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His father was shot dead over a pay dispute. Amadeo Giannini was seven years old.
Amadeo Pietro Giannini was born on May 6, 1870, in San Jose, California, the son of Italian immigrants. In 1876, his father Luigi was fatally shot by an employee in a dispute over pay, leaving his mother Virginia pregnant with a third child.
Virginia took over the family produce business herself. Giannini grew up working it, dropped out of business college at 15 because he thought he could learn more on the street, and became a produce broker and commission merchant for farms across the Santa Clara Valley.
He was so good at it that by 31 years old, he had sold his stake and retired.
Retirement didn’t last. Giannini noticed something the other bank directors around him refused to see: California’s immigrant workers had no one willing to lend to them.
He argued for it. He lost the argument, quit the board in frustration, and in 1904 opened his own bank in a converted saloon in San Francisco’s Jackson Square, calling it the Bank of Italy. First-day deposits totaled 8,780 dollars.
Then came April 18, 1906. The San Francisco earthquake and the fires that followed leveled much of the city, and every major bank shut its vaults to wait out the heat before the metal could be safely opened.
Giannini didn’t wait. He loaded his bank’s gold and cash onto a produce wagon, hid it under crates of fruit and vegetables, and hauled it 18 miles to his home in San Mateo before the fire could reach it.
Within days he was back, running his bank from a plank laid across two barrels on the waterfront, making loans on nothing but a handshake to people who had lost everything.
He was a banker. He guarded people’s futures. And he built one of the largest financial institutions on Earth out of a plank and two barrels.
Years later, Giannini said every single one of those handshake loans was repaid in full.
Every immigrant family in North Beach had someone who remembered the man on the wharf, lending money to strangers with nothing but his word on the line.
By the time Amadeo Giannini died in 1949, his bank, renamed Bank of America in 1930, had grown to more than 500 branches and 6 billion dollars in assets. It was the largest bank in the world.
His personal estate at death was appraised at roughly 489,000 dollars.
He gave away most of what he earned, to schools, to Italian war relief, to strangers who needed a loan no one else would write.
Some men build fortunes and keep them. Amadeo Giannini built the largest bank on the planet, and left almost none of it for himself.
Tony Monteleone 