Emperor in Private

Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson recalls that he was five years old when his father first told him that he was a genius.

Ahmanson today would scarcely win prizes for modesty, but his career in vests that paternal judgment with more truth than braggadocio. Starting with a 1925 stake of $20,000 in cash and securities, he has assembled a financial colossus of savings and loan associations, fire and title insurance, banking and investment companies. By conservative estimate, Ahmanson, 61, is worth more than $300 million.

No Place Like Home. Among U.S. thrift institutions there is certainly no place quite like Ahmanson's Beverly Hills-based Home S. & L., the nation's largest. Some 775,000 people keep their savings there, and last month Home's assets reached $2.5 billion, making it almost twice the financial size of its nearest competitor. Home was a midget with assets of less than $1,000,000 in 1947 when Ahmanson bought it for $162,000; he was making a shrewd bet that the yet unstarted postwar housing boom would make fortunes for mortgage lenders.

Ahmanson built Home into a powerhouse by nimble footwork and by devising new tricks to woo business. Before the rest of the industry awoke to the advantages of big-scale operation, he snapped up 18 other associations to form, almost overnight, the first major S. & L. chain. By offering to split profits with cash-shy builders, he soon grabbed a commanding share of the Southern California home-loan market.

Most of the loans were Government backed FHA or VA mortgages. Admits Ahmanson cheerfully: "We were paid a terrific price for virtually no risk." On top of that, Home bought up vast chunks of land that it is still selling at a hefty markup to builder-borrowers. With deft timing, Home cut back on loans for tracts of new houses before the great Southern California glut of 1965 and switched to apartments. This year the association itself is building three sizable apartment houses.

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 things got, the better they were for me."

In the mid-'50s, 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 his "edifice complex," Ahmanson is widely admired among S. & L. men. "We may be jealous, but we can't be critical," says President Edward L. Johnson of rival Financial Federation S. & L.

Ahmanson had a brief fling at politics when he managed Republican Goodwin Knight's successful campaign for Governor of California in 1954.

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."

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