so he could monitor his father's interest in the business.86
In the fall of 1924, Will seemed to be getting better. Aimee and Hayden married in a simple ceremony at the house officiated by the minister from Dundee Presbyterian Church. Then Will and Florence left to spend the winter in California.87 In Los Angeles they visited many former Nebraskans who had moved to the Golden State. Under the California sun, and perhaps with more seafood in his diet, Will's health improved.
While his parents were gone, Howard spent his weekends and vacations with Hayden and Aimee.88 They talked about the situation at National American. In 1924, Will and a couple of partners had launched another business, making loans on automobiles.89 This new company, like National American, was growing as the economy in Omaha and around the country enjoyed good times. But with Will away, the company needed leadership. James Foster was well qualified for the job, but Will may have hoped that one of his sons would succeed him, and the brothers apparently expected this as well.
After Will and Florence returned to Omaha, a rare heat wave struck in the middle of May. Will lay in bed struggling to breathe, while Florence tried to keep him cool. When it was clear that there was no other option, he was admitted to the hospital to have his thyroid removed. The surgery was not successful. On the evening of May 22, Howard's father died.
LEGACY TAKEN AWAY
Will's death unraveled the family's control of the businesses that he had helped to build. “Everything he was into, somebody took a swipe at,” Howard told a reporter many years later.90 On the morning of the funeral, the directors of National American Fire Insurance met without the family and chose Foster to succeed Will as president.91 Meanwhile, the banks cut off credit to the auto loan company and forced the Ahmansons to sell their interest in the business to the surviving partners.92
The family was hardly destitute. The Omaha World Herald reported that Ahmanson's estate was worth $75,000 (nearly $961,660 in 2011 dollars). Florence was left with a substantial sum of money and fifteen hundred shares in National American Fire Insurance.93 Each of her sons received one hundred shares.94 Howard also had the investments in his own brokerage account, which were worth nearly $20,000 in 1925 (nearly $258,000 in 2011 dollars)—a fortune for a teenager.
Howard returned to the University of Nebraska to begin his junior year, but shortly after the term started Florence became ill. Howard raced back to Omaha. With memories of Southern California still fresh in her mind and the doctor's recommendation that she move to a gentler climate, Florence and Howard decided to move to California. Howard loaded his roadster with his belongings and left that night for Los Angeles to find a place for them to live and make arrangements for Florence to join him.95
Deeply affected by his father's death, Howard confessed that it “made me do funny things for a long time.”96 He swore that one day he would regain control of National American. “I am a worshipper of my father,” he told a reporter. “He used to tell me the world's your oyster. Nothing's impossible to you.”97 Witnessing his father's betrayal led him to “the crazy idea that anything I got into, I was going to control. . . . Having seen my father's dreams all shot to pieces because he was so trusting, I decided that the worst thing in the world was partners, and that being liquid was the best.”98
TWO
Among the Lotus Eaters
ARRIVING IN LOS ANGELES in the fall of 1925, Howard Ahmanson discovered a city like Omaha. It was full of progressive, middle-class midwesterners, who had come after selling their farms and businesses. In many ways they had recreated a community they knew and understood, with “state societies” like the Iowa and the Nebraska clubs. They called themselves “Hawkeyes” or “Cornhuskers.” They socialized with others from their home states and attended enormous annual picnics celebrating the history and culture of the Midwest.
Everyone seemed to be a recent transplant. Nine out of ten residents had been in Los Angeles less than fifteen years.1 Without a rigid social structure—at least for white native-born Americans—the city offered opportunity to the entrepreneur and a boosterish political culture that blended public purpose with private gain and a social setting suited to Howard's ambition.2
Writer Carey McWilliams, who arrived in Los Angeles from Colorado with his mother and brother three years before Ahmanson, became convinced that these midwesterners never really adjusted to life in Southern California. Just as European immigrants in Eastern cities expressed nostalgia for the Old World and clung to tight-knit communities of immigrants in the New, midwesterners in Los Angeles lived within their transplanted communities at the edge of the Pacific.3
As he oriented himself, Howard discovered a community bursting with its own sense of destiny. In quarter-page newspaper advertisements, the Department of Water and Power, which was “owned by the citizens of Los Angeles,” extolled the vision of an earlier generation in building the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens River. The ads touted the promise of Boulder Dam on the Colorado River, which would store more water than all the other dams in the world combined and would ensure water and power for the city “for all times.”4 The business section was devoted to news of the booming oil industry. Meanwhile, the flood of newcomers fueled an ever-expanding real estate market. As the Los Angeles Times pointed out, the city was on track to triple its population in a single decade to become the largest city in the West and the fifth-largest city in the country. “More people means that many square miles of new residence districts will spring up—that existing districts must be built more compactly—that many business sections now unknown will come into being—that many a sparsely settled country road will become a city thoroughfare.”5
Like Omaha, Los Angeles advertised its commercial success and touted its embrace of the newest technologies and ways of living. The city had more automobiles per capita than any metropolis in the country; Omaha ranked second.6 Omaha had more telephones per capita—284 for every 1,000 residents—than any other city, but Pasadena ranked second.7 In the arena of home ownership, Omaha led Los Angeles by a substantial margin—48.4 percent compared to 34.7 percent—despite L.A.’s famous suburban expansion.8 The two cities also shared a strong commercial link. Oranges and lemons grown in Southern California traveled by rail to Omaha, the headquarters of the Pacific Fruit Express, and were reshipped east to be sold on the streets of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.9
Tourists, retirees, and relatively affluent citrus growers had fueled various boom and bust cycles of real estate speculation and economic growth in Los Angeles. Under the influence of a civic and commercial elite, the city had expanded its public infrastructure for water, power, and transportation ahead of demand, using these investments to attract industry. A vast system of streetcar lines had promoted suburban development of communities that seemed as familiar to Howard as Dundee.10
At the time of Howard's arrival, industrial growth in Los Angeles had reached the takeoff point. Over the next two years, the city's manufacturing sector expanded more quickly than that of any city in the nation except Flint, Michigan. By 1927, the dollar value of manufacturing output trailed only New York, Flint, and Milwaukee.11 Working together, business leaders and local officials successfully promoted the region's development for public benefit and private gain.12
The business networks that fueled L.A.’s growth were often rooted in mid-western communities like Omaha. White-collar, native-born, Anglo-Saxon “men on the make” crowded the sidewalks of Spring Street downtown. According to historian Clark Davis, they were “largely a self-selected class of people willing to relocate far away in order to reap the region's many rewards.”13 They changed jobs frequently in search of opportunity, creating a system of loose friendships and business relationships that sparked innovation
