The Sandwich Man Who Built an Empire

In the summer of nineteen fifty-one, a man named Alex Spanos borrowed eight hundred dollars and bought a truck. He loaded it with sandwiches, drove it out into the San Joaquin Valley's farm fields, and started selling lunch to migrant workers. He was twenty-seven years old, he had a wife and children, and he had recently dropped out of the University of the Pacific in Stockton without a degree.

Spanos had been born in Stockton in nineteen twenty-three, the son of Greek immigrants who ran a bakery. He had swept that bakery floor as a child, served in the Army during the Second World War, come back to Stockton, and tried the university for a while before concluding that the path he wanted was not through a classroom.

The sandwich route became a catering business. The catering business became a real estate operation. In nineteen sixty, he founded A. G. Spanos Companies, a development firm headquartered in Stockton that focused on apartment construction. By nineteen seventy-seven it was the largest apartment builder in the United States.

Spanos did not leave Stockton. He stayed, gave money to the University of the Pacific, built stadiums and centers with his name on them, renovated the old Fox California Theatre on Weber Avenue so that it could host concerts and events again, and spent decades as the city's most visible philanthropist and booster.

In nineteen eighty-four he bought sixty percent of the San Diego Chargers football franchise. He eventually controlled ninety-seven percent. The team relocated to Los Angeles in twenty seventeen. Spanos died in twenty eighteen at ninety-five.

He started with a truck full of sandwiches in a field.