H.F. Ahmanson & Co.

H.F. Ahmanson & Co. was a California holding company named after millionaire Howard F. Ahmanson, Sr. It was best known as the parent of Home Savings of America, once one of the largest savings and loan associations in the United States.

Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson, the company's founder, was born in Omaha, Nebraska on July 1, 1906.

Considered by his father to be a genius by the age of five, Ahmanson founded the H.F. Ahmanson company in 1927, before graduating from the University of Southern California. Ahmanson's company specialized in casualty insurance and quickly became the largest underwriter in California. During the Great Depression, the company prospered by dealing with foreclosures. Ahmanson once remarked that he felt like an undertaker: "the worse it got, the better it was for me."

In 1943, Ahmanson bought control of Omaha-based National American Insurance Company. His father had previously owned National American, but the Ahmanson family had lost control of it after his father's death in 1925.

After World War II, the American housing market expanded tremendously, especially in California. In 1947, Ahmanson purchased the Home Building and Loan Association, a savings and loan association with assets of less than $1 million, for $162,000. Home Savings now became the cornerstone of H.F. Ahmanson & Company. In the decade that followed, Ahmanson acquired 18 additional institutions, merged them under the name Home Savings and Loan, and turned the group into a financial giant.

Prior to the 1950s, mortgage lenders often earned extra income by tying fire insurance policies to mortgages. New laws passed by states in the late 1940s began to limit this tying relationship. The U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust division launched an investigation of H.F. Ahmanson in the mid-1950s, but the investigation was dropped.

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