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William Henry Crocker (1861–1937), was president of Crocker National Bank.
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Contents
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Biography
He was born in 1861 in Sacramento, California.
He attended Phillips Academy, Andover and Yale University, where he was a brother of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Phi chapter). After the 1906 earthquake and fire had left the Crocker mansions in ruins, in 1907 he donated the Crocker family's 2.6-acre (11,000 m2) Nob Hill block for Grace Cathedral.[1]
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 the Berkeley. [2]
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.
When much of the city of San Francisco was destroyed by the fire from the 1906 earthquake, William Crocker and his bank were major forces in financing reconstruction. His father, Charles Crocker (1822-1888), had been a builder of the Central Pacific Railroad.[citation needed]
In the 1890s, his wife, in part, 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, Eugene Boudin, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Edgar Degas. These pictures were lent by California Impressionist Lucy Bacon (who studied in France under Pissarro and met Cézanne), as well as Mrs. William H. Crocker, who was the leading California patron of French Impressionist art at the time.
He died in 1937 in Burlingame, California.
Legacy
His uncle's home in Sacramento, California, was converted into the Crocker Art Museum and was the first art museum to open in the West.[citation needed]
His nephew, Harry Crocker, was a movie star in the 1920s and, at one time, the personal assistant of Charlie Chaplin.
The public middle school in Hillsborough, California is named after him, Crocker Middle School.[3]
References
- ^ http://www.gracecathedral.org/church/index.php?fn=cry_20070207.shtml
- ^ J. L. Heilbron and Robert W. Seidel, Lawrence and His Laboratory (Berkeley: University of California, 1989)
- ^ http://crockerschool.hcsd.k12.ca.us/Index.aspx?page=5
External links
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