‘It is one of the things I take pride in.’

La Jolla resident Ted Davie spent 33 years with the Navy, flying airplanes and commanding carriers. He had barely retired in 1970 when he received his calling to a second career. Davie, now 76, organized a storage room full of collectibles into a gleaming museum for San Diego Trust & Savings Bank downtown. As the bank’s historian, he has also chronicled its 100-year history and now oversees much of the redesign and restoration of its branches. Davie was interviewed by Times staff writer G. Jeanette Avent and photographed by Bob Grieser.

I joined the Navy’s aviation cadet program in Oakland after I graduated from UC Berkeley with a humanities degree in 1936. I earned my wings in Pensacola a year later.

Before World War II broke out, I was an aviator, flying planes off a cruiser. The cruiser had two catapults, four airplanes and a hangar. They shot us off the decks with the catapults.

Then the war came on, and I was flying mainly anti-submarine warplanes in the Atlantic. The one I flew was a Lockheed Ventura, a twin-engine land plane. It was a high-powered airplane in those days.

After the war I went on to complete three years of study at military schools, including the Naval War College and National War College. During my career, I was executive officer of the escort carrier Point Cruz, home-ported in San Diego and later commanding officer of the USS Greenwich Bay and the Princeton.

The Greenwich Bay, which I commanded in 1961, was a communications ship. It was one of three ships which spent four months of each year south of the Suez Canal as flagships in the U.S. Middle East Force. After two months in the Persian Gulf, the ship made visits to several Indian ports and one to Chittagong in Bangladesh. After a few days at Chittagong, we got under way for a visit to Calcutta. En route, we found out a fully developed cyclone was headed for Chittagong. Needless to say, our Indian hosts toasted our good fortune in departing Chittagong before the cyclone hit. That cyclone brought great tragedy to the coastal areas of Bangladesh, and the force of it parted the moorings of a ship three times the tonnage of the Greenwich Bay and set it ashore.

My final assignment before I retired in 1970 was a three-year position as defense and naval attache at the American Embassy in Athens. While in Italy and Greece, I was able to enhance my knowledge of architecture. I had been an architectural buff all my life, and I suppose, if I hadn’t gone into aviation, I’d have gone into architecture.

I became involved with design and historical restoration at the bank after I retired to La Jolla. When the San Diego Trust & Savings Bank downtown was coming upon 50 years of age in 1978, the marketing department decided to do a book on the building rather than pass out paperweights and envelope openers.

A friend at the bank mentioned me to them, and I was hired to do the book, which I did in 45 days. They put me in a room with boxes of newspaper articles, papers, pictures and illustrations, and somehow I did it. I came in on Feb. 1 of that year, wrote the book, designed it, picked out the illustrations and photos and lined them up in the sequence I wanted in time for the April 15 celebration. After I finished the book, I just went back home and, about a month later, they called me and asked me to come back as an employee. I started the museum in 1980, and we opened it on Jan. 30, 1981. Retired president Thomas Sefton, the third generation of the family to run the bank, is an avid collector of diverse things. When technology at the bank would change and some of these banking machines became obsolete, instead of giving or throwing them away, he had them set aside.

The key element of the museum is the replica of the original teller’s cages from 1889. The gold pieces are also a big attraction. We have a 1852 $50 gold coin struck by Augustus Humbert before the U.S. Mint opened in San Francisco.

A chest in the museum contains 1,300 silver dollars each worth about $1,500 and dating back to 1871. We also have a 36.21-ounce gold nugget, the largest discovered in San Diego county.

But my favorites are the gold scales, including one that dates back to 1855. They were used to determine counterfeit gold coins. Counterfeiters used to drill into the coins, extract the gold and fill them with platinum. In those days, platinum was not an expensive metal compared to gold.

More recently, in 1987, Mr. Sefton asked me for an exhibit to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Charles Lindbergh’s first flight. Lindbergh’s plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, was built in San Diego, but it is now on display at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. I can remember taking my children to see it and always thinking I’d like to look into the cockpit to see what it looked like because it was hoisted in the air.

So one of the things we did for the anniversary was create a skeleton version of the plane’s cockpit. We got the dimensions for the cockpit from the San Diego Aerospace Museum in Balboa Park, which has a replica of the plane. They did the instrument panel for us, and I found a man who did beautiful welding to put the cockpit together. It was the No. 1 attraction of our exhibit.

For the 100th anniversary of the bank last year, we had a science and industry display. Again, the Spirit of St. Louis cockpit was the centerpiece of the display, along with newsreels from the time showing Lindbergh. Now, at the San Diego Aerospace Museum, it is one of the things I take pride in.