William Henry Crocker

His cousin, Aimee Crocker, was a Bohemian mystic who garnered publicity for her extravagant parties in New York, San Francisco and Paris, for her five husbands and many lovers, for her tattoos, and for living 10 years in the Far East, not as a tourist, but as if a native.

[4] William attended Phillips Academy, Andover and Yale University, where he was a brother of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Phi chapter).

[9],[10] He was a member of the University of California Board of Regents for nearly thirty years and funded the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory's million-volt x-ray tube at the UC hospital and the "medical" Crocker cyclotron used for neutron therapy at Berkeley.

In the 1960s, parts of this cyclotron were moved to the University of California, Davis, where they were the basis for the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory,[13] which inherited its name from the original.

[16],[17] One of the impressionist works they had acquired in 1894 was a painting by Claude Monet from his famous Haystacks series, "Meule, soir d'hiver", from 1899-1890 (W1217a) which was lost to eternity during the Great Fire following the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, as was most of the rest of their collection.

[18] Surviving items of Ethel's Egyptian and Byzantine textile collection were on loan to the San Francisco Museum of Art until 1953, when the collection was shipped to Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.[19],[20] As his cousin, Henry J. Crocker, William H. Crocker was a noted philatelist and the owner of the unique block of four of the 1869 24c United States stamps with inverted centre formerly the property of William Thorne.