Vocation
Spence gained his knowledge of business affairs through assisting his father in the management of the family's large farming tracts and herds of cattle in Ireland. He engaged in mining In Northern California and Nevada, but in San Jose he "controlled an extensive drug business" and then switched to banking. As well, he was one of the organizers of the Commercial Bank of San Diego.
In 1875 Spence was named cashier of the Commercial Bank of Los Angeles, organized by John Edward Hollenbeck and reorganized in 1880 as the Commercial State Bank, the forerunner of the First National Bank of Los Angeles, of which Spence became president in 1881. He held interest in other banks as well, and owned property in Whittier and Monrovia, California.
Spence was also responsible for building the first horse car line across the Los Angeles River and, in 1886, financing the first electric car line in Los Angeles.
Read more about this topic: Edward F. Spence
Famous quotes containing the word vocation:
“A vocation is the backbone of life.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Men are born to write. The gardener saves every slip, and seed, and peach-stone: his vocation is to be a planter of plants. Not less does the writer attend his affair. Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him as a model, and sits for its picture. He counts it all nonsense that they say, that some things are undescribable. He believes that all that can be thought can be written, first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Along the journey we commonly forget its goal. Almost every vocation is chosen and entered upon as a means to a purpose but is ultimately continued as a final purpose in itself. Forgetting our objectives is the most frequent stupidity in which we indulge ourselves.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)