Charles H. Strub

Who was Charles H. Strub?

Dr. Charles Henry Strub was an American dentist and entrepreneur who built and owned Santa Anita Park racetrack in Arcadia, California and was president and partner of the San Francisco Seals baseball club of the Pacific Coast League.

Charles Strub was born in Hollister, California as the only child of Isadore Strub and Rebecca Williamson Strub. At a young age, he moved to San Francisco, where he attended St Ignatius High School. He enrolled at Santa Clara University and played baseball under future business partner Charlie Graham. He was a teammate of future New York Yankees star Hal Chase. He decided to study dentistry, and since Santa Clara didn't offer that field of study, he transferred to the University of California at Berkeley where he played varsity baseball, and graduated with a dentistry degree. Having been put through agony as a child by the dentists of the day, he studied modern techniques with new pain-killing drugs and laughing gas so that pulling an abscessed tooth could be done painlessly—a great benefit to society, he thought. Having invested in state-of-the-art equipment, he was wiped out by the 1906 earthquake that destroyed his office before he saw his very first patient. In the weeks the disaster, he saw a column in the newspaper that said his baseball coach from Santa Clara, Charlie Graham, was looking for him to play some ball. During 1906 and 1907 he played baseball with the San Francisco team in the California State League but made his living as a dentist. Entrepreneurial focused, he was known as the "advertising dentist" and eventually had a chain of six "painless extraction" dentist parlors. His chain of dentist offices provided him the opportunity to speculate in the burgeoning California real estate market, financing much of the rebuilding of the SF Business district after the earthquake, making Doc Strub a very wealthy man. One of the San Francisco buildings he built was 450 Sutter, which still houses medical professionals. In 1918, the financially strapped owner of the San Francisco Seals put the baseball team up for sale and George Alfred Putnam and Charles H. Graham were looking to acquired the club, but lacked the necessary funds. After passing one of Strub's dentist offices, they sought out and brought the "Doc" in as an equal partner. Appointed team president, he successfully led the San Francisco Seals for more than two decades. In 1931, he oversaw construction of Seals Stadium. As President of the Seals, he sold minor league ball players to the majors at unheard of prices. After first trying to sell Joe Dimaggio to the Chicago Cubs, he eventually negotiated a deal with the New York Yankees for $25,000 on a money-back guarantee. Doc Strub always regretted that he was able to get more for Joe's brother Dom than he got for Joe. He quipped, "Of course I never dreamed he'd become the husband of Marilyn Monroe."