Ethel Sperry Crocker

Ethel and other family members owned the Sperry Flour Company, which was heavily invested in the World War I humanitarian effort by sending its flour across the ocean to aid famine-stricken citizens of Belgium.

[8] Encouraged by Lou Henry Hoover, wife of the later President Herbert Hoover, Crocker became treasurer of the Woman's "Belgian Relief Fund" in San Francisco and State Chair for the Woman's Section of the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB).

[9][10] On another level, Crocker was the leading patron of French Impressionist art in California at that time.

In the 1890s, Crocker and California Impressionist Lucy Bacon lent William Kingston Vickery, owner of the San Francisco art gallery Vickery, Atkins & Torrey, several 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 Claude Monet, Eugène Boudin, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Edgar Degas.