In a small, green-carpeted room of San Francisco’s Bank of America, one of the biggest sugar deals in West Coast history was quietly sealed. Last week, for $5,250,000, husky, handsome Charles Edouard de Bretteville, 36, and associates announced that they had picked up the choicest pieces of the disintegrating J.D. & A.B. Spreckels companies, a sprawling empire founded by bearded Claus Spreckels in 1863, which once held some 50 companies worth $60 million.
Most of the heirs of old Claus—five women and three men, among them Playboy (five marriages) Adolph B. Spreckels Jr.—had shown little interest in the business. As they needed cash to continue living in their high & handsome manner, they preferred to liquidate the empire. Ambitious Charlie de Bretteville, a distant Spreckels kin and longtime employee of the company, was glad to help in the liquidation. He formed a new outfit called the Spreckels Companies, with the aid of Virgil Dardi, the shrewd boss of Blair Holdings Corp., a California investment firm, and Claus’s grandchildren, sisters Alma Spreckels Rosekrans and Dorothy C. Spreckels. The sisters are the only members of the Spreckels clan still interested in the family business.
For their $5¼ million, De Bretteville and friends got assets which they estimate at $10 million. Among them: ¶Half-interest in the Spreckels Sugar Co. with its three California beet-sugar plants (including the nation’s largest), and its 14,000 acres of land, most of it in the rich Salinas Valley.
¶San Francisco’s $1,000,000 Spreckels Building.
¶Half-interest in the Pampanga Sugar Mills in the Philippines, which paid out $1,000,000 a year in dividends before the war, and will soon be completely restored from wartime damage by the Japanese.
Although Charlie de Bretteville grew up surrounded by Spreckelses (his aunt married the late Adolph B. Spreckels, Claus’s son), he picked up none of their playboy antics. A sharp dresser with an even sharper golf game (the low 70s), De Bretteville was a varsity swimmer and golfer at Stanford, spent a year at the Harvard Business
School. He went to work for the J.D. & A.B. Spreckels sales department at $150 a month, was western sales manager in 1942, when he joined the Navy. He came out a lieutenant commander. Now, as head of the Spreckels Companies, he says: “I want a happy ship and an efficient ship.”
As a start, President de Bretteville plans to make the Spreckels Sugar Co., which is already the biggest beet-sugar produce? (286,705,000 lbs. in 1948) in California and the fifth biggest in the U.S.,* more efficient. Altogether he is spending $1,800,000 on new equipment, plans to obtain new capital for expansion by making Spreckels Companies a public corporation and issuing stock.
*The other four: Great Western Sugar Co., Holly Sugar Corp., Amalgamated Sugar Co., American Crystal Sugar Co.
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