First some housekeeping.
This is Marion Sandler:
- Associated Press
- Marion Sandler at a 2006 meeting following Golden West’s sale to Wachovia.
Irena Sendler
Photo from findingDulcineaFrom the Los Angeles Times:
Marion Sandler dies at 81; World Savings Bank executive
Sandler was one of the first women on Wall Street. She and husband Herb bought the small Oakland S&L in 1963 and expanded it to 285 branches before selling it.The Sandler pic is from the WSJ's Deal Journal the first place I saw notice of her passing.
As one of the first women to hold a position of power on Wall Street, Marion O. Sandler was notable even before she and her husband, Herbert, spent 43 years building Oakland's World Savings Bank into such a major — and ultimately controversial — adjustable mortgage lender.
Sandler, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Russia, exploited her keen analytic skills to become Dominick & Dominick's first female executive in 1955 and joined Oppenheimer & Co. as a savings and loan analyst in 1961.
Spotting an opportunity, she and her husband, an attorney she had met in the Hamptons, used a bank loan two years later to buy the Oakland S&L, which then had two branches. By the time the co-chief executives were through, there were 285 World branches in 10 states.
Marion Sandler died Friday at her home in San Francisco after a long battle with severe asthma and migraine headaches, her family announced. She was 81.
Having sold World's parent firm, Golden West Financial Corp., for $24 billion on the eve of the mortgage meltdown, the Sandlers used their more than $2 billion cut of the proceeds to greatly expand their wide-ranging philanthropies. Their foundation's major efforts included significant funding for fair-lending advocates, such as the Center for Responsible Lending, for asthma research and for investigative reporting.
Yet the Sandlers also were attacked for pioneering pay-option mortgages, which allowed borrowers to pay so little that their balances rose instead of fell. Critics blamed the loans for the demise of Wachovia Corp., which bought Golden West in 2006 and was near collapse when it sold itself to Wells Fargo & Co. two years later....MORE
*On August 10, 2007, you may remember it as the week about which Goldman's David Viniar said:
“We were seeing things that were 25-standard deviation moves, several days in a row”
which caused some jollity among the cognescenti, see: "How Unlucky is 25 Sigma", we posted:
The Day the Music Died--The Mortgage Business
which referred back to the May 6, 2006 sale of Golden West to Wachovia.
The post also contained this bit from some guy in India:
On May 10, 2006 India Daily said:Not a bad call.
Sell of Golden West Financial to Wachovia signifies burst of housing bubble
Four days after the sale and two months before John Paulson started his first sub-prime fund.
The second look was in 2010:
"Happy Anniversary, Wells Fargo and Wachovia!" (WFC; WB)
**Irena Sendler is the woman Al Gore beat for the Nobel Peace Prize.
From our In Memorium post:
Irena Sendler, Nobel Peace Prize Candidate, Has Died
Some of the headlines....MUCH MORE
From the Telegraph:
Irena Sendler
Social worker who saved 2,500 Jewish children in Warsaw and was tortured by the Gestapo
...The Nazis took Irena Sendler to the Pawiak prison, where she was tortured; although her legs and feet were broken, and her body left permanently scarred, she refused to betray her network of helpers or the children whom she had saved. Finally, she was sentenced to death....From The Hindu:
Saviour of 2,500 children
From the Kansas City Star:
Polish woman championed by Kansas students dies
From the Associated Press:
Polish Holocaust hero dies at age 98
Al Gore made a movie.
