B. Finley Vinson was still in his Navy uniform when he got the call to become a banker half a century ago.
William H. Bowen was a successful lawyer, and it took months for him to agree to a career change.
The banks they built, First National and Commercial National, eventually merged to become the dominant bank in Little Rock. But even in retirement, both men tend to define themselves by what they did during World War II, the event that seems to have influenced their lives more than any other.
Vinson ‘a PR Guy’
“I really was a PR guy,” Vinson, 85, recalls of his pre-banking career. “I had worked on a newspaper in Corpus Christi, the Caller-Times.”
It was, he admits, “a strange place to start a banking career.”
When the war erupted, he joined the Navy as a commissioned officer.
“I was a lieutenant j.g. and I handled public relations and off-base city and county and state relations for the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, Texas.”
He pulled duty in Washington near the end of the war, then spent a few post-war years in Fort Worth. When the Navy moved him to Little Rock, it was for a sales job.
“I was disposing of real estate in Arkansas for all the services, Army and Navy and various other organization that had acquired land they didn’t need any more,” he says. “I came here in Navy uniform.”
His assignment as a surplus real estate salesman often required him to help arrange financing for potential buyers, which gave Vinson a wide acquaintance with bankers around the state.
J.V. Satterfield, mayor of Little Rock, was impressed with the young lieutenant and in 1950 hired him to head the city’s first urban renewal project — which explains why downtown redevelopment is still a subject close to his heart.
Eventually, Satterfield had another assignment for Vinson: drumming up business for a little “hole in the wall” bank on Main Street between First and Second streets called People’s Bank. The conversation, he says, went like this:
Satterfield: “We’ve bought a little old bank and we want you to join us and work with us.”
Vinson: “I don’t know anything about it.”
Satterfield: “We don’t want anyone who knows anything about banking. We want someone who knows about public relations.”
Vinson took the job.
“It was a pleasant job, and I liked the people I was working with. And I could see real opportunities because (Satterfield’s) idea of banking was so different from what the current idea was then. In those early days, most bankers sat in their offices and waited for business to come and see them.”
Bankers were not unlike lawyers in that respect, Vinson says.
“They never went out and asked for any business at all. That was unheard of, and that was my job when I went to work for a bank was to go out and get the business.”
Another banking legend, A.E. “Art” McLean, president of Commercial National Bank from 1933 to 1961, quickly called young Vinson into his office for a heart-to-heart.
“He said, ‘Young man, I want to talk to you.’ I said, ‘Well, all right, Mr. McLean.’ He said, ‘We in the banking business don’t go out and ask people for their business. We wait for people to come to us.’ He said, ‘You’re doing it wrong.’
“I said, ‘Well, I’m sorry, Mr. McLean, but this is what the people who hired me hired me to do.’ And sure enough, very few people had ever been asked for their business, I found.”
In 1953, Vinson convinced Satterfield to change the bank’s name.
“I went to my boss one day and said, ‘Hey, we’re overlooking something, I think. The biggest name in banking wherever you go is First National Bank. There’s no First National Bank in Little Rock. What don’t we change our name?”
Satterfield immediately agreed, and People’s Bank became First National Bank the same year it opened a $600,000 office on the southwest corner of Third and Louisiana.
With Satterfield encouraging Vinson’s aggressive marketing, First National “grew like Topsy.”
“We were the smallest bank in town, and we grew to where we were the biggest bank in town over a period of years. We changed the banking business in Little Rock, but that was happening all over the country.
“It was a revolution in banking in those days. Banks were coming out from behind their doors and asking people to do business with them, which they had never done before. But it was fun, coming from nowhere.”
Between 1956 and 1966, First National’s assets tripled to more than $100 million — a powerful presence by contemporary standards. Vinson was elected president of First National Bank in 1963 and chairman of the board in 1967.
Even an expansion of the building at Third and Louisiana couldn’t contain the bank’s growth. In 1973, Vinson undertook a building project that was seen as risky at the time but is now a Little Rock landmark: the First National Bank Building at Capitol and Broadway. At 30 stories and 600,000 SF, it was the tallest and largest building in Little Rock. To top it off, Vinson installed restaurant space and recruited Jacques & Susanne, the Little Rock’s first introduction to fine European cuisine.
“When we built this building and built the restaurant on top, I felt we had to bring in top restaurant people who knew their business and could add glitter and prestige to it,” he says.
Vinson retired in 1979 but was coaxed back to help drop a bomb on the banking industry in Little Rock: the merger of First National and Commercial National. Each bank’s assets slightly exceeded $400 million. The bank that resulted when the smoke finally cleared in the late summer of 1993 was First Commercial Bank. By the time First Commercial was acquired by Regions Bank in 1998, the holding company’s assets were $7.4 billion.
Vinson still comes to his office on the seventh floor of the Regions building for a few hours every day.
“I don’t run the bank and haven’t for years, but I like to know what’s going on,” he says.
Despite a “bum knee” that keeps him from walking for exercise, he is game for touring visitors around the bank building, especially the top-floor restaurant space that is now home to the Little Rock Club. “I love to show it off,” he says. “I’m proud of it.”
The exterior walls of the Little Rock Club’s main dining room are almost entirely glass, affording a view of the State Capitol to the west and the Arkansas River and North Little Rock to the north.
From the windows, Vinson points out various landmarks.
“I helped build that hotel,” he says of the Excelsior.
“I remember when there were little wooden boats tied up all along here,” he says, gesturing toward the banks of the river. “Just little old wooden boats that people who lived in the downtown area kept to fish from.”
The Downtown Riverview apartments being built at the north end of State Street are clearly visible from the 30th floor, and Vinson predicts success for them and for other apartments being developed downtown.
“Little Rock’s never been a boom town, but we’ve had steady, solid growth. That’s good. That’s better than mushroom growth because it will last. It’s still meaningful what we’ve built downtown.”
He visits the River Market regularly and expects the area around it will continue to develop, especially with the help of the Clinton Presidential Library.
“It will all fill in with businesses, people business,” he says. “It will be slow and constant selling and management.”
Vinson may be a PR guy from Texas, but he never looked back.
“I’ve been in Little Rock ever since I moved here and never an interest in leaving. And I’ve had some good offers to leave in the banking business, but I wasn’t interested in leaving. I acquired a modest interest in the bank, you know, so my roots are deep here.
“I’m old and I wish I was 20 years younger so I could have the fun I’ve had in this business. But you don’t go back.”
Bowen’s ‘Insane’ Decision
At 76, Bill Bowen seems more interested in reading and studying history, particularly that of World War II, than in banking. He was a 22-year-old farm boy from Altheimer who had just completed his training as a Navy fighter pilot when that great conflict ended in 1945.
“I was carrier qualified, assigned to a replacement squadron and just ready to go out as a replacement pilot,” he says. “And they dropped two bombs: one at Hiroshima, one at Nagasaki, and the war ended four days later.”
Truth be told, he was disappointed.
“I’m careful to whom I tell that, because the horror of war is such that if I’d had any sense, I wouldn’t say that. But I’d lost a brother, and I’d worked hard for two years to be trained for it.”
Bowen’s older brother had been washed overboard and drowned in October 1942 in the sea off the Aleutian Island called Hog Island. It had been the scene some months earlier of a little-known battle between Japanese soldiers and a National Guard Unit from Arkansas, and the memory of the Arkansans who died there was honored in 1993 when a joint resolution of Congress designated Arkansas Beach on Hog Island.
Bowen returned to the states, attended law school and commenced the practice of law at Mahaffey Smith & Williams. The firm was renamed Mahaffey, Smith, Friday & Bowen in 1962 and remains prominent as Friday, Eldredge & Clark.
His specialties were tax and corporate law, and he began to do work for banks. He represented existing banks and organized a bank. He was on retainer for the Arkansas Bankers Association from 1964 until 1971. That’s when he caved in to the entreaties of one of the most influential and endearing characters in Little Rock business: Richard C. Butler, a lawyer who had been president of Commercial National Bank since 1963 — the same year Finley Vinson became president of First National.
“Dick Butler recruited me weekly for four months. And I said, ‘No, thank you’ every week for four months,” Bowen recalls.
Finally, Butler wore him down.
“My wife thought I as insane and my partners thought I was insane, and I took a 55 percent salary cut — I’d had a marvelous practice, you see.”
Bowen became president of Commercial National, and Butler became the chairman of its board of directors. (Butler relieved the agony of a degenerative spinal disease in September by jumping into the Arkansas River from the Interstate 430 bridge. He would have turned 90 years old on Jan. 1.)
Bowen began his banking career nearly 20 years after his competitor Vinson, but it was still the era of relatively small banks.
“This little bank was a $100 million bank on the corner of Second and Main that was very personal in its relationship with customers and borrowers,” he says.
Bowen commenced growing the bank. He created a holding company, Commercial Bankstock Corp., and began acquiring smaller banks throughout the state. By 1980, Commercial Bankstock had assets exceeding $350 million.
In 1983, Bowen’s year-long effort to merge Commercial National with First National came to fruition. Unlike the acquisition of smaller banks, this was truly a merger of equals: Commercial’s assets were $409 million, First National’s were $405 million. The holding company that resulted was named First Commercial Corp. to reflect the legacy of both predecessors, and the sheer size of the resulting institution rocked the banking industry in Little Rock.
Bowen remained as chairman of First Commercial and continued an active program of acquisition, even crossing state lines to do it. They included Morrilton Security Bank, First National Bank of Russellville, First National Bank of Conway, a half-interest in Security National Bank and Trust of Norman, Okla., The Security Bank of Harrison, Benton State Bank, The Citizens Bank of England, Arkansas Bank and Trust of Hot Springs, and Home Federal Savings and Loan Association of Memphis.
“When we acquired a bank, we treated the bank as an independent entity concerned with the same things we were. We were just part of the same thing,” he explains. “We called it ‘the uncommon partnership.’ (The banks) kept their own names, their own boards, their own staffs, and we would help them.”
It was this loose alliance of semi-independent banks that some industry observers blame for the problems Regions Bank had when it acquired First Commercial Corp. and turned them all into branch locations.
Bowen preaches a “four-part rule” for business:
“Be fair to your customers, serve them well.
“Be fair to your employees, because that’s how you serve your customers, through talented, trained, happy employees.
“Be fair to your community, be supportive of it.
“And if you are fair to your customers, your employees and your community, you’ll serve your stockholders reasonably well. And that’s what the stockholders deserve.”
He retired at the end of 1990, but, like Vinson, continues to go to what is now the Regions Bank building almost every day. (“I come down to this office; I don’t work, of course.”) He spends some time raising funds for charitable causes, and he has become something of a venture capitalist. But he also maintains a strong interest in the banking business.
“The bank of which we are part is $41 billion, so the proportions are considerably different,” he says, contrasting it with the $100 million institution he joined to the amazement of his wife and law partners.
“The basics of banking were not unlike what they are now, except there have been added a number of things that we did not do at the time. We have a brokerage office, we have a large trust function, funds management, foreign banking, etc.
“But it’s still a people-oriented business. And what you need to know is what the law of banking is, the rules and regulations, and make sure you stay within them as you serve your customers, and you deal with your employees, and you support your community.”
As for the shareholders, Bowen should be reasonably satisfied. He now owns about 1.18 million shares of Regions Financial Corp. stock, and Arkansas Business estimated his wealth earlier this year at $44 million — sufficient to place him 85th on the list of wealthiest Arkansans.
As for his wife and former law partners who thought his career change was evidence of insanity, “I like to remind them of that regularly.”
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