Alma de Bretteville Spreckels

Alma de Bretteville Spreckels (March 24, 1881 – August 7, 1968) was a wealthy socialite and philanthropist in San Francisco, California. She was known both as "Big Alma" (she was 6 feet (1.8 m) tall) and "The Great Grandmother of San Francisco". Among her many accomplishments, she persuaded her first husband, sugar magnate Adolph B. Spreckels, to donate the California Palace of the Legion of Honor to the city of San Francisco.

She was born Alma Charlotte Corday le Normand de Bretteville in the Sunset District of San Francisco, the fifth of six children of Viggo and Mathilde de Bretteville, two Danish immigrants. The family was very poor during her early childhood. Viggo claimed to be descended from Franco-Danish nobility (he claimed one of Napoleon's generals as an ancestor) and used that as an excuse to avoid working while simultaneously deriding the "nouveau riche" of California. In contrast, Mathilde had enough ingenuity and business sense to open a combination Danish bakery–laundry service–massage parlor which became the family's source of income. At age 14, Spreckels quit school to work full-time for the family business. Meanwhile, she had developed a love of art and enrolled in the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art to study painting. While there, she earned money by being a nude model. Now flush with cash, she became popular around town, and found herself intimately involved with a miner named Charlie Anderson. After their relationship deteriorated, she gained a bit of notoriety for having successfully sued him for "personal defloweration".

Alma de Bretteville met her future husband thanks to modeling for the Dewey Monument by Robert Aitken, which can be found in Union Square. This statue was selected from a number of entries and only barely made the cut, thanks to the crucial vote of the chair of the Citizens' Committee, Adolph Spreckels. Although he was 24 years older than her, he was smitten and after a five-year courtship, they married on May 11, 1908. Because he was head of the Spreckels Sugar Company, she often referred to her husband as her "sugar daddy".

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