Legion of Honor

I am standing in front of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, a huge museum of fine art built by Alma de Bretteville Spreckels.

Alma was born in the Sunset District of San Francisco in 1881. She was the daughter of two Danish immigrants and her family was very poor during her childhood. Her father Viggo had noble origins which he used to exempt himself from working. Her mother Mathilde on the other hand had a knack for business and so she opened an establishment which was a bakery, a laundry service and a massage service at the same time. Her entrepreneurship is what got them through their rough times. When Alma was 14 years old, she had to quit school to work with her mother full-time. At the same time, she enrolled Mark Hopkins Institute of Art to study painting because of her deep love for art. While there however she earned money by being a nude model. This fact made her both famous and notorious.

With ups and downs in her story, it was through modeling that she met her husband-to-be, Adolph Spreckels. He was much older than her and owned a sugar company. Because of that, she called him "sugar daddy". According to many sources, it is believed that she was the first person who coined that term and gave a name to what we know today as sugar dating. After having three kids together, Adolph died from syphilis.

During her life, she became a known art collector, one of the most influential ones in the U.S. She purchased many important art pieces, including "The Thinker". After getting enough fame and trust to her name she started hosting multiple charity auctions to raise money for those wounded in the First World War. Moreover, she helped report the post-war working conditions for women for the Department of Labor's Women's Bureau and she became known as a caring philanthropist. At the same time, she decided to build a museum for her thorough art collection which is today's Legion of Honor in San Francisco. She left a legacy behind, a gift for the future that we can all enjoy today.