Posted by Cathy Gowdy on Thursday, September 25, 2008 at 11:25:41 :
Independent-Journal
Friday, January 19, 1979
Page 4
THOMAS MINTO is dead at 89
Thomas D. Minto, 89, of Greenbrae, retired real estate and insurance broker and longtime civic leader, died Thursday at a convalescent hospital after an illness.
Minto had been a partner in the firm of Kent and Minto, which participated in early development in Marin. He retired from the firm of Minto and Wilkie, an insurance company.
He helped organize the College of Marin and the Meadow Club in Fairfax and was a founder of the Rotary Club of San Anselmo.
Minto, a native of San Francisco, moved to San Rafael at the age of 19 and became assistant agent in the freight office of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad.
He was then transferred to the Ignacio station as assistant agent and telegraph operator and in 1910 became agent at the Corte Madera office.
“When the postmaster retired, I became railroad agent for Wells Fargo, Western Union and postmaster at a salary close to $400 a month, which was more than most made as a salary. Most of them got $100 to $125. I was fortunate,” Minto said in an Independent-Journal interview in 1975. From Corte Madera, he went to Kentfield in 1913 to serve again as postmaster and railroad agent.
When World War I started, Minto joined the Signal Corps and became a radio instructor.
After the war he returned to Kentfield and in 1919 he became a partner with Thomas T. Kent of Kentfield, son of Congressman William Kent, in a real estate and insurance business in San Anselmo.
“We began by opening Hawthorne Hills in San Anselmo,” he said. “The land was given to my partner, Tom Kent, by his father. It was 360 acres, which stretched clear back to the Sleepy Hollow Tract.”
During the 1920s Minto helped to organize the College of Marin.
“My partner and I felt that there was definitely a need for a junior college. We had some property for sale and we thought it was an ideal place for a college,” Minto said.
He showed the land to Ernest E. Wood, principal of Tamalpais High School, who said the site, the former Butler estate, where the college now stands, was ideal.
The high school district was short of money, so Minto and others started a drive for funds. “Finally we collected enough money so that by putting our commission (which we would have gotten on the property) in with what I had collected by public subscription, they were able to go ahead and buy it.”
After two trips to Sacramento, a college district was formed and the high school district turned the land over to the new district.
Among the properties developed by Kent and Minto were Chevy Chase Park in Larkspur, the Lincoln Apartment houses on Lincoln Avenue in San Rafael and the Country Club Heights Development in San Rafael.
In 1925 Kent and Minto bought out the Davis Freitas Insurance Co. and, after Kent retired, the insurance part of the business became Minto and Wilkie.
Minto and Kent also has arranged the first promotional mass meeting for formation of the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway Association in Santa Rosa.
Minto, who retired in 1949, said a few years ago, “I have been fortunate all my life in getting breaks. Each one thing that I went into seemed to succeed.”
Minto was a past president of the Redwood Empire Association, a former president of the Marin County Board of Realtors, a deputy commissioner of the Boy Scouts of America for the Ross Valley District, a past president of the Ross Valley Sanitary District board, a member of Fairfax Masonic Lodge 556, and of the California and National real estate associations.
Surviving are his wife, Helen Minto, a sister, Carie Skaggs of Santa Rosa, five nieces and two nephews.
The funeral service will be at 2 p.m. Monday at the Chapel of the Hills, San Anselmo. Burial will be at Mount Tamalpais Cemetery, San Rafael. The family prefers that memorial contributions be made to St. John’s Episcopal Church, Ross, or a favorite charity.
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