One job skill I’ve never had is looking for work. In the fall of 1972 I went looking for work. Mabel Wedlaw at the unemployment office sent me to Bank of America. So I became a banker. I had one other prospect also from Mabel for a company called Western Gear. I took the B of A job. It was a good job as a public relations representative, a writer for B of A. It paid $9,000 a year, a good salary in 1972 and about $4,000 a year more than I expected fresh out of college.
I wasn’t a very good writer and what I didn’t know at the time is that writing like any other trade is a skill to be learned. I thought I had to be good at it out of the blocks and I wasn’t. I was so uncomfortable having to do something I had no confidence in, I quickly got out of it and went into community relations with Bank of America. Community relations was about talking to people; organizing people in taking action. I learned how to do it as I went. I don’t think I had a preconception of how good I should be.
I transferred to Bank of America’s Urban Affairs Department and there I organized volunteer efforts that taught consumer finance in adult school, matched mentors for Job Corps participants and made connections between the bank and community groups. I got to work for Joe Angello and I began learning how to interact with people.
Before I got sober I had a tendency to burn myself out wherever I went. In those days I was impressive in the start and poor in the long run, a flash in the pan. My ambition took me to credit training just as my credit at Urban Affairs was running out. I became a loan officer. I really wasn’t very good at that. I had some success opening a new office for the Walnut Fair Oaks branch as the agency manager. After that it was downhill. I found myself in over my head and after two years I fled Bank of America into commercial sales for a company that sold paper and rotary press forms.
I made good money, but sales either takes a huge amount of self confidence or more often monster insecurities disguised as self confidence. I had neither in sufficient amount. I did a lot of birdwatching that year instead of selling paper. One time the manager's wife came into the office and later commented to her husband, "For a guy who supposedly works indoors, he sure has quite a tan." After a year I got back into credit and became the manger of mobile home financing operation for a medium sized independent insurance brokerage. The credit market tightened up and I was struggling to make a living and after nine months I was lucky to get a job with City National Bank.
By this time I had enough experience to actually learn to become a loan officer at City National Bank. I enjoyed it. Unfortunately, my alcoholism which had not served me well anywhere, got worse at City National Bank and my career was grinding down to nothing. When I joined City National they were a small but dynamic Beverly Hills Jewish bank. I started at Encino and after a year and a half I got myself the job of assistant manager of the Century City Office and failed completely. There were challenges in the branch but I was not up to them. I remember one time I had stayed up until the wee hours of the morning drinking wine by myself. I came to work in the morning smelling of wine and still a little drunk. Most of the time I was oblivious how others might see my drinking, but even I knew coming to work drunk was not a good thing.
I was nearly fired, not for drinking but just incompetence, not measuring up. My job at the bank was saved by a friend, a drinking buddy in credit administration, and I became a relief loan officer at various branches that needed someone temporarily. I recovered a little and got assigned to a branch with an incompetent and tyrannical manager for whom no one else would work and I couldn’t do any better. I got sober while working at the Sunset Doheny branch. In AA they say you have to reach bottom before you can get sober. In my career as a banker, Sunset Doheny was pretty near the bottom.
Joe’s wife was from a well known and wealthy family and he rode their money. The branch itself catered to wealthy Beverly Hills types, rock and roll bands and minor celebrities. Cher without makeup or presence, looking like a washed out mouse, spent hours with our new accounts clerk who was a friend of hers. Joe tortured his employees because he could and my customers were tattooed and pierced rockers in the days before that was common.
In 1984 after 8 months of sobriety I left City National Bank and went to Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank in downtown Los Angeles. As a career move it quickly proved to be the wrong place to go. My first day instead of going to an office in headquarters as I thought I was, I was shown my desk on the branch floor, next to a retreaded B of A Vice President who I had known many years ago. I thought I should have left the first day, but my pride kept me there. DKB and its predecessor Japan California Bank had been in California 25 years taking care of the interests of its Japanese customers and trying to tap into the rich California market without any success. They didn’t have a clue before and they didn’t have a clue after I joined them.
The Japanese officers there worked hard to help their Japanese customers get into the California market, to take whatever technologies they were looking for, make quick real estate profits and generally take advantage of the American market in any way they could. I stayed at DKB 9 years and after I left the orgy of buying eventually collapsed with the Tokyo real estate bubble and so did DKB, a zombie bank it was swallowed up by other Japanese banks who were only marginally healthier.
I was still learning how to live a sober life when I joined DKB. I quickly realized that being a token American officer in an organization that was lost was not the worst way to make a living. I got a decent paycheck without very demanding work and I could put my energy and drive into learning to live sober. At DKB they were strict about punctuality. It was important to get to work on time and no one should leave before quitting time. What I did in between, they really didn’t care. I went to noontime AA meetings and long lunches with my sober friends afterwards. My downtown AA community was my classroom for life and my evening meetings in South Pasadena were an opportunity to develop my leadership and community skills.
After the first year Yoshihiro Hayashi came to DKB from Tokyo and we became friends and I enjoyed working for Hayashi-san. I felt like I was doing something and I learned how to work with the Japanese. I’ve always enjoyed foreign environments and I learned a lot about collaborative work from my Japanese friends. After getting used to that environment I much preferred it to the competitive American environment where people often seemed to work against each other.
DKB had no idea at the time that I actually had experience in working with community groups, and Latinos and African Americans.
I went to meetings hosted by the regulators and consultants in the field. I began to get a sense of CRA. There was a regular circle of CRA people among the more sophisticated banks. They didn’t have much time for the Japanese and Chinese who were mostly clueless. They weren’t helpful to me at all with the exception of Bob McNealy, a very good man from Union Bank. Slowly I began to figure things out. I was lucky to link up with an old friend from City National Bank, Gordon Lejeune, who had become City National Bank’s CRA officer.
In 1991 I was a member of the board of Casa de las Amigas, a women’s alcohol and drug recovery house and that year I became the chairman of their annual fundraising event. I had a lot of help and guidance from people with experience and a wonderful committee and the fundraiser came off very well. I learned a huge amount about organizing and got a great confidence boost.
So at the end of 1991 when I finally had secured a seat on a CRA committee organized by the major banks, I was able to join Gordon on an effort to form a Community Development Corporation, one of the goals of the committee. In March, we had a well attended public meeting with the all the banks and community groups from South Central Los Angeles to explore the way a CDC could be formed. In April, the Rodney King verdict civil disturbance occurred. In the aftermath from my work on the CDC I knew the players, City Hall, the banking community, their regulators and the community groups.
The third day of the disturbance I volunteered to work for City Councilmember Mark Ridley Thomas and joined his office as a loaned executive for 90 days to work on the CDC. Earlier Mark had given us his support for a CDC if I promised to follow through and make it happen. DKB didn’t understand why they had to loan me to the City, but they were intimidated into going along with it.
I spent 1992 and into 1993 working on the goals of the Community Reinvestment Committee. We put together a coalition of banks that formed a CDC and got it off the ground in 1993. I also worked with Bob McNealy on the same committee to get a Community Financial Resource Center opened at Martin Luther King Boulevard and Figueroa. A couple of years later Bob and I were both screwed in succession by the executive director I pushed to hire. She didn’t like the oversight Bob and then myself demanded on what became her own personal juggernaut.
The director is still there but the CFRC is one of those organizations that in my opinion still gets funding but doesn’t do much other than promote itself. The CDC was killed by Bank of America. I didn’t realize forming the CDC was a back room agreement between Don Mullane of B of A and the City of Los Angeles during the Security Pacific “merger” talks. After a couple of years the Southern California Business Development Corporation was struggling, it could have survived, and Don had succeeded as chairman and shut it down. After the buyout was completed he had no further use for it.
I also worked with Sister Diane of Esperanza Community Housing Corporation. Esperanza built real affordable housing. Esperanza and groups like it, built and rehabilitated housing in South Central Los Angeles. They did great work that benefited the communities they served but it wasn’t much in comparison to the need. Los Angeles needed real affordable housing and instead we got token affordable housing. It’s always been difficult. Do you take what’s doable or do you strive for more. In the post-Reagan era we did the doable.
DKB took credit for all of my work with the bank coalitions and community groups and received a satisfactory CRA.
In 1994 I was ready to quit banking, my youngest son was graduating from high school. For my own needs I no longer had to make the money I had been making but then I got a call from California Commerce Bank, a Los Angeles subsidiary of Banamex, the largest bank in Mexico. Banamex had a serious CRA problem and needed help. I was learning to speak Spanish and a year working for Banamex seemed like a great opportunity.
I continued working with the community groups I knew. I had an expertise in fundraising and building bridges between community groups and the banks. I continued to work with Sister Diane and California Commerce Bank had a president active with Catholic Charities and I worked with Catholic Charities in supporting a Women’s Shelter. I enjoyed working at Banamex. I was well paid and when I went to the Bay Area, they kept me on working my own schedule and showing up when I needed to. It was hard to give up a job where I made good money doing only what I wanted to do. I stayed with California Commerce Bank until 1999. I quit banking in October of that year and took a year off with the intention of looking for work in a completely different field.
When the year was over I got a job as a consumer credit counselor, then a juvenile hall counselor and finally as a State Park Ranger.
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