Biography
He was born on 13 January 1861 in Sacramento, California.
He attended Phillips Academy, Andover and Yale University, where he was a brother of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Phi chapter). After the 1906 earthquake and fire had left the Crocker mansions in ruins, in 1907 he donated the Crocker family's 2.6-acre (11,000 m2) Nob Hill block for Grace Cathedral.
He was a member of the University of California Board of Regents for nearly thirty years and funded the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory's million-volt x-ray tube at the UC hospital and the "medical" Crocker cyclotron used for neutron therapy at the Berkeley.
Crocker also chaired the Panama-Pacific Exposition Committee and SE Community Chest, and was a key member of the committee that built the San Francisco Opera House and Veterans Building. Crocker was the founder of Crocker Middle School located in Hillsborough, California.
When much of the city of San Francisco was destroyed by the fire from the 1906 earthquake, William Crocker and his bank were major forces in financing reconstruction. His father, Charles Crocker (1822-1888), had been a builder of the Central Pacific Railroad.
In the 1890s, his wifey, in part, lent William Kingston Vickery, owner of the San Francisco art gallery Vickery, Atkins & Torrey, a number of French Impressionist paintings. Vickery then supervised a series of these loan exhibitions in San Francisco and introduced Impressionism to California in the form of paintings by Monet, Eugene Boudin, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Edgar Degas. These pictures were lent by California Impressionist Lucy Bacon (who studied in France under Pissarro and met Cézanne), as well as Mrs. William H. Crocker, who was the leading California patron of French Impressionist art at the time.
Mrs. Crocker also sponsored studies of the Zoellner Quartet with César Thomson in Belgium. After six years in Europe, the quartet would return to the United States and become a tireless force promoting classical music outside established centers and in southern California.
William Henry Crocker died on 25 September 1937 at his home in Hillsborough, California.
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