Building Home. Eric John Abrahamson
from a wide-open frontier town into an agricultural shipping center and one of the Midwest's major cities.13 When he left high school at the age of fifteen, one friend advised him to become a preacher; another suggested he go into insurance. He chose insurance.14
A handsome and elegant man, Will had a strong, square face with a cleft chin. Keeping with the style of the times, he parted his hair loosely in the center. His soft eyes communicated patience and understanding. He wore a starched white collar, a silk necktie, and expensive suits. Undoubtedly, his good looks helped to charm Florence Mae Hayden, a slight, strong-willed woman. Born in Pennsylvania, she had grown up in the Sandhills of western Nebraska.15 Her Scotch-Irish family had been in the United States since the Revolutionary War. She married Will in 1897 and gave birth to Hayden a year later. A daughter died as an infant.16 Several years passed and then Howard was born on July 1, 1906.17 After Howard, Florence had no more children.
FATHER AS MENTOR
Will Ahmanson loved both of his sons, but he showered pride and attention on Howard, whom he called a genius. “Father and Bud were extremely close,” Hayden once said, betraying more wonder than jealousy. “They couldn't seem to get to see enough of each other.”18 While Howard was still in elementary school, Will took the boy aside every evening after dinner. “While he smoked a cigar he'd talk over with me the events of the day—business affairs and finances—as if I had the maturity and judgment of a man of 50.”19 When Will played cards or shot pool with his friends downtown, Howard tagged along and listened to the talk of business and politics.20 Meanwhile, Florence set high expectations.21 She was smart and competitive, with a strong sense of right and wrong.
Howard received an enormous amount of attention from both his parents. In the second grade, his report card carried A's in every subject except deportment. Rather than let this single instance of imperfection slide, his parents took him to the University of Omaha to be part of a special study. The staff told the Ahmansons that Howard didn't have enough to do. Will and Florence decided Howard needed lessons in German and piano.22
On another occasion, when Howard came home from elementary school his father asked if his grades were the best in the class. Howard confessed they were not. A girl in his class was number one; he was number two. His father responded, “Hmm, how in the world did that happen?” This was typical of the way Will approached the issue of setting standards, said Howard. “He never criticized me. He led me by sheer devotion.”23
Will also believed in giving his son extraordinary responsibilities. When Howard was twelve or thirteen years old, Will opened a brokerage account for Howard, bankrolled it, and told his stockbroker to let the young man decide his own trades. Howard bought Bethlehem Steel while his father bought U.S. Steel. “When my stock went up twice as much as his, he was the happiest man in Nebraska,” Howard remembered.24 Father and son also collaborated on research and sometimes invested in the same company.25
An automobile enthusiast in the earliest days of the Model T, Will let his fourteen-year-old son drive. Howard fixed the license plate to a hinge and ran a wire to the driver's seat so that if he saw a policeman he could raise the plate so it was horizontal to the ground and harder to read.26 “I shouldn't even have been allowed to drive for another two years,” Howard recalled years later, “but nothing was too good for me.”27
Howard skipped a grade and entered high school in 1919 at the age of thirteen. He entertained his friends by playing the banjo, the piano, and the organ, but he showed no interest in the school's music groups.28 A popular junior, he became increasingly distracted by girls. When his grades fell, his teachers sent home warnings. “We called them flunk notices,” Howard remembered. One day, his mother confronted him with the notices and tucked them under Will's plate at supper with the rest of the mail. Howard waited for his father to say something. When he was done eating, Howard excused himself, saying he had a date. Will followed him out the door.
Unable to stand the suspense, Howard asked, “Did you read your mail?”
“You mean those flunk notices?” his father asked.
“Yes.”
Will guided him to the car. As Howard slid into the driver's seat, Will closed the door and spoke through the open window. “You're going to make it, aren't you?”
“Oh sure,” Howard responded.
“Well—Good night,” his father answered.
According to Howard, “that was all that was ever said about it.” It seemed to be enough. Howard brought his grades up. “After all,” he said later, “what would you do with a father like that? You had to do what he expected you to do.”29
Under Florence's influence, Howard became a member of the Presbyterian Church.30 He was active in the YMCA, passing his Bible study course with high marks.31 But religion never became an important part of his life. Fifty years later, when he had a son of his own, he told a reporter that he was taking his son to a different church every weekend “to find one that fit,” as if religion were simply one more accessory to the good life.
Throughout his childhood, Howard's relationship with Hayden was somewhat distant. Eight years older, Hayden left home to attend the Kemper Military Academy just as Howard was starting school.32 By the time Howard was in his teenage years, Hayden was in college at the University of Nebraska. When Howard was in high school, Hayden was working for his father's company as an assistant underwriter. After Hayden began dating Aimee Elizabeth Tolbod, she joined the family for dinner every Sunday night, introducing another subtle distance between the two brothers.33
Later in life, Howard would idealize his childhood in Omaha. He remembered twenty maple trees for climbing in the yard of his parents’ house. He played with the neighbor kids. In the summer, the family vacationed at Lake Okoboji in Iowa. Yet Omaha, like the rest of America, was a complicated and sometimes troubled place in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
AN UNSETTLED CITY
The fourth-largest city in the trans-Mississippi West, Omaha lagged only San Francisco, Denver, and Kansas City. On the streetcars, Howard overheard the thick accents of Germans, Swedes, Hungarians, Danes, and Italians who had come to work for the railroad, the packinghouses, the distilleries, and a host of other industries that depended on the shipment and processing of agricultural products.34
In this era, the entrepreneurs of the frontier age gave way to business leaders who collaborated to promote the city and resist unionization. The city became a regional center for banking and insurance. Between 1916 and 1918, Omaha rose from sixteenth to fourteenth on the list of cities leading the nation in bank clearings.35 Nebraska led the nation in the number of banks per capita—with one for every 1,207 people, compared to the national average of one for every 4,032.36 In Nebraska, and Omaha particularly, managing and protecting capital was big business.
Despite its importance as a financial center, Omaha also had a dark side. As in many American cities, political control rested in the hands of a shadowy political boss. Gambling and saloons flourished even after national prohibition was adopted in 1919. By one estimate, Omaha had twenty-six hundred prostitutes in 1910. Providing sex and liquor to cowboys, railroad workers and other men, the city's houses of ill repute netted $17.5 million a year.37 In addition to crime, liquor, and prostitution, Omaha also experienced inter-ethnic and racial violence. A mob of a thousand men attacked the Greek section of town in 1909, looting, burning buildings, and attacking residents.38 Ten years later, as race riots flared in midwestern cities, an African-American packinghouse worker was arrested and accused of assaulting a nineteen-year-old white woman and her companion. A mob stormed the courthouse, nearly lynched the mayor, and then seized the defendant. He was hanged, mutilated, and dragged through the streets with a rope around his neck. His bullet-riddled body was burned as the crowd cheered and posed for photographers.
If he didn't witness the murder, thirteen-year-old Howard Ahmanson certainly heard about it. His neighbor and high school classmate, actor