh, April 9, 1963, in folder: Balderston Report-1962 [sic], box 11, in Correspondence of the Office of the Chairman, Joseph McMurray, 1965–1968, RG 195, NARA-CP.

18.Balderston noted that during the heyday of its loan program the VA was able to manage the overall supply of new residential construction in a market through its approval process. As conventional loans dominated the market in the early 1960s, the government (through the FHLB, for example) was less able to manage this overall supply, and booms and busts from uncoordinated market activity were more likely. Balderston pointed out that the commissioner of savings and loans had legal authority to force savings and loans to stop making loans and that in an extreme situation this authority could be used to avoid oversupply, but he said this was not something he wanted to do. “If it is at all possible to do so,” he said, “it is far better to leave the flow of individual business decisions in the hands of operating managers.” Balderston, “New Service Program,” 2–3.

19.Ronald J. Ostrow, “S&L Loan Risk Policies Draw Eye of State,” LAT, December 18, 1963, part III, 9.

20.Balderston, “New Service Program.”

21.Balderston acknowledged that “state regulation in California has gone farther in policing lender’s risks than is generally characteristic of savings and loan regulation.” This was in part because of the size and importance of the industry within California’s markets and thus the need to manage the risk that thrifts might pose to the state’s financial system. F. E. Balderston, “Financial Regulation as a Control System Problem: The Case of the Savings and Loan Industry,” Management Science 12 (1966): B-418.

22.“Half of Loan Must Be Held, State Rules,” LAT, July 14, 1964, B7.

23.Balderston, “Financial Regulation,” B-418. For data on employees in 1962, see California, Division of Savings and Loan, Sixty-Eighth Annual Report (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1963), 19, CSA.

24.“Washington at Work: Kennedy Administration,” WSJ, January 18, 1961, 13. See also “John Home,” Chicago Tribune, January 10, 1985, n.p.

25.Ahmanson was not alone in his efforts to lavish cash on politicians to smooth the relationships between business and government. Farrell’s series of investigative stories revealed that many of Ahmanson’s friends in the savings and loan industry were members of a Los Angeles–based organization called United for California, which distributed an estimated one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand dollars to conservative, probusiness candidates in the early 1960s. Often this organization simply paid the bills of candidates it supported without ever making a recognized “contribution.” Harry Farrell, “Phone Call—and Cash Arrives,” San Jose Evening News, May 11, 1963, 1.

26.Harry Farrell, “Political Angel’ Plays Dual Role,” San Jose Evening News, May 16, 1963, 1.

27.The California Assembly Committee on Fire and Insurance launched a special investigation in October 1961. The committee, supported by a finding from the California attorney general, concluded that the contract had been awarded properly and determined that the agreement with H. F. Ahmanson & Co. “more adequately protects the interests of the State and, simultaneously, provides wider coverage than was otherwise possible at a lower premium to the Cal-Vet buyer.” California, Interim Committee on Finance and Insurance, “Fire Insurance, Land Sale Contracts, Cal-Vet Insurance: Preliminary Report,” in Assembly Interim Committee Reports, 1961–1962, vol. 15, no. 25 (Sacramento: Assembly of the State of California, 1962), 50.

28.Farrell, “Political Angel.’”

29.Senator Clark L. Bradley (R-San Jose), quoted in Harry Farrell, “A ‘Gathering’ of String-Pullers,” San Jose Evening News, May 14, 1963, 1, 4.

30.Richard Harwood, “Government Lists Baker Misdeeds,” WP, January 11, 1967, A1; Willard Edwards, “Baker Tells LBJ Role in Loan,” Chicago Tribune, January 21, 1967, 1.

31.Richard Harwood, “Baker’s Quest for S&L Donations Told,” WP, January 13, 1967, A1.

32.The Senate Rules Committee launched an investigation into Baker’s conduct. After Lyndon Johnson became president, Baker loomed as a considerable embarrassment to the new president. Although the Rules Committee heard testimony in February 1964 that suggested that Baker had received unethical, if not illegal, payoffs, Baker refused to reveal anything that would damage his powerful friends or incriminate himself. The Rules Committee found that Baker had committed “gross improprieties,” but it took no further action. Mark Grossman, Political Corruption in America: An Encyclopedia of Scandals, Power and Greed (New York: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2003), 19. See also Willard Edwards, “Tells of Cash on Baker Desk,” Chicago Tribune, January 12, 1967, 1.

33.Grossman, Political Corruption in America, 19.

34.The case may have also alerted government investigators to look more closely at the political contributions of the savings and loans. The presidential campaign of 1964 came and went before investigators finally scoured the records of Ahmanson’s public relations subsidiary. Ultimately, four separate entities within the Ahmanson empire pled guilty to making illegal campaign contributions of $50,026 during the presidential campaign of 1964 and of fraudulently deducting $177,469 from the companies’ tax liabilities. “Ahmanson Firms Plead Guilty to Making Illegal Political Contributions,” WSJ, October 29, 1969, 2.

35.Corporate spending on politicians had come under attack in the Progressive era, but laws seeking to limit or ban corporate election contributions had been largely ineffectual. Between 1925 and the end of the 1950s, the issue failed to produce significant new laws, in part because the public was increasingly comfortable with the relationship between business and government. Justin A. Nelson, “The Supply and Demand of Campaign Finance Reform,” Columbia Law Review 100, no. 2 (March 2000), 524–57. See also Thomas E. Mann, “Linking Knowledge and Action: Political Science and Campaign Finance Reform,” Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 1 (March, 2003): 69–83.

36.Office of Program Policy, Housing and Home Finance Agency, “Facts about the Housing of the Nonwhite Population: A Digest of Bureau of the Census Data,” November 1962, in box 48, files of Federal Home Loan Bank Board Chairman McMurray, RG 195, NARA-CP.

37.Mark Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, 190–94.

38.Jackson K. Putnam, Jess: The Political Career of Jesse Marvin Unruh (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005), 100.

39.“U.S. Directive on Civil Rights in Mortgage Lending Looms,” American Banker, October 24, 1961, n.p., clipping in box 58, Records of the Office of the Chairman, Federal Home Loan Bank, General Correspondence of Chairman McMurray, RG 195, NARA-CP.

40.Housing and Home Finance Agency, “President’s Executive Order 11063: Equal Opportunity in Housing,” November 20, 1962, in box 48, Records of the Office of the Chairman, Federal Home Loan Bank, General Correspondence of Chairman McMurray, RG 195, NARA-CP.

41.“Torrance Picketers Will Continue Tract Protest,” LAT, August 10, 1963, 10.

42.Kenneth Childs to Stephen Slipher, August 13, 1963, in box 58, Records of the Office of the Chairman, Federal Home Loan Bank, General Correspondence of Chairman McMurray, RG 195, NARA-CP.

43.Ibid.

44.Paul Weeks, “Negro Family Acquires Home in Disputed Tract,” LAT, July 16, 1964, 20.

45.Millard Sheets, “Kenneth D. Childs,” on reel 5704, in Millard Sheets Papers, AAA.

46.Richard Deihl, interview by author, September 25, 2009.

47.Ibid.

48.Jack Miller, “A Monotony in Making Millions,” San Francisco Examiner, October 15, 1967, 10.

15. CRISIS OF THE MANAGED ECONOMY

1.E. Erich Heinemann, “Thrift Units Face California Test,” NYT, July 17, 1966, 97.

2.Tom Cameron, “Southland Building Hits Lowest Level since ‘51,” [no publication identified], clipping provided to John Horne by Norman Strunk, October 27, 1965, in box 6, Files of FHLBB Chairman John E. Home, RG 195, NARA-CP.

3.California, Division of Savings and Loan, Annual Report, 1963, 27, and Annual Report, 1964, 5. The downturn was not limited to California. In 1964, a number of thrifts in Illinois failed and had to be bailed out by the FSLIC. When this happened, California regulators expressed concern. Balderston noted a major problem with the FSLIC: insurance premiums paid by thrifts did not reflect risk. Preston Silbaugh had proposed reforms to the federal system that would allow the FSLIC to charge higher premiums to institutions that took greater risks. Balderston suggested that such a system would help align management’s interests with public policy. But California’s suggestions were not heeded by federal lawmakers or regulators. In the absence of these pricing incentives, the burden of risk management fell primarily on regulators. F. E. Balderston, “Financial Regulation as a Control System Problem: The Case of the Savings and Loan Industry,” Management Science 12, no. 10 (1966): B-427.

4.“Several Smaller S&Ls in Southern California Increase Savings Rates,” WSJ, March 31, 1965, 9.

5.Cameron, “Southland Building.’”

6.Arelo Sederberg, “The Savings & Loan Problem: Are Mergers the Solution?” LAT, May 1, 1966, H1.

7.Some thrifts were able to turn to the secondary market for cash. In April 1965, for example, First Charter Financial announced that it would sell a 75 percent interest in $89 million of VA-backed real estate loans to Morgan Guaranty Trust Co. of New York. “First Charter Financial to Sell 75% of $80 Million of Loans Backed by VA,” WSJ, April 21, 1965, 9.

8.Thomas W. Bush, “Ahmanson: What’s This Talk of S&L Pinch?” LJT, June 5, 1966, H1.

9.“Federal Home Loan Bank Board Increasing Interest Rates Charged S&L Associations,” WSJ, April 15, 1965, 32.

10.“Ex-Omahan Is a Giant in the Loan Industry,” [Omaha World-Herald], June 6, 1965, n.p., clipping from Mary Jane Bettefreund.

11.Howard Edgerton to Franklin Hardinge Jr., August 19, 1965, in folder: Advertising General—1965, box 2, Files of FHLBB Chairman John E. Horne, RG 195, NARA-CP.

12.Henry A. Bubb to John E. Home, December 22 and 27, 1965, in folder: Advertising General—1965, box 2, Files of FHLBB Chairman John E. Home, RG 195, NARA-CP.

13.For a debate over the causes of the 1966 credit crisis, see articles by L. Randall Wray, “The 1966 Financial Crisis: Financial Instability or Political Economy?” and Martin H. Wolfson, “Financial Instability and the Credit Crunch of 1966,” both in Review of Political Economy 11, no. 4 (1999).

14.“Reserve Board Lifts Discount Rate to 4½% From 4%, Directly Defying Administration,” WSJ, December 6, 1965, 3.

15.In the meantime, Federal Reserve Board chairman William McChesney Martin, unwilling to backtrack, tried to fix the situation by suggesting that the Fed might increase the reserve requirement by discouraging banks from offering CDs in small denominations. But defensively, he criticized the savings and loans for overreacting. “Reserve Board to Mull Increase in Banks’ Reserves behind Certificates of Deposit,” WSJ, December 15, 1965, 2.

16.“Reserve Cautions Banks on Interest on Time Deposits: S&L Aid Grows,” WSJ, December 20, 1965, 2.

17.“Savings Interest Lifted by Savings-Loans in Los Angeles, Detroit: Rate War Feared,” WSJ, December 13, 1965, 4.

18.Ibid.

19.Gareth Sadler to Edmund G. Brown, June 7, 1966, in folder 67, box 4, RG 3739. CSA.

20.Staff Comments to L.E. Woodford, re: California FS&LA, August 17, 1966, in folder: California Federal, Los Angeles, CA—1966, box 6, Chairman John Horne’s papers, RG 195, NARA-CP.

21.Home Savings had had some involvement with this 963-acre project in the late 1950s. Sales began in 1957 on a seven-hundred-home development. The project was shut down because of a construction strike in 1959. Long Beach Federal Savings & Loan apparently carried the financing at one point, but the thrift was seized by the FSLIC after regulators charged that the thrift was overextended and mismanaged. By 1966, the project was still unfinished. Home owners in the community were frustrated, and the developers owed money to the FSLIC. “Federal Suit Filed on Builders of Bellehurst,” LAT, February 19, 1966, OC14; Hal Schulz, “Homeowners Request Action in Bellehurst,” LAT, July 12, 1966, OC8; Thomas W. Bush and Paul Houston, “Renovation Finally on Horizon for Eyesore Bellehurst Tract,” LAT, February 17, 1967, 3.

22.Jack Miller, “Tycoon Blasts Gimmicks,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, February 20, 1966, III-9.

23.“Home Savings Hits $2 Billion,” LAT, March 10, 1966, B16.

24.John E. Home to Howard F. Ahmanson, February 24, 1966, in box 6, Chairman John Horne’s papers, box 4, RG 195, NARA-CP.

25.California Commissioner of Savings and Loan, “Lending Reports,” June 15, 1966, in folder: [82] [Department of Savings and Loan, Los Angeles Office Records, 1964–66], box 4, F3739:63–86, CSA.

26.Richard H. K. Vietor, Contrived Competition: Regulation and Deregulation in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 257–60.

27.Gary Hector, Breaking the Bank: The Decline of BankAmerica (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 66–67.

28.Vietor, Contrived Competition, 257–60.

29.“Bank of America Offers 5% Savings Certificate in $5,000 Denomination,” WSJ, March 22, 1966, 25.

30.“Two California S&Ls Raise Rates; More Banks Increase CD Interest,” WSJ, March 23, 1966, 2.

31.Ibid.

32.“More California S&Ls Offer 5% Certificates to Compete with Banks,” WSJ, March 28, 1966, 11.

33.Home Savings lowered the minimum threshold for these time deposits to $2,500. Ibid.

34.“Home Savings & Loan, Largest in Nation, Joins Others in West Paying 5% on Savings,” WSJ, April 4, 1966, 7.

35.Ibid.

36.Heinemann, “Thrift Units.” The Los Angeles Times reported a nearly $480.5 million outflow in April 1966 compared to a net positive inflow of over $161.7 million in May of 1965. Thomas W. Bush, “Higher Savings Rates Produce Little Switching,” LAT, July 8, 1966, B11.

37.While other thrifts found it increasingly difficult to make loans because of the drain on their funds, Home Savings made $30 million of new loans on single-family homes in March and April, despite a depressed market. Sederberg, “Savings & Loan Problem” LAT, May 1, 1966, H1; “News,” House and Home, July 1966, 5–6.

38.David L. Mason, From Buildings and Loans to Bail-Outs: A History of the American Savings and Loan Industry, 1831–1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 183–84.

39.Sadler sought to support the thrifts in their efforts to be competitive—authorizing them in June, for example, to advertise their high-rate bonus plans to attract depositors. H. Erich Heinemann, “Thrift-Rate War Looms,” NYT, June 15, 1966, 63.

40.On May 17, the FHLB of San Francisco, recognizing that it too had to pay a higher cost for money, raised the interest rate it charged to member banks to 5⅜ percent. Thomas W. Bush, “Interest Rate at S.F. Federal Home Loan Bank Rises to 5⅜%,” LAT, May 3, 1966, C9.

41.Testifying before a House committee in September 1966, Tom Bane, the lobbyist for the Council of Savings and Loan Financial Corporations, which represented state-chartered capital stock companies in eleven states, said that when the FHLBB refused to support an increase in savings deposit rates, “one or two S&Ls came to the conclusion that the Board’s judgment was wrong, and to prevent serious damage to their institutions, gave up their borrowing privileges and announced early, before the reinvestment period began, their intention to increase rates. These associations [including Home Savings] were successful in preventing a great outflow.” The move was repeated in June and July. Tom Bane, “Prepared Statement,” in U.S. Senate, Committee on Banking and Currency, Regulation of Maximum Rates of Interest Paid on Savings, hearing, 89th Cong., 2nd sess., September 13, 1966, 60–62.

42.Heinemann, “Thrift Units”; Thomas W. Bush, “Most Area S&Ls Reluctant to Follow Home Savings to 5¼%,” LAT, June 25, 1966, A7.

43.“Ahmanson Considers Paying 5¼% on Home S&L Accounts,” LAT, June 16, 1966, B10.

44.Bush, “Ahmanson.”

45.Ibid.

46.John K. Horne to Robert DeKruif, June 13, 1966, in box 4, Chairman John E. Horne’s papers, RG 195, NARA-CP.

47.Thomas W. Bush, “Home Savings Pushes Rate Higher—to 5¼%,” LAT, June 24, 1966, B13.

48.“New York Savings Bank Lifts Rate to 5%; California S&L Joins Move above Ceiling,” WSJ, June 27, 1966, 2; Arelo Sederberg, “Split Develops in S&L Ranks on Savings Rate,” LAT, June 29, 1966, C10.

49.Bush, “Most Area S&Ls.”

50.John E. Honre to Howard Ahmanson, June 24, 1966, in Chairman John Horne’s papers, box 4, RG 195, NARA-CP.

51.Sederberg, “Split Develops.”

52.Taper’s First Charter Financial Corp. was under significant pressure throughout the crisis. The company’s longtime president and CEO Charles Wellman resigned abruptly after Taper chose to take a conservative strategy that aligned with federal regulators. Several other top executives followed Wellman out of the company. Taper reorganized the company and closed down its tract development, apartments, and industrial and commercial construction units to concentrate primarily on single-family and smaller residential units. Bush, “Most Area S&Ls.”

53.Arelo Sederberg, “Taper Urges S&Ls to Stop Boosting Rates,” LAT, July 13, 1966, B8.

54.Heinemann, “Thrift Units.”

55.Sederberg, “Split Develops.”

56.“New York Savings Bank Lifts Rate.”

57.Sederberg, “Split Develops.”

58.Howard Edgerton to L. E. Woodford, August 9, 1966, in folder: California Federal, Los Angeles, CA—1966, box 6, Chairman John Horne’s papers, RG 195, NARA-CP.

59.Sydney Barlow to L. E. Woodford, July 22, 1966, in box 15, Files of FHLBB Chairman John E. Home, RG 195, NARA-CP.

60.Howard Edgerton to L.E. Woodford, August 16, 1966, in box 6, Files of FHLBB Chairman John E. Home, RG195, NARA-CP.

61.Gareth W. Sadler to John E. Horne, July 8, 1966, and John E. Horne to Gareth W. Sadler, July 21, 1966, both in folder: California State, 1965–66, box 6, Files of FHLBB Chairman John E. Home, RG 195, NARA-CP.

62.Heinemann, “Thrift Units.”

63.“More Major S&Ls Go Up to 5¼% Passbook Savings,” LAT, July 1, 1966, B12.

64.Thomas W. Bush, “S&L 5¼% Rate Prevails; 8% Mortgage Seen,” LAT, July 2, 1966, A9.

65.When California regulators totaled the winners and losers during the July reinvestment period, they said Home had a net gain in cash of $47,793,355, an increase of 2.58 percent. Lytton was the only other state-chartered association that also experienced a major gain—increasing $13,445,413 or 3.58 percent. Abner D. Goldstine to Gareth W. Sadler, July 22, 1966, in folder 83, box 4, collection 3719, CSA.

66.Bush, “Higher Savings Rates.”

67.Display advertisement, LAT, July 19, 1966, 12.

68.H.P. Minsky, Stabilizing an Unstable Economy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 90, cited in Wray, “1966 Financial Crisis,” 424.

69.Gareth W. Sadler to Luther E. Gibson, August 27, 1966, in folder 68, Department of Savings and Loan, Administrative Records, Records of the Los Angeles Office, Subject Files: Legislation, March 1966–Dec. 1966, box 4, collection F3739: 63–86, CSA.

70.Sydney Kossen, “Bills Ask Cal Bank, S&L Shakeup,” San Francisco Examiner, April 8, 1965, 73.

71.Archie K. Davis to A. Willis Robertson, September 13, 1966, in U.S. Senate, Committee on Banking and Currency, Regulation of Maximum Rates, 50–52.

72.Larry Blackmon to A. Willis Robertson, n.d., in U.S. Senate, Committee on Banking and Currency, Regulation of Maximum Rates, 53.

73.Bane, “Prepared Statement,” 60–62.

74.The act allowed for the payment of higher rates on CDs over one hundred thousand dollars and lower rates on deposits below that amount. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Message from the President of the United States Transmitting Proposals for Measures for Curbing Inflation and Preserving Our National Economy,” September 8, 1966, in U.S. Senate, Committee on Banking and Currency, Regulation of Maximum Rates, 46.

75.Richard Deihl, interview by author, February 7, 2011. See also Richard K. Green and Susan M. Wachter, “The American Mortgage in Historical and International Context,” Journal of Economic Perspective 19, no. 4 (2005): 97.

76.Lewis J. Spellman, “Deposit Ceilings and the Efficiency of Financial Intermediation,” Journal of Finance 35, no. 1 (March 1980), 129–36.

77.Thomas F. Cargill, “U.S. Financial Policy in the Post–Bretton Woods Period,” in Money and the Nation State: The Financial Revolution, Government and the World Monetary System, ed. Kevin Dowd and Richard H. Timberlake Jr. (Oakland, CA: Independent Institute, 1998), 197–98.

16. A NEW WAY OF LIFE

1.Franklin D. Murphy, interview by Margaret Bach, November 16, 1992, in TAFA. A number of scholars have looked at how “the arts became a key route by which the nouveaux riches were socialized into the upper class, and arts events became ‘ritual occasions for the reafErmation of elite solidarity.’” For a summary of this literature, see J. Allen Whitt, “Mozart in the Metropolis: The Arts Coalition and the Urban Growth Machine,” Urban Affairs Review 23, no. 15 (1987): 17–18.

2.“Minutes of First Meeting of Board of Trustees of The Ahmanson Foundation,” [December 22, 1952] in file: TAF Minutes, box: TAF History, TAFA.

3.The first contribution of shares of Guaranteed Stock of Home Savings and Loan Association was apparently made by Howard Ahmanson in December 1956. See Ahmanson Foundation Board of Directors Minutes in file: TAF Minutes, box: TAF History, TAFA.

4.Congressman Wright Patman criticized this growing practice of using tax-exempt foundations to hold the controlling assets in major corporations. In August 1961 he noted that the number of tax-exempt foundations in the United States had grown from 12,295 in 1952 to 45,124 in 1960 and that many of these foundations owned controlling interests in a number of major businesses. See A. James Casner, “Memorandum re Possible Investigation of the Rockefeller Foundation,” May 7, 1962, in folder 87, box 14, series 900, RG3.2, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Sleepy Hollow, NY. In 1948, the Virginia Law Review published an article on the use of charitable foundations to avoid taxes that also highlighted how business owners could maintain control of their companies. See B. C. E. Jr., “The Use of Charitable Foundations for the Avoidance of Taxes,” Virginia Law Review 34, no. 2 (February 1948): 182–201.

5.Ahmanson Foundation Board of Directors, file: TAF Minutes, box: TAF History, TAFA.

6.For example, Dr. Edward Boland, his personal physician and a friend, who was researching rheumatic diseases, received support from the foundation. Evelyn C. Barty to Dr. Edward W. Boland and Dr. Nathan E. Headley, February 18, 1958, file: TAF Minutes, Box: TAF History, TAFA.

7.[Notes and statistics compiled from minutes, no author or date,] in file: Grants-statistics, box: TAF History, TAFA.

8.Francie Ostrower, Why the Wealthy Give: The Culture of Elite Philanthropy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 28–49.

9.Howard Ahmanson to John A. McCone, n.d., in folder: Howard F. Ahmanson Sr., in box: TAF History, TAFA.

10.Howard Ahmanson to Dorothy “Buff” Chandler, February 7, 1958, in file: Southern California Symphony Association, Music Center Building Fund, TAFA.

11.Ernesto Chávez, Mi Raza Primero: Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966–1978 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 26–27. Urban redevelopment and downtown revitalization in many cities across the United States displaced low-income residents of color and focused on this monumental and cultural approach in the 1960s and 1970s. Notable projects included the 1960s construction of Lincoln Center in New York. Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 60–61. Mike Davis asserts that these elites were motivated by their business and personal interests. Culture had become an important component of the land development process. It also played an important part in attaining social status. My own view is that these factors account for only part of Ahmanson’s participation in this movement. Personal aesthetics and deep-seated beliefs about the nature of community, rooted in his upbringing in Omaha, also played a role. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990), 71. Ahmanson may have participated in the GLAPI conversations. Asa Call headed “an informal but influential Committee of Twenty-Five that met regularly for lunch at Perino’s on Wilshire to discuss the issues of the day.” Ahmanson knew Call and was a regular at Perino’s. Kevin Starr, Golden Dreams: California in the Age of Abundance, 1950–1963 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 154.

12.Pereira’s design of the new Union Oil high-rise downtown was celebrated by Life magazine in June 1960 as part of a transformation of a city that was finally “going up as well as out.” “Los Angeles in a New Image,” Life, June 20, 1968.

13.Henry Sutherland, “The Spirit That Built the Music Center,” special insert, LAT, December 6, 1964, 29.

14.Davis, City of Quartz, 72.

15.Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt, Thinking Big: The Story of the Los Angeles Times (New York, G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1977), 306–20. See also Avila, Popular Culture, 61.

16.William Fulton, The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 236. See also Davis, City of Quartz, 120–28.

17.Milton Goldin, “‘Why the Square?’ John D. Rockefeller 3rd and the Creation of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts,” Journal of Popular Culture, 21, no. 3 (Winter 1987): 19.

18.Ibid., 23, 27. See also Julia L. Foulkes, “Streets and Stages: Urban Renewal and the Arts after World War II,” Journal of Social History 44, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 413–34.

19.“USC to Honor Ahmanson,” LAT, April 9, 1967, I14.

20.In June 1961, he attended a reception honoring members of the committee and got a chance to see the architectural plans and a model for L.A.’s new cultural capital on Bunker Hill. Mrs. Norman Chandler to Mrs. Howard Ahmanson, June 13, 1961, in FA.

21.“Ahmanson Appointed to Culture Center Board,” LAT, April 11, 1963, A2.

22.Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., interview by author, December 15, 2010.

23.Los Angeles businessman and Democratic contributor Ed Pauley was also added to the board. Judith Martin, “15 Named to Cultural Center,” WP, August 28, 1964, C2.

24.“Where Oh Where Should We Revel in Art,” WP, May 24, 1964, E2; “Trustees Approve Kennedy Center Plans,” WP, May 18, 1965, A5. See also Elizabeth Stevens, “Battle over Kennedy Center Site Widens as Opponents Trade Shots,” WP, August 22, 1965.

25.“Howard Ahmanson,” Valuator, Fall 1966, 13, clipping in FA.

26.“A ‘Potentially Great’ Museum Opens,” This World, April 4, 1965, 39–40, clipping in LACMA Archives, Balch Research Library, LACMA.

27.“Art Museum,” California Citizen News, April 5, 1965, clipping in LACMA Archives, Balch Research Library, LACMA.

28.“Itinerary for Mr. and Mrs. Howard Ahmanson and Miss Evelyn Barty,” on reel 5676, in Millard Sheets Papers, AAA.

29.Even after the opening of the museum, Lytton continued to pose problems for Brown and the institution. In June 1965, for example, he asked the Board of Supervisors to stop funding the museum’s operations unless taxpayers gained direct representation on the museum’s board of trustees. Ray Zeman, “Lytton Opposes Art Fund Unless Public Has Voice,” LAT, June 17, 1965, A1.

30.Ibid.

31.The tensions at LACMA were experienced by other art museums and cultural institutions at this time. After the American Association of Museum Directors promulgated guidelines in 1963 to try and clarify these issues, the Los Angeles Times brought them to the public’s attention to provide some structure to the local debate. Henry J. Seldis, “Drawing a Course through Art Museum Intricacy,” LAT, June 20, 1965, B1.

32.Tom Goff, “Art Museum Upheaval Stirs Up Supervisors,” LAT, November 9, 1965, A1.

33.Robert Wernick, “Wars of the Instant Medicis,” Life, October 26, 1966, 112.

34.E. W. Carter to LAT, “Letter Page: Museum Controversy, Two Sides to Question Aired,” LAT, November 13, 1965, B4.

35.“The Art Wagon,” Nation, December 13, 1965.

36.Tom Goff, “Foundation Gives $1 Million to Music Center Fund,” LAT, December 29, 1965, A1.

37.Charles Champlin, “A Fund for Cultural Opportunity,” LAT, October 31, 1965, B1.

38.Howard Ahmanson to Kenneth Hahn, January 14, 1966, in folder: Music Center in box: TAF History, TAFA.

39.“The Music Center / Dedication Week” Program, April 1967, in file: Week of Dedication Taper-Ahmanson, April 9–15, 1967, box 14, collection 1421, Dorothy B. Chandler Papers, Special Collections Library, UCLA.

40.Peter Bart, “Los Angeles Prepares for Museum Opening,” NYT, March 29, 1965, 42.

41.Ibid.

42.Frank Riley, “Ahmanson: A 1967 Interview,” Los Angeles Magazine 12 (1967): 34.

43.“Prosperous Omaha Should Turn to Culture—Ahmanson,” [Omaha World-Herald], February 11, [1961], clipping provided by Mary Jane Bettefreund.

44.“Howard Ahmanson” [Valuator], 13.

45.Riley, “Ahmanson,” 34.

46.“Progress of Freeways on C of C Agenda,” LAT, November 17, 1966, OC2.

47.Leonard Greenwood, “Rise in Bankruptcies: Too Many People Going for Broke,” LAT, April 23, 1967, L1.

48.Seidenbaum wrote several pieces that articulated his idea that privacy was at the heart of Southern California culture. See “Man and His Materialistic Smog-castles,” LAT, March 8, 1966, C1, and “California—As Others See Us,” LAT, April 30, 1967, A21.

49.Riley, “Ahmanson,” 34, 60.

50.Ann Forsyth, Reforming Suburbia: the Planned Communities of Irvine, Columbia, and The Woodlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

51.James Gillies, “Some Preliminary Observations on the Publicly Held Company and Management in the Light Construction Industry,” in Essays in Urban Land Economics: In Honor of the Sixty-Fifth Birthday of Leo Grebler (Los Angeles: Real Estate Research Program, University of California, 1966), 287–300.

52.In February 1964, House and Home reported on fifty new towns under construction across the country. Thirty-one of the fifty were being developed by publicly held companies. Cited in Gillies, “Some Preliminary Observations,” 297.

53.Gillies, “Some Preliminary Observations,” 292–93.

54.Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth Century Metropolis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

55.Patrick Nuttgens, review of The Community Builders, by Edward P. Eichler and Marshall Kaplan, Town Planning Review 39, no. 4 (January 1969): 356–57.

56.Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Merchant of Illusion: James Rouse, America’s Salesman of the Businessman’s Utopia (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2004), 185.

57.The term community builder is used variously in academic literature. Marc Weiss used it to distinguish entrepreneurs like Mark Taper and Ben Weingert who planned, financed, built, and sold large-scale housing developments like Lakewood in Los Angeles. Others have used the term to refer to creators of planned development that incorporates community amenities like parks, recreational facilities, churches, and shopping. Marc A. Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

58.“Airport Development near Campus Cleared,” LAT, September 20, 1953, A16.

59.Edward P. Eichler and Marshall Kaplan, Community Builders (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 40.

60.Forsyth, Reforming Suburbia.

61.Fulton, Reluctant Metropolis, 9.

62.William L. Pereira and Associates, A Master Land Use Plan of Fox Hills for Home Savings and Loan Association (Los Angeles: William L. Pereira and Associ- ates, 1960). See also Victor Gruen Associates, “Fox Hills Project: Exploratory Land Use Analysis for Home Savings and Loan Association,” April 15, 1960.

63.Neighbors in the Ladera Heights community resisted this project, complaining that it would remove a recreational use from an area where recreational facilities were limited. Some citizens were unhappy that one of the area’s few public golf courses that was open to minorities would be paved over to accommodate the plan. “Area Group to Fight Fox Hills Rezoning,” LAT, January 14, 1962, CS1.

64.“Culver C of C Opposes Freeway, High-Rise Re-Zoning of Fox Hills,” LAT, August 18, 1963, WS8.

65.“Fox Hills Rezone Plan Called ‘Unsatisfactory,’” LAT, June 17, 1962, CS3. See also Charles Curtis, “Golfers Make Last-Ditch Appeal to Save Fox Hills Golf Courses,” LAT, April 14, 1963, C5.

66.Walt Secor, “Plateau for Subdivision Draws Fire,” LAT, May 3, 1962, H1.

67.“Rezoning Bid under Study,” LAT, November 21, 1962, B8.

68.“Hughes Fights High-Rise Units in Baldwin Hills,” LAT, January 12, 1964. E3.

69.Riley, “Ahmanson,” 34, 60.

70.Ahmanson promised that the golf course would be developed early in the project. “One of the worst things that ever happened to Southern California,” he said, “is that recreation facilities have not kept pace with home construction and growing populations.” “New Community Planned on Ranch,” LAT, June 12, 1963, E8.

71.Gordon Grant, “Call It Progress,” LAT, June 13, 1963, G1.

72.Francis M. Carney, “The Decentralized Politics of Los Angeles,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 353 (May 1964): 118.

73.Ibid.

74.Even the Los Angeles Times embraced a less political or polemical position in the community under the leadership and influence of Otis Chandler and his mother Dorothy. Considered one of the worst major dailies in the mid-1950s, the Times ranked among the top ten by 1964. Dennis McDougal, Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2001), 219–34.

75.Speaking at the Carnegie Institute, John Gardner suggested that the most powerful individuals in cities across America had virtually abdicated their leadership responsibility. As a result, the federal government was increasingly filling the power vacuum. Gardner feared this trend would undermine local leadership. He advocated a new pluralism that would recognize the role of leaders from various constituencies within the urban community. Frank Riley, “The Power Structure: Who Runs Los Angeles?” Los Angeles Magazine, [December] 1966, 31, FA.

76.Ibid.

77.Riley, “Ahmanson,” 34.

78.There’s no record that Ahmanson’s faith in elite experts created an intellectual conflict with his populist instincts. His perspective was certainly not uncommon for his generation.

79.Riley, “Ahmanson,” 34.

80.Riley, “Power Structure,” 29.

81.C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956).

82.“Architect Stone a Self-Styled ‘Migrant Worker,’” LAT, July 21, 1968, O1.

17. A PERSONAL EPIC

1.The list included John D. MacArthur, Edwin Land, John Mecom, Henry Crown, W. Clement Stone, Daniel K. Ludwig, Leo Corrigan, William Keck, R. E. Smith, Charles Allen Jr., James Abercrombie, and John Erik Jonsson. Stewart Alsop, “America’s New Big Rich,” Saturday Evening Post (July 17, 1965), 23–39.

2.Leon F. Scibilia, “The Wealthiest Man in California,” California Business, January 4, 1966, 2.

3.Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., interview by Marc Nurre, [1993], in FA.

4.Margaret Leslie Davis, The Culture Broker: Franklin D. Murphy and the Transformation of Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 114.

5.Howard Kushner, A Cursing Brain? The Histories of Tourette Syndrome (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

6.Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., interview by Marc Nurre [1993], in FA.

7.Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., interview by author, December 15, 2010.

8.“Black-Foxe: A Brief History,” 2005 www.bfmi.org/history.html.

9.Davis, Culture Broker, 114–15. Howard Ahmanson Jr. says that his appointment to the board set a legal precedent.

10.Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., interview by author, December 15, 2010.

11.Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., interview by author, by Marc Nurre, [1993], in FA.

12.Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., interview by author, December 15, 2010.

13.Richard Deihl, interview by author, September 25, 2009.

14.Caroline Leonetti Ahmanson, interview by Roberta Ahmanson and Marc Nurre, August 23, 1993, notes by Marc Nurre, in FA.

15.Ibid.

16.“Faces behind the Figures,” Newsweek, July 1, 1965, 26.

17.Caroline Leonetti Ahmanson, interview by Roberta Ahmanson and Marc Nurre, August 23, 1993, notes by Marc Nurre, in FA.

18.Richard Deihl, interview by author, December 19, 2009.

19.Davis, Culture Broker, 59.

20.Margo Leonetti O’Connell, interview by author, November 17, 2010.

21.Millard Sheets, interviews by Paul Karlstrom, October 1986–July 1988, in AAA.

22.“State of Mourning Proclaimed by Reagan,” LAT, June 7, 1968, 24.

23.Robert DeKruif, interview by author, May 1, 2009.

24.Davis, Culture Broker, 100.

25.Franklin D. Murphy, interview by Margaret Bach, November 16, 1992, in TAFA.

26.Richard Deihl, interview by author, September 25, 2009.

27.Christy Fox, “Ahmanson and Courtright to Blow Out Candles Again,” LJT, June 14, 1968, H3.

28.Caroline Leonetti Ahmanson, interview by Roberta Ahmanson and Marc Nurre, August 23, 1993, notes by Marc Nurre, in FA.

29.David Roe and Dial Torgerson, “2 Southland Fires Rage Uncontrolled,” LAT, June 23, 1968, 1.

30.“Ahmanson Services Set for Saturday,” LAT, June 21, 1968, A2; “More Than 500 at Rites for Financier Howard Ahmanson,” LAT, June 23, 1968, B.

31.Funeral expenses totaled $105,558 (nearly $662,000 in 2010 dollars), the bulk of which was paid to Forest Lawn. “Inheritance Tax Affidavit,” Court Proceeding No. P-541–088, copy in FA.

32.“More Than 500 at Rites for Financier Howard Ahmanson,” LAT, June 23, 1968, B3.

33.Ibid.

34.Richard Deihl, interview by author, December 19, 2009.

35.“More Than 500 at Rites.”

36.“Ahmanson Services Set for Saturday,” LAT, June 21, 1968, A2.

37.Valuation comes from “Report of Inheritance Tax Referee,” Superior Court of the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, Case Number 541 088.

38.Ahmanson Foundation v. United States, 674 F.2d 761 1981 US App.

39.“Directions for Partial Amendment,” Ahmanson Bank and Trust Company Trust No. 28, Howard F. Ahmanson, April 17, 1967, copy in FA.

40.According to Ahmanson’s will, until Howard junior reached the age of twenty-one, Dorothy Grannis Sullivan was given Howard senior’s rights as guardian of Howard junior’s person. “Last Will and Testament of Howard Fieldstad Ahmanson, June 3, 1968,” copy in FA. “Application for Admission to The C.F. Menninger Memorial Hospital as a Voluntary Patient,” July 14, 1968, copy in FA. See also Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., interview by author, December 15, 2010.

41.Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., interview by author, December 15, 2010. See also Davis, Culture Broker, 113–15.

42.H. F. Ahmanson & Co., 1993 Annual Report.

43.This provision was included in California’s Mortmain Statute. See “The Ahmanson Foundation—Detailed Statement of Need for Legislation,” April 28, 1982 in FA.

44.Ahmanson Foundation v. United States, 674 F.2d 761 1981 US App.

45.H.F. Ahmanson & Co. sold 3.6 million shares worth about $101 million ($28/share). The underwriters were Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Kidder, Peabody & Co. After its financial restructuring, H. F. Ahmanson had about 22.7 million shares outstanding, 30.6 percent of which were owned by the Ahmanson Foundation. Another 44.6 percent interest was held by various trusts principally benefiting family members. “H.F. Ahmanson & Co.’s Initial Public Offer of Stock Sells Quickly,” WSJ, October 18, 1972, 30. Of the 3.6 million shares offered, 800,000 were new issues to raise working capital, 857,421 were owned by the Ahmanson Foundation, and 750,000 were shares in which the foundation and Dorothy Grannis Sullivan had joint interests. “The Ahmanson Foundation—Detailed Statement of Need for Legislation,” April 28, 1982, in FA.

46.Franklin Murphy, interview by Margaret Bach, November 16, 1992, 2 in File: Trustees-Transcripts, box: TAF History, TAFA.

47.“The Ahmanson Foundation: Library Support,” [1974–1990] in file: Grants-statistics in box: TAF History, TAFA.

48.“The Ahmanson Foundation: Research,” [1974–90] and “The Ahmanson Foundation: Support to Hospital,” [1974–90] in file: Grants-statistics in box: TAF History, TAFA.

49.Franklin Murphy, interview by Margaret Bach, November 16, 1992, 2 in file: Trustees-Transcripts, box: TAF History, TAFA.

50.Daniel M. Weintraub, “Charles Fletcher, 82, Dies: Founder of Home Federal,” LAT, October 1, 1985, SD_A1.

51.John O’Dell, “Baldwin Co. Defaults on Property Loan,” LAT, October 1, 1993, 7.

CONCLUSION

1.Walter Russell Mead, “The Death of the American Dream II,” The American Interest, June 3, 2011, http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/06/03/the-death-of-the-american-dream-ii/.

2.Tom Furlong, “Into the Home Stretch: Home Savings Faces Tough Problems as Its CEO Nears Retirement,” LAT, December 20, 1992, 1.