The names of the men who built the Pacific Mutual building in downtown Los Angeles were even more legendary than the landmark clock that adorned it for almost a century.
Heavy-duty empire builders and railroad tycoons Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins--who lent their names to, among other things, a great university, a major bank and a grand hotel on San Francisco's Nob Hill--did not really need another monument to their success. They just needed an insurance company that would pay swifter heed to the needs of life on the frontier.
The Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co. was founded in 1868 by three of the merchants who became known as the Big Four after building the Central Pacific railroad, which later became the Southern Pacific. Tired of Eastern insurance companies' slow payments on claims and their practice of charging Westerners an extra premium to cover the risks of frontier living, they opened the first life insurance company west of the Mississippi. It was headquartered in Sacramento and ultimately became the state's largest life insurer.
Stanford, a former governor, soon-to-be U.S. senator and later founder of Stanford University, became the insurance company's first president. A year later, he swung an unwieldy silver-headed sledgehammer toward a shiny golden spike (missing on the first swing) linking the Union Pacific with the Central Pacific near Promontory, Utah, thus opening the first transcontinental railroad. While Central Pacific moved ahead with its network of trains and steamships, holding the entire economy of the state in its monopolistic grip, growth at Pacific Mutual was relatively slow.
The insurance company's first policy was reserved for Stanford. When he died unexpectedly during the Panic of 1893, his financial affairs were in a tangled state and the university, which was supported totally by his fortune, was unable to pay professors' salaries. The future of the 2-year-old school was in doubt.
When Stanford's Pacific Mutual policy paid his widow $11,784, she used it to help the university surmount its financial difficulties until her husband's estate could be settled.
That same year, Pacific Mutual moved its headquarters to San Francisco and prospered. In 1906, it merged with the Conservative Life Insurance Co., which had been founded in Los Angeles six years earlier.
The decision was fortuitous. Several weeks after the deal closed, the company's headquarters was dynamited in an effort to halt the spreading fire caused by the historic San Francisco earthquake.
