Word: ahmanson
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...Ahmanson's sense of financial timing was honed early. The Omaha-born son of the owner of a small insurance company, he began dabbling in the stock market in his teens, ran up his $20,000 grubstake by age 18. He moved west after his father's death, started selling fire insurance, and soon hit upon the idea of concentrating on the low-risk residential side of that business, especially on foreclosed properties (which in those days required a new policy). Thus the Depression made him rich. "I felt like an undertaker," Ahmanson once remarked. 'The worse...
...Ahmanson's lucrative combination of S. & L.s and insurance prompted Justice Department antitrusters to investigate his operations, but the inquiry was soon dropped. "They call Uncle Howard an octopus," said his nephew and business associate, Bill Ahmanson, a few years ago. "But the worst that can be said about Unc is that he lives to build capital and to run his own show...
...Edifice Complex." Lately, Ahmanson has been building monuments as well. He contributed $2,000,000 to help construct the Los Angeles Music Center for the Performing Arts, an equal sum for the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art; he also endowed the Ahmanson Center for Biological Research at the University of Southern California. Last month he announced plans for a 40-story office block on Wilshire Boulevard designed by Manhattan Architect Edward Durell Stone. With two marble-clad, ten-story outriders, the Ahmanson Center will cost $75 'million. Though some of his competitors like to wisecrack about...
...Ahmanson had a brief fling at politics when he managed Republican Goodwin Knight's successful campaign for Governor of California...
Today, except for serving on civic boards, he relishes his ranch (a 200-acre spread with a private golf course near Palm Springs), his yacht (the 80-ft. Sirius II), his art collection (Rembrandt, El Greco, Vermeer, Rubens) and, above all, his privacy. Ahmanson runs his establishment from his midtown Los Angeles mansion. "I haven't met an employee in 20 years," he muses. "In insurance, maybe I had too much of people...