William Henry Crocker I (January 13, 1861 – September 25, 1937) was an American banker, the president of Crocker National Bank and a prominent member of the Republican Party.

Early life

Crocker was born on January 19, 1861, in Sacramento, California.^[1] His father, Charles Crocker (1822-1888), one of the "Big Four" railroad magnates, was the builder of the Central Pacific Railroad.^[2]

His uncle, Edwin B. Crocker, a wealthy California lawyer and later California Supreme Court justice, and his wife, Margaret Crocker (née Norton) founded the oldest still operating museum of the Western United States in Sacramento, the Crocker Art Museum.

His nephew, Harry Crocker, was a movie star in the 1920s and, at one time, the personal assistant of Charlie Chaplin.

His cousin, Aimee Crocker, was a Bohemian mystic who garnered publicity for her extravagant parties in New York, San Francisco and Paris, for her five husbands and many lovers, for her tattoos, and for living 10 years in the Far East, not as a tourist, but as if a native.^[3]

His cousin, Henry J. Crocker, was a prominent San Franciscan businessman and one of the Committee of Fifty, who got into a well documented public feud with William, eventually leading to a court ruling against him in his claim of having been defrauded by his own cousin.^[4]

William attended Phillips Academy, Andover and Yale University, where he was a brother of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Phi chapter).

Career

Crocker served as president of Crocker National Bank. When much of the city of San Francisco was destroyed by the fire from the 1906 earthquake, Crocker and his bank were major forces in financing reconstruction.

Crocker also served as a director of the Sperry Flour Co., the company of his wife's family owning a chain of flour mills across the US, a truly global conglomerate, with branches as far away as Hong-Kong and Norway.^{[5],[6],[7],[8]}

Philanthropy

After the 1906 earthquake and fire had left both the adjacent mansions of W.H. Crocker and his father in ruins, in 1907 he donated the Crocker family's 2.6-acre (11,000 m²) Nob Hill block for Grace Cathedral.^[9],[10]

He was a member of the University of California Board of Regents for nearly thirty years and funded the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory's million-volt x-ray tube at the UC hospital and the "medical" Crocker cyclotron used for neutron therapy at Berkeley.^[11] In 1936, Crocker contributed $75,000 toward the building of a laboratory for Ernest O. Lawrence at the University of California, Berkeley, which was subsequently named "Crocker Radiation Laboratory" in his honor.^[12] This laboratory became home to the Berkeley 60" cyclotron. In the 1960s, parts of this cyclotron were moved to the University of California, Davis, where they served as the basis for the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory,^[13] which inherited its name from the original.^[14][15]

Crocker also chaired the Panama-Pacific Exposition Committee and SE Community Chest, and was a key member of the committee that built the San Francisco Opera House and Veterans Building. Crocker was the founder of Crocker Middle School located in Hillsborough, California. The Sacramento, California, home of Crocker's uncle, Edwin B. Crocker, was converted into the Crocker Art Museum, which was the first art museum to open in the West.^{[citation needed]}

Art Collection

During his lifetime William H. Crocker and his wife Ethel amassed a considerable collection of works of art.^[16],[17]

One of the impressionist works they had acquired in 1894 was a painting by Claude Monet from his famous Haystacks series, "Meule, soir d'hiver", from 1899-1890 (W1217a) which was lost to eternity during the Great Fire following the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, as was most of the rest of their collection.^[18]

Surviving items of Ethel's Egyptian and Byzantine textile collection were on loan to the San Francisco Museum of Art until 1953, when the collection was shipped to Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.^[19],[20]

Philately

As his cousin, Henry J. Crocker, William H. Crocker was a noted philatelist and the owner of the unique block of four of the 1869 24c United States stamps with inverted centre formerly the property of William Thorne.^[21][22]

The stamp collection survived because it was on tour abroad at the time.

Personal life

Crocker was married to Ethel Sperry (1861–1934),^[23] the daughter of Simon Willard Sperry and Caroline Elizabeth (née Barker) Sperry, from Stockton (CA), and sister to Elizabeth Helen Sperry (wife of Prince André Poniatowski).^[24] Ethel and other family members owned the Sperry Flour Company, which was heavily invested in the WWI humanitarian effort by sending its flour across the ocean to aid a million famine-stricken citizens of Belgium, which, although officially neutral, had been invaded in 1914 and brutally occupied by German troops. When the US later became itself involved in the Great War, the company supplied flour for the American troops in Europe and subsequent post-war relief efforts.^[25] A special brand, American Indian, was created for the distinctive decorated flour sacks.^[26]

Encouraged by Mrs Lou Henry Hoover, wife of the later president, Ethel had become treasurer of the Woman’s Belgian Relief Fund in San Francisco and State Chairman for The Woman’s Section of the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB), while William chaired the men's committee of the Belgian Relief Fund in San Francisco, who were to send the first 'State Ship', the SS Camino, with food aid, on 5 December 1914, over to the port of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, which remained neutral during WWI. Other Sperry family members were also heavily involved in the relief effort and Ethel's nephew, William Hatfield Sperry, a journalist, volunteered to go to Belgium and acted from 1914 until 1917 as a CRB-delegate covering the war. W.H. Sperry's sister and her husband, Arno Dosch Fleurot,^[27] a foreign war correspondent, were also on the front in Europe. ^[5]

On another level, Ethel was the leading patron of French Impressionist art in California at that time. In the 1890s, Crocker's wife, and California Impressionist Lucy Bacon, who studied in France under Pissarro, lent William Kingston Vickery, owner of the San Francisco art gallery Vickery, Atkins & Torrey, a number of French Impressionist paintings. Vickery then supervised a series of these loan exhibitions in San Francisco and introduced Impressionism to California in the form of paintings by Monet, Eugène Boudin, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Edgar Degas. Ethel also sponsored the studies of the Zoellner Quartet with César Thomson in Belgium. After six years in Europe, the quartet returned to the United States, and became a tireless force promoting classical music outside established centres and in Southern California.^[28]

After the 1906 earthquake destroyed their San Francisco home, William relocated the family to a new home in Hillsborough (CA) in 1910.^[30],[31] The grand estate was aptly named "New Place", now part of the Burlingame Country Club clubhouse.^[32],[23] The buildings were designed by Lewis P. Hobart, the lavish gardens by Bruce Potter. Some of the fragile original lantern slides on glass of the property by Frances Benjamin Johnston, an artist of the era, have survived to this day.^[29]

Children

Together, William and Ethel were the parents of four children:^[33]

• Ethel Mary Crocker (1891–1964), who married French (former) Count André de Limur in 1918, who gave William and Ethel their first grand-daughter.^[34][35]
• William Willard Crocker (1893–1964), who married Ruth Hobart, daughter of playboy Walter Hobart and granddaughter of the Comstock silver millionaire Walter S. Hobart, in 1923. They divorced in 1948 and he married Gertrude (née Hopkins) Parrott, former wife of William G. Parrott. After her death in 1958, he married Elizabeth (née Fullerton) Coleman, former wife of George L. Coleman, in 1960. After his death, she married Alexander Montagu, 10th Duke of Manchester.
• Helen Crocker (1897–1966), who married Henry Potter Russell, a son of Charles Howland Russell who was previously married to Ethel Borden Harriman.
• Charles Crocker (1904–1961), who married Virginia Bennett in 1926. They divorced and he married Marguerite Brokaw, a daughter of Howard Crosby Brokaw, in 1938. After his death, she married Charles Norton Adams.

William Crocker died on September 25, 1937, at his home in Hillsborough, California.^[1]

Descendants

His grandson, also named William, is a retired anthropologist who worked at the Smithsonian Institution specializing in Canela Indians of Brazil.^[36],[37]

Legacy

The public middle school in Hillsborough, California, is named after him, Crocker Middle School.

Family tree