REAL ESTATE: The Duke’s Heaven

In Zuleika Dobson, Author Max Beerbohm created a Duke of Dorset who belonged to a society so exclusive that the Duke was the only member. He occasionally nominated new members, but at the elections found himself regretfully compelled to blackball them.

Since 1919, Real Estate Man Samuel F. B. Morse,* often called the “Duke of Monterey,” has tried to create something almost as exclusive with his famed Del Monte Properties Co. on California’s cypress-clad, ocean-girt Monterey Peninsula. He has sold parcels of the 14,000 beautiful acres (at as high as $50,000 an acre), but has always reserved the right to tell the owners what to do with their land. He excludes Negroes, Asiatics and former “subjects of the Ottoman Empire.” Once in, purchasers cannot build a house or fence, cut or plant a tree, keep a cow, pig or chicken, without the Duke’s permission.

Navy Ahoy. Of recent years, Duke Sam’s exclusiveness has begun to fray around the cuffs. Except for the war boom, his company, which controls three golf courses (including Pebble Beach and Cypress Point), two hotels and a beach-sand processing plant, has lost money from 1932 on. When the U.S. Navy took over his famed 400-room Del Monte Hotel as a wartime training center, Duke Sam began to wonder if naval officers would not be a possible mainstay for the new depression he feared. So—why not sell the Navy his Del Monte Hotel?

Last week, President Truman signed a bill authorizing the Navy to buy (for $2,149,000) Duke Sam’s Del Monte Hotel as a postgraduate “Little Annapolis” for naval officers. By then, Duke Sam was already busy planning a model village, including a $320,000 shopping center, to house the 12,000 to 15,000 instructors, students, wives, servants, etc. he expects to live near the school. On the site of the present Del Monte golf-course clubhouse, he is planning a new Del Monte Hotel to house non-naval customers. As the Navy officers come and go, he will carefully sift them for permanent residential prospects.

Comfortable Berth. Ramrod-straight and hickory-tough at 63, Duke Sam thinks that hard work and perseverance are often a hindrance to success; hard workers may be too busy to meet the right people. He feels that if he had not been captain of the Yale ’07 football team, he would not have met Templeton Crocker (Yale ’08), who introduced him to his grandfather, California Banker William H. Crocker. Young Sam was hired to liquidate Crocker’s corporate catchall which owned, among other things, the Monterey Peninsula. While liquidating it, young Morse formed a San Francisco syndicate which bought the peninsula for more than $1,300,000.

Since then, he has devoted himself to keeping himself and the peninsula in tiptop shape. He likes to tear telephone directories or decks of cards in half to demonstrate his strength. (Once, one of his three sons foiled him by inserting a sheet of tin into a deck of cards, convinced Duke Sam his strength was going.) To intimates, he is a genial host who thinks nothing of spending $10,000 on a party; he once gave a big shindig for Monterey’s retiring garbage man. A thoroughly unreconstructed individualist, he used to blast the New Deal with, “You can’t keep people alive forever who can’t keep themselves alive—let ’em go to potter’s field, where I’d be if I couldn’t take care of myself, and where I’ll go when I can’t.”

But his faith in the Republican Congress was also shaken when he learned it had gone on vacation without appropriating the necessary money to buy his hotel. This difficulty would probably be solved by a temporary lease, but Duke Sam grumbled: “When things like this take place, I wonder why we’re not a part of Russia.”

* Grandnephew of the telegraph’s inventor.