RICHARD HENRY PEASE
Richard Henry Pease came to San Francisco in
May 1869, as the pioneer local representative of the Goodyear Rubber Company, a
New York corporation. He eventually became president of the subsidiary
corporation controlling the business here, and was owner of a three-fourths
interest in the business, in connection with which he established in 1893 a
branch headquarters in the City of Portland, Oregon. He was one of the alert,
forward-looking and substantial business men of the Pacific Coast country, was
progressive in his methods and policies, and developed a large and important
enterprise, the while he so ordered his course as to merit and command
unqualified popular confidence and good will. His death, on the 16th
of September, 1919, removed one of the prominent and honored figures from the
business community of San Francisco.
Mr. Pease was born in the City of Albany,
New York, on the 13th of July, 1848, and was a son of Richard Henry
and Mary Elliott (Dawes) Pease, who passed their entire lives in the old Empire
State. Of the family of ten children only one is living at the time of this
writing, in 1923---Mrs. Martha Harriott, a resident of Geneva, New York. The
death of the father occurred February 25, 1891, and that of the mother on the
25th of April, 1876.
The schools of his native state afforded the
subject of this memoir his early education, and at the age of seventeen years
he there entered the employ of the Goodyear Rubber Company, which has since
developed into undoubtedly the largest and most important corporation of the
kind in the United States. That Mr. Pease made an excellent record in this
connection is evident when it is noted that after the passage of three years he
was sent by the company to become its agent or representative in San Francisco,
and it was due to his able administration that the business from this
headquarters was developed into one of importance and large volume. Mr. Pease
was one of the loyal and liberal citizens and representative business men of
San Francisco, was a republican in political adherency, and held membership in
the Pacific Union Club, the Bohemian Club and the San Francisco Golf
Club.
In April, 1883, was solemnized the marriage of Mr. Pease and Miss
Isabelita Ogden, and she still maintains her home in San Francisco, as do also
the two children, Mary, who is the wife of Arthur Watson, and Richard Henry II,
who succeeded his father a president of the Goodyear Rubber Company of San
Francisco, an office of which he is now the incumbent and in which he is well
upholding the prestige of the family name.
Transcribed
by Louise Shoemaker.