A. P. GIANNINI AND THE 1906 EARTHQUAKE

A century ago, one banker was the lender of first resort when disasters hit. With coronavirus crippling the economy, we could use far more financial entrepreneurs like him today.

His story shows that innovation often comes when unlikely people and unusual events collide. Born in 1870, Amadeo Peter Giannini quit school at age 15, becoming a wildly successful fruit-and-vegetable merchant. At the age of 31, three years before he went into banking, he had a net worth of about $300,000—more than $9 million in today's money.

"I might never have gone into the banking business," he later recalled, if he hadn't gotten into a shouting match with the head of a local bank about its reluctance to make small loans to individual borrowers. In 1904, Giannini founded a bank of his own in San Francisco, called Bank of Italy, to do just that.

Then, on April 18, 1906, an earthquake struck the Bay Area, killing more than 3,000 people and setting the city ablaze.

Realizing the fires were heading toward his bank, Giannini heaved $80,000 of gold and cash into two horse-drawn produce wagons. He buried the money under crates of oranges to hide it from looters rampaging through the streets. For weeks afterward, he recalled later, the bank's money smelled like oranges.

By the next day, the Bank of Italy had burned to the ground. But Giannini rode in from his home in San Mateo, where he had stashed the money. With San Francisco still smoldering, he set up a desk on the wharf and plunked a sack of gold on it, under a cardboard sign on a stick that read BANK OF ITALY: OPEN FOR BUSINESS.

San Francisco's Market Street after the 1906 earthquake

To read the complete article (subscription required), see:
An Unlikely Hero for 1906, 1929...and Today (https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-unlikely-hero-for-1906-1929-and-today-11590764100)

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