The fortune Alex Spanos amassed over six decades began with bologna.

The year was 1951, and the son of a Greek immigrant was unemployed and broke, searching for a way to provide for his wife and two young children. He convinced a Stockton bank to loan him $800 to buy a panel truck and supplies to make bologna sandwiches to sell to migrant farm workers.

The humble beginning grew into a multi-billion dollar collection of businesses, now overseen by his son, Dean, and centered around the family’s most valuable asset: the National Football League’s Chargers.

Dean Spanos took a drastic step with his father’s legacy in January, moving the Chargers to Los Angeles after 56 seasons in San Diego and leaving fans seething in a place he called home.

The key to understanding the younger Spanos’ decision is the man himself — and his family. A large photograph of the Spanos clan dominates the wall behind his desk in an office that overlooks two practice fields at Chargers Park in San Diego. On a credenza, between an NFL record book and a golf club, a copy of his father’s autobiography leans against the wall.

A lone page is dog-eared for quick reference: “A solid family foundation: This is the basis of everything. ... Without family, you will be left emotionally empty, no matter how fabulous your accomplishments.”

Friends say Spanos, 66, felt burdened by a “sacred duty” and “solemn responsibility” to resolve the family’s long-running search for a new stadium in San Diego or elsewhere.

Although known for his deliberate approach to business, the Chargers chairman gambled on the 120-mile drive north into an unforgiving market. It meant leaving San Diego, a place the team owned, for L.A., a sprawling metropolis crowded with college and professional sports. But Spanos didn’t see an alternative.

The decision could add a billion dollars to the franchise value — Forbes estimates the Chargers and the family’s other businesses are already worth $2.4 billion — and boost annual revenue by tens of millions of dollars.

The cost to Spanos, however, extends beyond the NFL’s $650-million relocation fee. In San Diego, fans burned Chargers jerseys and attacked him on social media. A columnist called him a villain and the city’s “most hated man.”

The biggest decision Spanos will make in his career is one he’ll never escape.

“He has suffered so much through this and people can believe it or not, but he’s been tortured by what to do,” said Bertrand Hug, a San Diego restaurateur who considers Spanos his best friend. “At the end, he says, ‘I have no choice. I have to protect my family.’”

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The bologna sandwich business took off and, by late 1951, Alex Spanos had leased space at the San Joaquin County Fairgrounds to house 350 workers. He furnished it with surplus bedding, according to the autobiography, and served boiled beans and the sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Spanos made $35,000 in the first three months, then expanded the business by moving to an old barracks at the Stockton Metropolitan Airport. He adjusted the menu to include tortillas, rice and beans.

By 1956, the A.G. Spanos Agricultural Catering Service provided 7,000 meals a day and made $700,000 that year — the equivalent of more than $6 million today.

“If I hadn’t made provisions, they would have slept in the fields instead of the beds provided and they would have eaten whatever the farmers could scrounge instead of the three meals I served each day,” Spanos wrote.

At the suggestion of an accountant, Spanos invested some of the windfall in real estate. He founded a construction company that built its first apartment complex in 1961. The Bali Hai in Stockton included a luau pit as part of a South Seas theme. Headquartered in Stockton, the company opened offices in six other states.

Spanos still made time for his favorite hobby: golf. He met Bob Hope in 1969 during a round at Eldorado Country Club in Indian Wells. They played for $100 a hole, according to the autobiography. The entertainer became one of his closest friends. They later performed a song-and-dance routine together at Carnegie Hall in New York.

“When Alex was born,” Hope said in a Times story in 1985, “the doctor slapped him and Alex said, ‘Like to rent an apartment?’”

Dean Spanos started working in his father’s burgeoning empire before he was old enough to drive. The son swept out apartments, dug ditches — he once ruptured a sewage line at the bottom of a 10-foot deep trench — and framed buildings.

The father told the son he had to be the first one at a job site and the last to leave. Everyone watched him. If the owner’s son didn’t care, then why should they?

“It was the greatest experience of my life,” said the younger Spanos, who graduated from the University of the Pacific in 1972 with a degree in business administration.

After a failed bid for the San Francisco 49ers in 1977, Alex Spanos bought majority interest in the San Diego Chargers seven years later for $40 million. The transition from entrepreneur to professional sports owner wasn’t smooth. San Diego fans booed Spanos in 1988 during an on-field ceremony to retire the number of Chargers quarterback Dan Fouts, frustrated by the team’s losing ways. He called it the worst moment of his life.

Spanos rarely took time off; he grew uncomfortable if away from work for more than a few days. He had a hands-on management style, a quick temper and an outsized personality that could intimidate any room.

Gary Plummer, a standout linebacker for the Chargers from 1986 to 1993, remembered how a phone call would warn staff and players at the team’s headquarters that the owner was on his way.

“It was panic,” Plummer said. “It was like cockroaches scattering when you turn on the light. No one wants to be seen by Alex Spanos. All he did was scream and yell at everything.”

Dean Spanos, the oldest of four children, took over the team’s day-to-day operations in 1994. Friends see him as, in many ways, the opposite of his father: shy in public and content to operate behind the scenes, far outside the professional sports spotlight other owners enjoy.

The father began detaching himself from the business and in 2008, revealed he suffers from dementia. Friends and family say he still owns an iron handshake and plays gin rummy for a few hours each day at his Stockton home. But the disease has taken a toll.