Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
SCOTT TAYLOR HARTZELLBut Oscar R. Kreutz was more than a money man. He also founded a church and was a booster for the arts and downtown.
ST. PETERSBURG - To Oscar R. Kreutz, cash was king.
"In grade school, father advised me to get into a business dealing with the necessities of life," Kreutz said in 1975, as Florida Federal Savings and Loan's board chairman. "When my day of decision came, I decided money was the greatest necessity."
In 1923, Kreutz organized the First Federal Savings-Building Association. U.S. presidents later considered him among the nation's sharpest S&L men. Kreutz increased Florida Federal's net worth over 20 years from $50-million to $750-million.
"Oscar R. Kreutz," historian Walter P. Fuller wrote, "the greatest banker of them all."
Kreutz the civic leader boosted local arts and improved the central business district. He helped establish Florida Presbyterian (Eckerd) College, promote St. Anthony's Hospital and build First Presbyterian Church.
"Giving back to the community," said Phil Skelton, 58, Kreutz's stepson, "was what Oscar Kreutz was all about."
Born in 1899 in Sioux City, Iowa, Kreutz learned responsibility. "There was always the barn to clean, the cows to milk, chickens to feed," he said.
After graduation in 1916, Kreutz joined the Navy and was dispatched to Harvard to study radio communications. After jobs in retailing and overseas radio operation, he returned home and discovered savings and loans.
"Encouraging people to save money (for homes) struck me as being a great, even an exciting, idea," said Kreutz, who in 1923 organized an S&L in Sioux City. Within seven years, his firm boasted $1-million in assets and was among five local banking institutions out of 19 to survive the Depression.
"Public confidence was shattered," said Kreutz, who married Marion Benton in 1926 and would have two daughters.
In 1931, President Herbert Hoover summoned Kreutz to a national home ownership conference. Under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1934, he came to Washington at age 35 as a member of the Federal Savings & Loan Review Committee.
"He always kept his hand in the Washington scene," said lawyer Raleigh Greene III, 53, who called Kreutz an immaculate, no-nonsense man who felt his proudest achievement was his family.
But Kreutz frowned on politics. A bleeding ulcer in 1948 nearly killed him. In 1953, Raleigh W. Greene Sr. beckoned Kreutz to come work for him at First Federal of St. Petersburg, the bank known as Big Blue.
"I am living on borrowed time," Greene Sr. told Kreutz, his new executive vice president. When Greene Sr. died in 1954, Kreutz became First Federal's president and board chairman.
Kreutz reaped state department recognition in 1961 for expanding Argentina's savings and loan associations. "He always knew what he was talking about," said Norman Halsey, 88, Big Blue's former vice president of construction loans.
For contributing to downtown development as president of St. Petersburg Progress Inc., Kreutz was saluted during a 1966 Princess Martha Hotel luncheon.
"(He) is one of the greatest things that ever happened to St. Petersburg," publisher Nelson Poynter said of Kreutz, who helped establish the St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts (1965) and the $50-million Bayfront Center (1965).
Milton Roy Co., a leading volume pump manufacturer, placed Kreutz on its board of directors in 1967. About 1968, the United Nations realized Kreutz's dream of an international housing bank.
"This bank would be supported by all the ... nations," said Kreutz, who would become the committee's vice president while also serving on the Florida Council of 100, the Florida Chamber of Commerce and as a trustee of Florida Presbyterian College, which he helped establish in 1960.
In 1970, Kreutz passed the bank's presidency onto Raleigh W. Greene Jr. That September, Kreutz spoke at Oxford University: "Management is the science of getting things done through people."
Kreutz's book The Way It Happened (1972) became a savings and loan guide.
Months after becoming a widower and one day after his 75th birthday in 1973, Kreutz suffered a heart attack at his Snell Isle home. Later that year he became president of the Anthonians and helped it trumpet St. Anthony's Hospital.
"Kreutz was an outstanding community leader," said Harrison Fox, 83, Big Blue's former senior executive vice president. "My mentor."
With the persuasive and articulate Kreutz as board chairman in 1973, Big Blue was renamed Florida Federal Savings and Loan Association. That October, Kreutz married Virginia Skelton.
After he retired at age 76 in 1975, Kreutz's wife recited Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Grow old along with me" to him at a tribute. About 700 admirers attended.
Kreutz held a Big Blue office as chairman emeritus during his retirement and often cruised on his 31-foot boat, I'm Okay. On Feb. 15, 1987, Kreutz died at St. Anthony's after a stroke. He was 88.
- Scott Taylor Hartzell can be reached at hartzel@msn.com