San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
BUILDING AN EMPIRE
New biography recounts the life and times of John D. Spreckels
He died in 1926, almost 30 years before she was born. But like many native San Diegans who came before and after her, Sandra Bonura grew up in the world John D. Spreckels built.
Bonura’s mother worked on Coronado Island, where — at one time or another during his late-19th- and early-20th-century heyday — Spreckels had owned North Island, the San Diego-coronado Ferry System, the Coronado Beach Company and the Hotel del Coronado. As a girl, Bonura often spent weekends with her grandmother at the Hotel Metropole boarding house, where she could see the marquee of the grand Spreckels Theatre from the lobby window. From her grandmother’s second-floor room, Bonura had a fine view of what used to be D Street, which Spreckels renamed Broadway and developed into a thoroughfare worthy of six of his own buildings.
But before he was the man who gave San Diego electric streetcars, its first skyscraper and the Spreckels Organ Pavilion, John D. Spreckels was the son of a hardworking German immigrant, a rebellious son who left the family’s booming sugar business to make his mark on a nowhere town that he loved at first sight. It was that John D. Spreckels — the man with the humble German roots and the immigrant work ethic — who convinced author Bonura that the story of the other John D. Spreckels — the powerful, ambitious man who put San Diego on multiple maps — was a tale she could tell.
With her new biography “Empire Builder: John D. Spreckels and the Making of San Diego,” Bonura hopes to do justice to both of them.
“He’s a businessman, and I’m more artistic, so I didn’t know how I was going to put myself in the head of a man like this,” said the 65-year-old Bonura, who ran across Spreckels while doing research for her second book, “Light in the Queen’s Garden: Ida May Pope, Pioneer for Hawaii’s Daughters.”
“Then I realized he was German. And since I was raised in a German household eating German food and singing German songs, I was able to relate to him. His father (Claus Spreckels) came here with just a coin in his pocket, and he became one of the richest men in the world. In order to do that, you have to be tenacious and obstinate and willing to tell the world, ‘Get out of my way.’ That’s the German way. John D. was like that, and I’m like that, too.”
What he sacrificed
Born in 1853 in Charleston, S.C., John Diedrich Spreckels was never going to be a man who thought small. His German-born father started his American life working in a New York grocery store. He moved his family to San Francisco, and after opening a few breweries, Claus got into the sugar-refining business. By 1880, the Spreckels California Sugar Refinery was producing 50 million pounds of sugar a year, and Claus Spreckels was on his way to being named one of the richest men in the world.
In “Empire Builder,” Bonura shows that one of costs of being Claus’ oldest son was a shortchanged childhood. At 10, John was pulled away from school and his beloved piano lessons to accompany Claus on a factfinding trip to New York. By the time he was 13, John was listed as the company’s vice president.
“Originally I thought, ‘I’m not going to like this guy at all.’ He seemed so brutal and antagonistic,” Bonura said from her home in Del Cerro. “But the more I learned about him, the more I saw what he sacrificed. He didn’t want to be in the sugar business, but he was the vice president of his father’s company at 13. Where was his childhood?”
John may have preferred a different career, but as his brothers Adolph B., Claus A. (nicknamed “Gus”) and Rudolph also found out, being part of the Spreckels sugar empire was not optional. And as the family embarked on a lucrative and controversial expansion into Hawaii, John honed the aggressive, uncompromising business style that would serve him well once he found something that he really wanted.
Just one month before his 34th birthday, John D. Spreckels found that something. And it was us.
Spreckels’ first glimpse of his future came in July of 1887, when he sailed his yacht into San Diego Bay to find a small town in the midst of a frenzied land
boom. With encouragement from brash young developer Elisha Spurr Babcock Jr., Spreckels built San Diego a new wharf and coal bunker, which would help spur San Diego’s growth while fortuitously benefiting Spreckels’ thriving shipping business.
Thanks to his ability to ride out the land bust of 1888, the sugar prince used the family’s power and his own considerable wealth and business prowess to make San Diego his own.
And in the process, he made San Diego.
“If you are looking at the period from the 1880s through the 1920s, Spreckels was the single most important person in driving growth in the city,” said Andy Strathman, a lecturer in Cal State San Marcos’ history department and the co-editor of the Journal of San Diego History, which is published by the San Diego History Center.
“One way to envision what Spreckels meant to San Diego generally is that he could get up in the morning in his home on Coronado, take the Spreckels ferry to San Diego, disembark at the Spreckels wharf and walk down Broadway, which was his little stretch of San Diego. He owned the San Diego Union and the Tribune. He was responsible for naming Broadway. That is how much he was responsible for that growth.”
Quiet titan
In keeping with the title of her book, Bonura chronicles the building of Spreckels’ San Diego empire, which came to include the San Diego Union and Tribune newspapers, the San Diego Electric Railway, the San Diego and Arizona Railway, and Belmont Park. He helped bring the 1915 Panama-california Exposition to Balboa Park. He created the zoo’s first elephant enclosure.
But a formidable subject like John D. Spreckels deserves an intrepid biographer, and if anyone was going to get to the heart of the man behind the buildings, it was going to be Bonura.
A San Diego native who dropped out of high school and moved to Hollywood at the age of 17, Bonura spent 10 years in the music industry before returning in 1982 so that she and her husband, Carl, could start their family in her hometown. Sandra and Carl had two kids, and Sandra went back to school. She never stopped going until she got her doctorate in education, curriculum and instruction from Northern Arizona University in 2003. She was a school counselor in the La Mesa Spring Valley School District through the 1990s, and she is currently an adjunct professor at Azusa Pacific University.
Bonura is also a history buff and a writer, two loves that she combined to write her first two books.
Her 2012 book “An American Girl in the Hawaiian Islands: Letters of Carrie Prudence Winter, 1890-1893” looked at life in Hawaii during the last years of the monarchy through the letters of a young teacher. Her 2017 book “Light in the Queen’s Garden” told the true story of Ida May Pope, an Oberlin College-educated teacher and activist who played a surprising role in Hawaiian history during the 1893 Hawaiian Revolution and beyond.
While Bonura was doing her deep-diving research into Pope’s life, she discovered that John D. Spreckels — the man from the theater marquee of her San Diego childhood — had been a close friend of Hawaii’s Queen Lili‘uokalani. In the process of satisfying her curiosity about this unlikely connection, Bonura amassed enough new research — diaries, oral histories, many personal photos and records from Spreckels’ surviving family members — to curate a 2018 exhibit for the Coronado Historical Association’s museum.
That exhibit kick-started what would become “Empire Builder,” a 440-page book that looks at both the empire and the man. In addition to Spreckels’ many achievements, we hear about the cutthroat deals, the lawsuits, the brawling family dramas, and the controversial power plays that only a man with his outsize influence could pull off.
We also hear about Spreckels’ love of family and music. We hear how he gave Coronado its first library and San Diego its first Japanese gardens. We see him as the philanthropist who avoided the spotlight and the titan who was deathly afraid of public speaking.
Ultimately, we see the many sides of the man who saw San Diego as a town with the potential to become so much more. The man who was determined to get us there.
“People would be amazed at the lengths he went to to build San Diego and to employ its inhabitants and to give people a reason to get up in the morning and do things. Everything he did made life easier for people. He even gave them Mission Beach, which made life fun.” said Spreckels’ great-granddaughter Virginia Wilson, who lives in Napa County and provided Bonura with many family records and mementos.
“He gave his life for San Diego, and I don’t want his legacy to be forgotten. That is what is so important to me about this book.”