“He could inspire confidence which is the mark of a leader,” said Dean Plassaras, who helped develop Spanos Park West. “If you were close to him, you would think everything was possible.”

In his heyday, Spanos flew up to 6,000 miles a week in his private jet, crisscrossing the country between his company’s divisions, directing various subordinates as they built apartments and offices.

By 1977, he was the number one builder of apartments in America. That fiscal year, he wrote in his autobiography, “I built 3,370 apartment units valued at $69 million,” plus 244 more he kept as a personal investment, plus $6.4 million in “garden-style office complexes.”

Spanos always flew home to Stockton. He could have lived anywhere. He was tethered to this place.

“Why Stockton?” he wrote. “My business associates endlessly ask: Why not San Francisco, L.A., New York? I can never give them an answer that makes sense from a business perspective, except that Stockton is home and where I belong.”

Born here on Sept. 28, 1923, Spanos worked in his father’s bakery, Roma Lunch #2, in Stockton’s old skid row.

“A kettle of screaming anger,” Spanos said of his father. “He never once hugged us as boys or congratulated us as men.”

In a key passage in his book, Spanos asks for a raise. His father refuses. Spanos knows he has to quit. But then what? His wife, Faye, is pregnant. He has no plan.

He eyes the door. “The other side of the door, where I would eventually find success, did not offer a welcome mat. It was a dark uncertain, forbidding place …” But, “I felt compelled to prove myself to Dad: that I was better than he believed me to be.”

Spanos ventured through that door. Borrowing $800, he started a business catering lunches to Braceros. Soon he was housing them. He expanded and prospered. He got rich: “Within five years of leaving the bakery I was clearing almost $700,000. Big money back then.”

An accountant suggested he get into real estate for tax purposes. Spanos never was afraid to step through the door.

From real estate to apartment building, he used a system: a lean and mean privately held company; top experts to show him the ropes of new endeavors; nepotistic staffing of loyal family executives; grueling hard work.

And family. “No matter how badly things go in the business and the outside world, I have always been sustained by knowing I could return to someone who truly loves me.”

Although, he candidly admitted, “I am not an easy man to live with.” He combined the drive of a tank with the temper of a volcano. Yet he cherished his wife and children.

Spanos’s Stockton projects, oddly, are not typical of his projects elsewhere. Aiming at the top 10 percent of apartment dwellers, he started with the Bali Hai, the cool tiki apartments on Pershing Avenue. Elsewhere, he built apartments for the masses. Quality, but not high end.

Here he built single-family homes.

Spanos was seen by many as the foremost practitioner of back-room influence on city land use policy. He even hired Stockton’s city attorney to help him do it. But he wasn’t all that Machiavellian, said Gary Podesto, Stockton mayor from 1997-2004.

“The Spanos Company, in spite of what people say about them, never interfered in City Hall,” Podesto said. “They presented their case. But of all the developers they are one that never said, ‘Do this for me.’ That’s the honest-to-goodness truth.”

Giving seems to have been a genuine part of Spanos’s code. He paid off his father’s debt. He gave relatives generous stipends. He paid off the debt of St. Basil’s Greek Orthodox Church. He threw gala fundraisers for a boys’ home, helped Dameron Hospital and funded football at University of the Pacific, as well as the construction of several campus buildings. In later life, he expanded his giving to the arts.

Buying the Chargers was a lifelong dream. In a burst of hubris, he promised San Diego a Super Bowl within five years. It took him years to admit his business skills didn’t transfer well to sports.

Spanos finally relinquished control and, against his business instincts, started writing bigger checks. In the 1994-95 season, the Chargers went all the way to the Super Bowl. They didn’t win. But San Diegans loved it.

Stockton sometimes seems cursed with a low glass ceiling that keeps people down. Spanos, who started as humbly as anyone, smashed through that glass ceiling in a private jet. He never stopped flying. And when he landed, he landed in Stockton.

Wrote Spanos: “Living in Stockton makes me remember who I am and where I came from.”

Contact columnist Michael Fitzgerald at (209) 546-8270 or michaelf@recordnet.com. Follow him at recordnet.com/fitzgeraldblog and on Twitter @Stocktonopolis.