James Lick is haunting me

Seriously, the guy's name is everywhere. Have you noticed? He's got a highway, a high school, and the middle school down the street from my apartment named after him. I had never heard of him before. It turns out Lick was a piano builder who became the richest man in California during the second half of the nineteenth century. He was born on the East Coast, but made his fortune building pianos in Argentina and Chile. When he arrived in the Bay Area in 1848, he built hotels, mills, and orchards. He did some mining, too (I guess everyone who was here during that period did some mining). It was Lick who imported a bunch of Peruvian chocolate and inspired Domingo Ghirardelli, the confectioner, to move to San Francisco. Towards the end of his life Lick planned to use his fortune to build colossal statues of himself and his family, plus a great pyramid, in downtown San Francisco, but was convinced to donate the majority of his money to the public good instead.

The best sentence I encountered while researching James Lick on the Internet:
"In 1884, the Lick Old Ladies Home in San Francisco was established with a grant from the Lick estate."
Hah!

At first reading, I thought the statues and pyramid thing was really odd and that maybe Lick was a little kooky. Then I realized that San Francisco IS famous for having a giant pyramid downtown. Not so kooky after all. (Lick didn't have anything to do with the Transamerica Pyramid, though. The Transamerica Company unveiled architect William L. Pereira's plans for the skyscraper in 1969 and construction wasn't completed until the early 1970s.)