Building Home. Eric John Abrahamson
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 and growth. For young men, many of these relationships 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.