first person: How I almost missed my banking career

Northwestern Financial Review, May 15-May 31, 2005 by Locke, E David, Telschow, Tony

When I was a kid I loved baseball, and a pick-up game in my old metropolitan St. Louis neighborhood almost pre-empted my banking career.

A P.A. announcement at my high school had notified us that the local Junior Achievement chapter was starting a bank and looking for student workers. I went to the meeting - which got me out of study hall. A local banker pitched the bank idea, and although I didn't know anything about banking, I made an appointment to meet him at the Junior Achievement Center. The day of the appointment I was playing ball, when my mother came out and said that someone on the phone wanted me at a meeting. "Did you say you would go?"

I said, yes, but I'm playing ball with the guys. She said, "If you told him you'd go then get going." I went, got caught up in banking, and soon became president of the Junior Achievement bank.

The day after high school I started at a local community bank. I made $225 a month cleaning Addressograph plates and making checkbooks. When I got my first pay envelope, I expected to find $112.50 in it. When I asked why I only had $97.46, I got my first lesson in taxation. I eventually went to the loan side and got started in collections. I later worked at a St. Louis-based S&L and occasionally had to collect in East St. Louis. One day I asked a guy in a parked car for directions. He gave me the directions then removed a magazine from the passenger seat to reveal a revolver, saying: "Now say thanks or I'll kill you." I gave him a big grin and said, "Thank you, sir." Then I scrambled back to my car, drove to the office and told my boss he could fire me if he liked, but I'd never go back to East St. Louis.

I came to work as a vice president at McFarland State Bank in 1975. Two years later, at the age of 28, I became president. The IBAA recognized me that year as the youngest bank president in the country. The bank was small, about $5-million in assets, and I was involved in everything; there isn't much I didn't get in and do. Today we manage about $350 million in assets, but I still walk through the bank regularly to greet customers, talk with employees and lead from the front.

I got back to my roots a few years ago by teaching an entrepreneurial class at the local high school. It was like the Junior Achievement program that inspired me, in that students learned about a business's life cycle. I'll never forget one student, who wasn't interested at the outset; by the end of the year he was a standout and sales leader. A couple of years later a busboy came up to me in a restaurant and said, "Do you remember me?" It was the young man from class, and he said, "I'm in the University of Wisconsin Business School." It's very gratifying to think that the class might have inspired him.

I really enjoy coming to work every day, and people here know that my motto is "never give up." Take the credit union issue, for example. There are some 9,600 credit unions in the country, and most of them do just as Congress intended. But many are over a billion dollars in size and they're everything to everybody; their common bond is, if you have a pulse you can join. They're a major threat to community banking as we know it. They've morphed into banks and should be regulated and taxed accordingly. That's an issue community bankers can never give up on.

E. David Locke

President

McFarland State Bank

McFarland, Wis.

Date of birth: July 7, 1948

Born in: Alton, III.

Hobbies: Golf, hunting, fishing, hiking