C.K. Fletcher, Savings Unit Founder, Dies

Charles Kimball Fletcher, founder of San Diego County’s largest savings and loan and a member of a pioneering San Diego family, died Sunday of cancer in Mercy Hospital in San Diego. He was 82.

Fletcher, who founded Home Federal Savings and Loan in 1934 and helped build it into the nation’s ninth-largest, was described by an associate as a “perpetual motion machine. Charlie believed you could accomplish anything you wanted if you put your mind to it and your effort to it,” Robert Adelizzi, Home Federal president, said.

Born in San Diego in 1902, Fletcher was the third of Edward and Mary Fletcher’s 10 children.

Edward Fletcher, who went to San Diego from Massachusetts in 1888, was a key player in providing a water supply to San Diego and is credited with creating reservoirs at Lakes Hodges, Cuyamaca and Henshaw. The elder Fletcher also helped develop Del Mar, Solana Beach, Grossmont, Mt. Helix and Fletcher Hills.

Charles Fletcher attended grammar school in San Diego and graduated from San Diego High School in 1920. He graduated from Stanford University in 1924 and studied at Oxford University for a year before traveling in Europe, the Mideast and Asia.

After spending several years selling stocks and securities in Los Angeles, he founded Home Federal with $9,500 in capital in 1934. By 1942, when Fletcher enlisted in the Navy, the company had grown to $4 million in assets.

In 1946, Fletcher served one term as California’s 23rd District Republican congressman.

He retired as president of the firm in 1963 and, four years later, at 65, relinquished his job as board chairman.

Fletcher then moved to Hawaii, where he was general manager, then president and chairman of Pioneer Federal Savings and Loan Assn. He divided his time between Hawaii and Del Mar.