Co-Founder Is Finally Finding Time to Relax : Thrift: Maurice McAlister has loosened his hold of the reins at Downey Savings & Loan, and is even taking some time off for his favorite activity--fishing.
Those who knew Maurice L. McAlister when he actively ran Downey Savings & Loan thought he would never relinquish control of the Newport Beach thrift’s day-to-day operations.
But he has finally gone fishin’. Well, almost.
“I can go a couple of weeks and never think of the problems at the savings and loan,” Downey’s 69-year-old chairman said last week before leaving on a fishing trip to Mexico.
Indeed, Downey’s president, Stephen W. Prough, talks with McAlister by telephone most days but says the conversation often has little to do with the thrift. Last week, for instance, Mac, as he long has been known, simply talked about his recent quail hunting trip and his upcoming fishing trip.
“My favorite thing to do is to go fishing for large-mouth bass,” McAlister said.
But he was too active at Downey, which he co-founded in 1957, to drop out of a regular work life completely. He comes from his home in Bullhead City, Ariz., to preside over the S&L;’s monthly board meetings. And he manages or oversees a number of his own and his family’s real estate projects.
“It doesn’t take me long to get interested in something else,” he said.
McAlister and his wife, Dianne, for instance, own 90 acres of land in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area overlooking Lake Mojave, south of Hoover Dam, and they just won rights to use water from the Colorado River, allowing the land to be developed.
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Federal land and park agencies are trying to stop the McAlisters from building up to 400 homes there--the only ones that would have a clear view of any of the recreation area’s lakes.
“They said they don’t have any money to buy my land, but they said they can trade,” McAlister said. “I may look into that. They have land right on the river on the Nevada side near Laughlin.”
He also oversees a family real estate lending business that helps to provide affordable housing in South Gate, where he grew up, and in neighboring communities like Compton and South-Central Los Angeles. With one of his three daughters and her husband managing the operation, the family loans money to small entrepreneurs to buy and repair houses for resale to low-income buyers. The family makes about 75 such loans a year, McAlister said.
“It’s not just a business,” he said, “it’s really a nice thing to do, and you feel good about doing it.”
The most nettlesome problem McAlister has these days is deciding what to do with 25 rare nickelodeons he has collected over the years. Some are worth $100,000. One stately instrument plays paper roll music every day at noon at the S&L;’s branch in Downey, where the thrift once was based. Others--with pianos, drums, even a violin set up inside handsome mahogany and walnut cases--are in the thrift’s Newport Beach headquarters and in McAlister’s longtime home in Downey. One of his turn-of-the-century nickelodeons is one of only two in existence.
“We talked about putting them in the Laughlin museum under a nonprofit operation, but I just don’t feel up to overseeing another corporation that has the government involved because it’s a nonprofit,” he said, likening the suggestion to the government regulation that he believes is killing the S&L; industry.
“From where I sit, the small bank and the small S&L; have really done an outstanding service for this country,” McAlister said. “They provide local management that knows the people and the community.”
Because of that familiarity, small-business owners and home builders used to get started with loans from community banks and thrifts, he said.
“But today, it’s almost impossible for young people to get started with a bank or thrift loan,” he said. Lending “is a very simple business, but it’s become so complicated with government regulations.”
