Bank of America blossomed after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Johnson & Johnson was lifted by the Johnstown Flood. By Kenneth G. Pringle

Out of the Los Angeles wildfire disaster will grow a new, better city. The next Bank of America may also emerge. Or Johnson & Johnson, or Vick's.

These companies and others happened to be at the right place at the right time with the right product when disaster hit. For BofA, it was the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. For J&J, the 1889 Johnstown Flood. For Vick's, 1918's "Spanish flu."

Los Angeles's tragedy will offer similar opportunities to those with timing, foresight -- and perhaps a couple of wagons handy.

BofA founder Amadeo Peter Giannini's career hinged on one key decision, the day the earthquake hit, as fires spread. Leave the bank to the flames, or take the money and run?

The son of Italian immigrants, he had established Bank of Italy in 1904 -- it wouldn't become BofA until 1930 -- to serve the immigrant community. Business was small but growing.

Then, at 5:12 a.m., April 18, 1906, everything changed.

"EARTHQUAKE AND FIRE: SAN FRANCISCO IN RUINS," was the Call-Chronicle-Examiner's headline. "Whole City Is Ablaze."

The earthquake toppled full blocks and tore streets asunder. The fires, caused by ruptured gas mains, raged for four days. Some 80% of the city was destroyed, 3,000 were killed and more than 200,000 left homeless.

Rumor of the advancing flames reached the Bank of Italy building at noon. This was Giannini's moment of decision. He sent to his stepfather, a produce wholesaler, for two horse-drawn wagons filled with empty fruit crates.

At the bank, they loaded gold, cash and bank records into the crates -- a clever disguise -- and set off for Giannini's house, 17 miles south in San Mateo. It was a harrowing journey, among the dazed and wounded. Looters were spotted.

"I saw would-be robbers on every corner," Giannini later recalled, writes Gerald D. Nash in A.P. Giannini and the Bank of America.

They made it safely. Giannini's gambit paid off, as the funds of other banks went up in flames or were trapped in melted vaults. That gave him a head start, and he took it.

"Tomorrow I am putting a desk on Washington Street wharf with a Bank of Italy sign over it," Giannini announced on April 21. "Any man who wants to rebuild San Francisco can come there and get as much cash as he needs to do it."

Soon Giannini was bringing gold back to the city, a sack at a time, to lend out. Reconstruction commenced.

"[T]he largest single contributing influence toward this marvelous rebuilding, this 'first aid' to the stricken, was extended by the Bank of Italy, at that time the 'baby bank' of San Francisco," the Call and Post wrote July 12, 1908.

Giannini built on this good will, turning his baby bank into San Francisco's biggest, branching out across California and further, earning the appellation " J.P. Morgan of the West."

The earthquake "placed the public spotlight on what had been a small and obscure bank," the biographer Nash writes. "No advertising campaign could have accomplished what the earthquake did for him."

In 1930, after much regulatory wrangling, Giannini merged his California holdings into Bank of America NA. He previously consolidated several New York chains into Bank of America NT&SA.

"It is regarded as a foregone conclusion that as soon as banking laws permit," The Wall Street Journal wrote, "[the two BofAs] will become one, the nucleus of a nationwide branch banking organization."

The Street consensus was spot on. Today, BofA's the nation's second largest bank by assets, and third in branches, with 3,900.

Two decades before the earthquake, on May 31, 1889, at 2:50 p.m., a dam burst on Pennsylvania's Little Conemaugh River. Fifty-seven minutes later, a wall of water and debris -- like " a huge hill rolling over and over" -- hit Johnstown.

More than 2,000 people were killed, many more injured. The area became one big field hospital.

Donations rolled in, including a shipment from Johnson & Johnson, a New Brunswick, N.J., company founded three years earlier with 14 employees. Amid Johnstown's battlefield conditions, J&J's line of mass-produced surgical supplies showed the way to the future of medical care.

By 1898, during the Spanish-American War, J&J's first-aid packets were standard issue.

"Nearly every man had one of them in his pocket and they saved a lot of suffering," confirmed Lt. William E. Trull, returning home after having his hand shattered by a bullet, wrote the New Brunswick's Daily Times, July 12, 1898.

Today, J&J is the world's biopharma leader, employing 130,000.

In 1918, elation over the Great War's end was tempered by the " Spanish Flu," a virulent influenza strain that killed 100 million globally.

There was no cure. But the Greensboro, N.C., maker of Vick's VapoRub claimed it helped patients breathe better and "throw off the grippe germs." Folks agreed.

Vick's plant "operated continuously" during the pandemic, VapoRub sales increased from $900,000 to $2.9 million in 1919, and that little blue jar -- now a Procter & Gamble product -- remains a medicine-cabinet mainstay.

Stories like these are common. The law of supply and demand holds in times of crisis, growing even more acute. And there is a fine line between help and exploitation. Some walk it better than others.

"Today is the time they need you," is how Giannini put it after the earthquake. "The time for doing business is right now."

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