William M. Garland (Entrepreneur)

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William May Garland (born March 31, 1866 in Westport Island , Maine , † September 26, 1948 in Monterey , California ) was an American entrepreneur, realtor, member of the International Olympic Committee and President of the Organizing Committee of the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles which ended with a financial gain for the first time in Olympic history.

Life

1890 Garland moved to Los Angeles, where he first as an accountant of the streetcar company ( Pacific Cable Railway Company worked), before he in 1894 with a real estate company became independent. He was the only real estate agent to be re-elected as president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards . During World War I , he worked for the US Department of Defense and his skill is believed to have saved the government millions of dollars buying and selling real estate for barracks and military training areas. After the war he was a colonel in the California Home Reserve. He was elected President of Southern California Real Estate Agents three times and was also President of the California Chamber of Commerce and Industry . He was active in the Republican Party and a member of the National Convention for over 20 years . He was offered the candidacy for mayor of Los Angeles, but he declined. He made a fortune developing and selling real estate on Wilshire Boulevard , which connects central Los Angeles with Beverly Hills , Westwood and Santa Monica . He was a member of the Los Angeles Board of Education , the Public Library Board, and President of the Los Angeles Art Association . This real estate company still exists today.

Member of the International Olympic Committee

Garland was chairman of the Los Angeles Athletic Club , which he expanded in analogy to the New York Athletic Club as a social center in Southern California. He himself was primarily involved in tennis and golf and added value to his real estate through several golf courses. Garland went from 1919 to 1923 six times at his own expense to Europe to the IOC as a lobbyist to move the Olympics awarded in 1924 or 1928 to Los Angeles at. In 1922 the IOC made him a member, which he remained until shortly before his death in 1948. Unusually early, in 1923, the 1932 games were awarded to Los Angeles. At the Olympic Congress in 1923, he convinced the IOC to host the later Olympic Games in Los Angeles, then a small town at the end of the world. Garland took care of the construction of the Olympic Stadium, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum , which could be used again in 1984 with only a few modifications. He and his company set up an Olympic village for the first time (for 1400 male participants, women stayed in the hotel), the houses of which he sold at a profit after the extremely inexpensive first use by the athletes. Although the Games fell into the Great Depression, they were the first to produce a financial gain: Garland had cut the admission prices in half at short notice and thus attracted the largest number of spectators who had attended the Olympic Games up until then. Avery Brundage and the American Olympic Committee (AOC) sued him for this one million dollar profit . However, he won the process because the AOC had not previously participated in the risk. The IOC also co-opted his son John J. Garland (1902–1968) as a member.

Awards

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.realtor.org/bios/william-may-garland
  2. ↑ http://www.babcockancestry.com/books/garland/019williammaygarland.shtml
  3. ↑ http://library.la84.org/SportsLibrary/JOH/JOHv18n3/JOHv18n3i.pdf
  4. ^ Steven A. Riess, Power Without Authority: Los Angeles' Elites and the Construction of the Coliseum. Journal of Sport History 8 (Spring, 1981), 1, 50-65
  5. ↑ http://fultonhistory.com/Newspapers%206/New%20York%20NY%20Tribune/New%20York%20NY%20Tribune%201922%20Aug%20Grayscale/New%20York%20NY%20Tribune%201922%20Aug%20Grayscale%20 -% 200052.pdf
  6. ↑ Arnd Krüger : Between politics and commerce. It happened 15 years ago. Olympic Games in Los Angeles. In: Damals 31 (1999), 5, pp. 8-11
  7. ↑ http://library.la84.org/SportsLibrary/Olympika/Olympika_2002/olympika1101d.pdf
  8. ↑ http://library.la84.org/SportsLibrary/ISOR/ISOR2006x.pdf
personal data
SURNAME Garland, William M.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Garland, William May (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American sports official, entrepreneur, art patron, and tennis player
DATE OF BIRTH March 31, 1866
PLACE OF BIRTH Westport , Maine
DATE OF DEATH September 26, 1948
Place of death Monterey , California