Downey Executive’s Death a Loss for S&L; Industry : Thrift leader: Family and employees were important to Gerald H. McQuarrie, who represented long-honored values--like honesty and integrity--not often seen in the business during the 1980s.

With his infectious smile and a glint in his eyes, Gerald H. McQuarrie welcomed a group aboard his boat, the Pez Vela, for a short fishing trip off Newport Beach early on a sunny Saturday morning last July.

The savings and loan business was his vocation, but fishing was his avocation. At 70, he didn’t actually fish as much as he used to, yet he loved to take others out and had an almost boyish excitement as he revealed one of his longtime ambitions--going to Australia in search of a 100-pound yellowtail.

“To catch a 100-pounder, wouldn’t that be a thrill?” he gushed.

McQuarrie was still planning that round-the-world trip, one more chance for the old man to challenge the sea and reel in the big prize, when he died of leukemia a week ago Saturday.

His death was, of course, a personal loss to his close-knit family and good friends, but it also was a big loss to the decimated S&L; industry, which has been sorely in need of role models lately.

McQuarrie represented more than just a thrift executive who advocated the traditional thrift business of making home loans. He represented some long-honored values--like honesty and integrity--that were not often seen in the industry or many other businesses during the flashy 1980s.

The accolades from friends and competitors after his death had one theme in common--an honorable, decent man was gone.

“He was a real leader in the industry and a real gentleman,” said Stephen W. Prough, president of Western Financial Savings Bank in Irvine.

While some thrift leaders may have thought that McQuarrie was an anachronism, he helped Downey Savings & Loan provide a sharp contrast to the thrift grist that normally fed the media: S&Ls; failing, taxpayers being burdened by S&L; losses and executives like Charles H. Keating Jr. of Lincoln Savings & Loan in Irvine going to prison for fraud.

The success of Downey, which McQuarrie co-founded 35 years ago, was simple, he said while fishing: “We had too much to lose ourselves.”

With McQuarrie’s mortgage banking background and co-founder Maurice L. McAlister’s building and developing expertise, Downey grew slowly, steadily and solidly. Its real estate ventures--typically neighborhood shopping centers anchored by a major supermarket--were so strong that regulators gave the thrift permission to exceed industry limits on those types of investments.

But the 1989 federal law that restructured the industry required all thrifts to sell such investments, and the mix of Downey’s assets has been changing greatly since.

McQuarrie played “Mr. Outside” to McAlister’s “Mr. Inside.” While the shyer McAlister worked his real estate deals at the S&L;, the gregarious McQuarrie helped to lead state and national trade groups and worked on legislative issues for the industry.

For a onetime workaholic--”I slowed down quite a bit later on,” he confessed--he had an easygoing style that won him the admiration of most of the Downey employees he met. He viewed as “most important” his relations with employees.

“If you let people know they’re appreciated, they’ll work for you,” he said during a break from fishing aboard the Pez Vela, which is Spanish for a sailfish. “You treat people as individuals.”

And there didn’t appear to be a condescending bone in his body.

“He was just a plain and simple guy to me,” said Costa Mesa Police Lt. Sam Cordeiro, a fishing buddy who sometimes worked on McQuarrie’s boat. “When you associate with the upper crust, they often treat you as second-class citizens. Gerald never did.”

McQuarrie, an only child whose parents died when he was a young man, knew he was lucky to be able to help build a successful business and reap the rewards that it offered. And he gave back to his community and his church.

“It’s time,” he said while waiting for the fish to bite last year, “to do the Street People in Need.”

SPIN is a Newport Beach-based group that provides services for the homeless.

“It’s a concept I really like,” he said. “They take whole families and help them. They do a great job.”

He later contributed to the group and his wife and daughter volunteered their time to help SPIN.

As much as he worked, McQuarrie also enjoyed his time off, his time with his family and friends. Back when Newport Beach still had a trailer park at the beach near Dover Drive, he bought a trailer and often took his family there, teaching his two boys how to fish as his father had taught him.

His oldest son, Brent, recalls that their first boat, a 12-foot outboard, had to go because it was always close to being swamped by bigger boats whenever they tied it to a buoy to fish. The next boat, a 25-footer, provided the McQuarries with an adventure of a lifetime.

It was October, 1967, and the teen-age Brent and younger brother Scott went with their parents about 15 miles offshore to try to catch marlin or sailfish. Instead, they caught something that was so big and strong that it knocked their boat around as McQuarrie wrestled with it. His wife, Oneida, and Brent also took turns reeling in the fish and letting the line out, a process that went on for an hour as they tired the fish out.

In the end, the McQuarries had to tie the fish alongside the boat. It was too heavy to bring aboard. Brent said no one at first was quite sure what it was. But it turned out to be an 11-foot-long thresher shark that weighed 228 pounds, the third largest fish ever caught off Newport Beach at the time.

“I broke several knives trying to kill it,” Brent said. By coincidence, they tied the fish so it dragged backward in the water for a slow two-hour trip home. “We didn’t know it, but we were told that dragging it in the water backward caused water to go in the gills. It eventually drowned.”

The shark was smoked and fed the family for a long time, said Brent, who is now 40.

McQuarrie some years later took up golf, more for the fun and recreation than the effort to post a low score. He helped his score with a few rules he invented, like the McQuarrie drop. Scott explained it to about 300 people who attended funeral services for his father on Wednesday: If your ball goes behind a tree, you can kick it onto the fairway without a penalty stroke being assessed.

McQuarrie found humor in many things, even though he sometimes felt a little guilty about finding some things funny.

While fishing last year, for instance, he chuckled as he recalled an early Downey Savings promotion. The thrift offered a silver dollar to anyone who would let an employee put a bumper sticker reading, “Follow Me to Downey Savings,” on the car. A lot of customers agreed, possibly to their later chagrin.

“Those bumper stickers really stayed on,” he laughed. “People had to sell their cars to get rid of them.”

For McQuarrie, life was full and exciting.

“I wish everybody could feel as happy as we do,” he said.