Downey Savings Chooses New Chief Operating Officer

Downey Savings & Loan, continuing its restructuring, is expected to announce today that it has hired F. Anthony Kurtz as its chief operating officer.

Kurtz also is expected to be named president in the near future, replacing co-founder Maurice L. McAlister, according to an industry source. McAlister said in an interview last Friday that he will retire in six to 12 months.

Kurtz will assume his initial duties Sept. 23, the same day that veteran banker Robert L. Kemper takes over as Downey’s chief executive. As chief operating officer, Kurtz will replace Jane Wolfe, who is expected to be reassigned to another top management spot.

The S&L; said last Friday that Kemper, a former Wells Fargo Bank vice chairman, would fill the chief executive position vacated by the S&L;’s other co-founder, Gerald H. McQuarrie, 70, who retired July 31.

Until he retires, McAlister, 65, will remain as chairman and president of the Newport Beach-based S&L; and president of its real estate investment subsidiary, DSL Service Co.

McAlister has been spending most of his time in the last few years selling the real estate holdings of the thrift unit. Under the 1989 federal law that reshaped the thrift industry, all S&Ls; must recoup by mid-1994 the depositor funds that were used for real estate development and other direct investments.

Both Kurtz and Kemper resigned Friday from their posts at the failed Great American Bank in San Diego, which stated in a press release that both were hired as high-level executives at another institution, which it didn’t identify, and would start this month.

Kemper, 62, who was Great American’s chairman and chief executive, and Kurtz, who was its executive vice president and chief financial officer, were hired in July, 1990, with the blessing of regulators to try to save the ailing S&L;, but the task proved hopeless and regulators seized the institution last month.

Kurtz, 50, a 1963 graduate of Cal State Northridge, is no stranger to the thrift industry.

After brief stints as a senior accountant at the Price Waterhouse & Co. accounting firm and as controller of an investment firm, he joined H.F. Ahmanson Co. in Los Angeles in 1968, the holding company for Home Savings of America.

He became a senior vice president and chief financial officer of the holding company and served for nine years as chief administrative officer of corporate operations.

Kurtz left in 1989 to join the Price Co. in San Diego, which operates the Price Club discount stores, as executive vice president and chief financial officer, the posts he held until he joined Great American.