their savings to the store for safekeeping. The store canceled interest charges on all customers' credit accounts. When Julius Meier died in 1937, his nephew, Aaron (Bud) Meier Frank (1891–1968) became president of the store, a position he would hold for nearly 40 years, becoming the most important businessman in Portland for decades. World War II During World War II, Meier & Frank supported the Allied forces: Federal officials cited the store's efforts in support of the war 1941 to 1945 as the most outstanding of any department store in the United States. Meier & Frank devoted all of its newspaper advertising space to bond sales; for 1,207 continuous days the back page of the first section of The Oregonian ran ads—not to sell merchandise but to support the war effort. The store conducted the largest single sale of war bonds in the nation, a $32-million sale that lasted two weeks in the store's auditorium. Postwar After the war, the company completed the installation of the longest continuous up/down escalator system in the world, serving all selling floors of the store and costing $1.5 million. Two years later, Meier & Frank demolished the Portland Hotel and built a two-level parking facility on a full block southwest of the store, between S.W. 6th, Broadway, Morrison, and Yamhill. In the late 1960s, Meier & Frank proposed an 11-story parking garage on the block, which the city denied after a series of heated public hearings. This proposal helped prompt the downtown business community and the city to undertake a comprehensive downtown planning program. The lot became Pioneer Courthouse Square in 1984. Meier & Frank's first branch store, with , opened in Salem, Oregon, under the direction and management of Aaron Frank's son Gerry Frank (1923-2022) in 1955. It had store-side parking for 1,000 cars. Five years later Meier & Frank opened Oregon's second-largest department store (exceeded only by its own downtown store) in Northeast Portland in the new Lloyd Center, at the time the world's largest shopping center. The crown prince of Japan (later Emperor Akihito) joined the dignitaries attending the opening festivities. From 1964 to 1966, a bitter intra-family battle erupted as stockholders considered two potential buyout offers for the store—one, supported by Aaron Frank, to sell to Carter Hawley Hale Stores for cash, and the other, supported by Jack Meier (Julius Meier's son) (1912–1988), to sell to May Department Stores for