began while they were students at the region's still emerging universities.
FOOTBALL AND COMMERCE
Howard Ahmanson's enrollment at the University of Southern California (USC) resulted from a casual miscommunication. Newly arrived in the City of Angels in October 1925, he hailed a cab and instructed the driver to take him to the University of California's Southern Branch (later renamed UCLA). When the driver dropped him at USC, Ahmanson, none the wiser, found the registrar's office and enrolled. The mistake would eventually be worth millions to the university.14
USC catered to the aspirations of L.A.’s white Anglo-Saxon elite in the mid-1920s. Its ambitious president, Rufus Bernhard von KleinSmid, recognized that the city needed a professional elite to run its businesses, courts, and government. He expanded the two-year-old College of Commerce and Business Administration, opened a new law school building in 1925, launched a college of engineering, and in 1929 created the nation's second school of public administration. These changes kindled rapid growth in enrollments. The school became a hotbed for the emerging view of government championed by Progressives and technocrats. To promote alumni loyalty and giving, KleinSmid made football a central part of the USC experience.15 The team became a national powerhouse. Ahmanson became a lifelong fan.
Howard's enrollment coincided with the university's move to expand the business program. Adding new requirements and classes, the university offered a full four-year degree. A record-setting class of 485 students, including 45 women, fostered a special camaraderie and sense of purpose among the students and faculty.16 Among his classmates, Ahmanson found friends, including the indefatigable Howard Edgerton, who wrote for the school newspaper and was a class officer, and Joe Crail, who would later create the largest savings and loan in Los Angeles—until Howard Ahmanson entered the business.
In the faculty, Ahmanson also discovered a brilliant mentor and trusted advisor. Thurston Ross was a Signal Corps veteran who had served as a pilot in World War I. An engineer by instinct, he helped develop the timing technology that allowed fighter pilots to fire machine-gun bullets through the gaps between the spinning blades of their propellers. After the war, Ross moved to Los Angeles and earned a master's and a doctorate at USC in economics. Asked to join the faculty, he created the university's first course in real estate appraisal.17 An efficiency expert, Ross was an advocate for the professionalization of management. In short, he was the kind of social engineer that Herbert Hoover and other Progressives liked.18
Ross and Ahmanson developed a mutual admiration. According to Ross, Ahmanson dazzled the faculty “with his terrific physical stamina and his brains.” “He worked like a Trojan, taking twice as many courses as the rules allowed” and graduating ahead of schedule, in 1927.19
When he first arrived at USC, the university had no housing available, so Howard joined a fraternity at UCLA.20 There he met Gould Eddy, a tall, thin fraternity brother who shared exactly the same birthday and year. They became good friends and soon business colleagues. He also met Dorothy “Dottie” Johnston Grannis, a “yell girl” or cheerleader and English literature major.
A HOLLYWOOD ROMANCE
Dottie personified the Jazz Age in Los Angeles. With bright, penetrating brown eyes, finger-wave curled blonde hair, and a diminutive no-pound figure, she vibrated with energy. The daughter of Laura “Johnnie” Johnston and Frank Grannis, a real estate developer and opera devotee, Dottie was president of her class at the Hollywood School. After graduating in 1924, she was admitted to the University of California, Southern Branch.21 Over the next six years, she attended the university off and on. Meanwhile, she worked as a social secretary to the young but enormously ambitious Paramount executive David O. Selznick.22
It's not clear how or when Howard and Dottie met, but by the time he graduated in 1927, they were already in love. The week after graduation, playing tourist in San Diego, he dispatched what he described as his “first written epistle.” It was a chatty note, full of the confidences of young lovers. He talked about visiting scenic points and Southern California missions but complained about being too far from her. Already committed to a postgraduation trip with his mother to Omaha, he dreaded the excursion because it would take him farther away from Dottie.23
Howard's mother was delighted with his new girlfriend. As he reported from Omaha that summer, “The family would keep you in my mind if I didn't myself. . . . You have their unqualified endorsement from your picture,” which was placed on the mantel of the family home on California Street.24
Howard's letters to Dottie that summer and during the course of his travels for family and business over the next several years evidence the family dynamic that influenced his entrepreneurial career as well as his continuing affection for his hometown. He noted that Florence was wrapped up in Hayden and Aimee's two children: William, who was nearly two, and Robert, who was just five months old. According to Howard, they were “probably the two ‘swellest’ boys in the United States, if not the world.”25 Back among family and old friends, he revealed his continuing attachment to the Midwest and Omaha. It was good “to know the butcher and baker and candlestick maker and all that,” he wrote to Dottie. “What a change from Los Angeles. It does seem after all like home.” In Omaha, he socialized with girls from his past and visited his fraternity brothers in Lincoln. In his letters to Dottie, he described these outings as obligations to old friends. Over and over he wrote that she was the only girl for him.
Dottie could understand Howard's Omaha nightlife, even if it made her nervous about his loyalty. She was high-strung, needed the attention of men, and craved the banter and drink of society to avoid what Howard would call “the gremlins” in her head. While he was away, she kept up an active social life, going to parties and nightclubs with friends from college and planning charity events with her sorority sisters. Yet despite the social distractions, Howard and Dottie increasingly depended on each other.
Howard also kept her informed of his efforts to redeem his father's dream. “Whenever he came to call,” she said, “the first thing he'd tell me was that he'd picked up a couple more shares of National American.”26
AN IDEA AS SIMPLE AS A SAFETY PIN
The memory of how his family had been treated following his father's death energized Ahmanson's entrepreneurial initiatives, yet it did not turn him against the company his father had founded and lost. Howard had begun selling fire insurance for National American while he was still at USC. Despite his youth, he knew the business and the institutional players. He knew that big insurance companies on the East Coast and in Britain were sitting on great piles of money. He believed he could persuade these companies to make him their agent.
Some in the industry warned that he was swimming against the tide. Seeking greater operational control over their far-flung businesses, many large fire insurance companies were replacing independent general agents with salaried managers. In January 1926, Pacific Underwriter and Banker predicted that general agents would soon disappear.27
The youthful Ahmanson ignored these warnings. He launched H. F. Ahmanson & Company as a managing general insurance agency in 1927, while he was still enrolled at USC. For working capital, he cashed a check for $588.21 that he had received from selling several insurance policies.28 Renting an office downtown at 315 West Ninth Street, in the Pacific National Bank building, he hired a secretary and recruited his fraternity brother Gould Eddy to join him.29 After receiving permission from the State of California, he issued one thousand shares of stock in the company. With his father in mind, he kept all of the shares to himself.
In Omaha after graduation, Howard tried to convince National American's two senior executives, James Foster and Roy Wilcox, to dump their existing
