Charles H. Strub

Dr. Charles Henry ('Doc') Strub (November 3, 1884 – March 28, 1958) was an American dentist and entrepreneur who built and owned Santa Anita Park racetrack in Arcadia, California and was president and partner of the San Francisco Seals baseball club of the Pacific Coast League.

Charles Strub was born in Hollister, California, as the only child of Isadore Strub and Rebecca Williamson Strub. At a young age, he moved to San Francisco, where he attended St Ignatius High School. He enrolled at Santa Clara University and played baseball under future business partner Charlie Graham. He was a teammate of future New York Yankees star Hal Chase. Having been put through agony as a child by the dentists of the day, he decided to study dentistry. Since Santa Clara didn't offer a dentistry program, he transferred to the University of California at Berkeley to obtain his degree and where he also played on the varsity baseball team. At Berkeley, he studied modern techniques with new pain-killing drugs and laughing gas so that pulling an abscessed tooth could be done painlessly—a great benefit to society, he thought. Upon graduation, Charlie invested in state-of-the-art equipment which was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake before he saw his first patient. In the weeks following the disaster, he saw a column in the newspaper that said his baseball coach from Santa Clara, Charlie Graham, was looking for him to play some ball. During 1906 and 1907 he played baseball with the San Francisco team in the California State League but made his living as a dentist. Entrepreneurial focused, he was known as the "advertising dentist" and eventually had a chain of six "painless extraction" dentist parlors. His chain of dentist offices provided him the opportunity to speculate in the burgeoning California real estate market, financing much of the rebuilding of the SF Business district after the earthquake, making Doc Strub a very wealthy man. One of the San Francisco buildings he built was 450 Sutter, which still houses medical professionals.

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