Banking on Birdie

Northwestern Financial Review, Jan 24, 1998 by Bengtson, Tom

Catherine Jackson, NFR's 1998 Banker of the Year, is riding a wave of enthusiasm to revitalize her community

Waverly, Minn., a town of 600 people located an hour west of the Twin Cities, faces a number of the challenges that confront many rural communities. The population isn't growing. Most of the main street businesses closed years ago, leaving a row of boarded-up buildings in what was once a thriving downtown. Stores in neighboring towns now pull much of the commerce out of Waverly.

But this is a town that is going to make it. Waverly has a handful of important assets. First, it sits on a pair of attractive recreational lakes. Second, it is a community in which a former vice president of the United States spent much of his life. But third, and perhaps most importantly, the town has Catherine Jackson, the president of the local bank, who is committed to making the town the vital center of activity she knew the town to be during her childhood here.

Jackson, known as "Birdie" to the locals, has worked for the last three years to establish a museum in Waverly dedicated to the memory of Hubert Humphrey, vice president to Lyndon Johnson and presidential candidate in 1968 and 1972. The idea for the museum came out of a community effort in 1994 when Waverly celebrated its 125th anniversary. The museum effort is now in full swing, with a museum director already hired. The goal is to renovate a local municipal building and have the new museum open by 2001.

Because of her unique community revitalization work, and because of the way she has built up the Citizens State Bank of Waverly since she became its president in 1985, Jackson is being named Northwestern Financial Review's Banker of the Year for 1998. She is the first woman selected for the award since the magazine initiated the award 10 years ago.

Getting Started

Daniel Graham, Jackson's father, bought the bank with a brother in 1951. The way Jackson describes it, he ran the bank mostly by himself. Jackson and her younger brother, Daniel Jr., would work in the bank during school breaks and summers, but neither initiated careers in the bank. As Daniel Sr. approached retirement, he invited the kids to work in the bank. Catherine, who had married Kim Jackson, a man she met while attending Gustavus Adophus College in St. Peter, Minn., was living in Minneapolis working as a buyer for Dayton Hudson, the large retailer. Kim, the son of a missionary, was working as a teacher at a prestigious private school. Describing herself as "Dad's last resort," however, she decided to move back to Waverly in 1978 and begin a career in the bank. Her husband kept the teaching job in the Twin Cities and commuted after the move. Jackson had already done most of the operational jobs in the bank; the new part was lending and asset/liability management. By 1985, her father retired, selling the bank to the kids. Also, Daniel junior was now working in the bank, as was Catherine's husband who decided to exchange his chalk board for a banker's lamp.

While the bank had provided a nice living for her father, Jackson quickly realized that it wouldn't be so easy in the future. If the bank was going to succeed, the town had to succeed - and that would take some doing. The bank counted mostly on loans to people in the town for business. Although central Minnesota is a prosperous farm area, Citizens State Bank hasn't traditionally done a significant amount of farm lending - a factor that kept the bank out of trouble during the 1980s when other small rural banks were suffering along with the farmers. Much of Citizens State Bank's business is related to real estate lending. The bank finances many of the homes and cabins ringing the 500-acre Lake Waverly. But in order to assure the town's long- term viability, it would take more than a lake.

Jackson was instrumental in bringing the Minnesota Design Team to Waverly for a weekend in 1994. The Team is a special group of architects and community planners who visit two communities per year, conduct an indepth study of the community's strengths and weaknesses, and makes recommendations about what the community can do to improve. Out of those recommendations came the idea for the Humphrey museum. Humphrey is a man well-known in Minnesota, although he was born and raised in South Dakota. From the mid-1950s until his death in 1978, Humphrey spent much time at his home in Waverly. He had come to know the area while he was mayor of Minneapolis in the 1940s when the Ewald bothers (known for their dairy operations) would invite him to spend weekends on the lake at their guest cabin. Humphrey eventually bought a home adjacent to the Ewald property. Today, the former Humphrey property belongs to a rehabilitation facility, Muriel Humphrey having sold it shortly after her husband's death. The community quickly latched onto the idea of a museum. Locals already had assembled a small collection of Humphrey letters and other artifacts for a temporary display set up for the town's 125th anniversary.