Really, it comes down to this: Would you believe a suburban banker who doesn`t golf? Who opens his doors at 6:45 a.m., and keeps them open until 9 p.m.? Whose bank charges only $7.50 for an overdraft? Who says that yes, it`ll stay that way, even after the bank is swallowed by a $44-billion Chicago banking conglomerate?
Hey, what kind of banker have we here? Next thing, he`ll fix it so that the corner automatic teller will stop swallowing our bank cards. We`ll be living in a checkless society, and our monthly bank statements will be error free.
”I suppose any bank can find reasons why it shouldn`t be open seven days a week like we are,” says Jerry Bradshaw, president of Gary-Wheaton Corp., the holding company for Gary-Wheaton Bank, ”and believe me, most bankers do not want to be open seven days a week.”
Ah, a whiff of reality. Bradshaw and the approximately 900 employees of Gary-Wheaton`s 13 branches realize that, even though they will continue the long hours, they will be learning the ways of the normal bank world. That`s because Gary-Wheaton in February reached agreement with First Chicago Corp., the nation`s 11th largest bank holding company, to be purchased later this year by First Chicago in a $136.4 million stock deal that followed two years of negotiations.
It also marked a turning point for community banking in Du Page County. Nearly all of Gary-Wheaton`s Du Page rivals have become subsidiaries of huge bank holding corporations, sometimes several times removed. There`s more than La Salle behind La Salle Bank of Lisle: There`s Algemene Bank Nederland N.V., of Holland. Harris Bank of Hinsdale is ultimately owned by the Bank of Montreal.
The uplink to powerful bank-holding companies has changed the financial landscape in Du Page County. Instead of having loan capabilities in the millions of dollars, the modest-looking neighborhood bank branch likely draws the full lending power of its parents, so that such local banks are financing even the most expensive examples of the county`s explosive growth.
Obviously, the exotic alliances have pressured other banks to do the same. Despite having more assets than any other Du Page bank-Gary-Wheaton grew from $55 million in 1972, the year Bradshaw took over, to approximately $800 million today-its commercial loans were unimpressive.
The bank has $236 million in outstanding commercial loans and nearly as much in commercial deposits, a lot of money, maybe, but a small piece of change for bank whose success with small depositors is so well known.
Having found its own Daddy Warbucks, Gary-Wheaton has been trying to persuade the holders of its 75,000 accounts that some of the less attractive aspects of bank mergers won`t be repeated here.
Bradshaw has become one of the best-known faces in the county. A series of quaint, almost dowdy advertisements turns up in every general-interest newspaper and magazine in Du Page: cutout photographs of Bradshaw sitting behind his desk, holding forth on ”No annual fee on our Visa card,” or asking, ”Is your cost of banking going up? Ours isn`t.”
Black-and-white pictures, gold-rimmed four-cornered eyeglasses, hands on the desk. Not exactly the Joe Isuzu of advertisements.
Nevertheless, the ads hit home that little has changed for customers at the bank-the ads don`t mention the merger-and at the same time, they display the bank`s services. ”If we`re going to retail bank services we have to play that (advertising) game, and I know people like it,” Bradshaw says. ”It`s more like K mart.”
If that is the case, Bradshaw loves to talk Blue Light Specials. Gary-Wheaton requires a $100 minimum balance on interest-bearing checking accounts, $375 on NOW accounts. Overdrafts are $7.50, plus a surcharge of up to $2 a day.
Gary-Wheaton was the first bank in the state to offer a Visa debit card, intended to replace checks (purchases are deducted directly from the cardholder`s checking account, instead of being billed to the cardholder at month`s end). It also was one of the first suburban Chicago banks to open an in-house discount brokerage.
It doesn`t sound much like the rarefied strata of high finance, and it isn`t. But the average balance of Gary-Wheaton`s 55,000 checking accounts is about $1,087, and that, Bradshaw says, makes the minimum balances and customer niceties the bank`s big sales pitch.
Most frequently cited: the 6:45 a.m. weekday opening time for drive-ins, and the 9 p.m. closings at the Gary-Wheaton`s main branch in downtown Wheaton. A Carol Stream branch is also open Sundays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., hours that are among the bank`s busiest.
”We`ve always had long hours and have always been customer oriented,”
Bradshaw says. ”Some of our competitors are trending that way but really don`t have a feeling for what customer-oriented is. I think we do have it.
Community banks that have become branches attached to the subsidiary department of a holding company develop big-bank problems quickly, Bradshaw says.
Employee turnover becomes epidemic, with the familiar faces behind the teller`s window replaced by those intolerant of customers who don`t have identification. And there can be estrangement as simple as what Bradshaw calls the failure to realize that ”people over 35 don`t easily adjust to (automatic teller machines). They like to be treated as if they know somebody.”
If folks in Du Page County don`t know Jerry Bradshaw the banker, it`s likely that they know Jerry Bradshaw the community activist.
Bradshaw last fall co-founded the Du Page Community Foundation, a charity modeled on the Chicago Community Trust whose goal is to nonrestrictively fund organizations committed to improving life in Du Page. ”It isn`t religiously connected; it isn`t hospital connected,” Bradshaw says. ”It`s just available to anyone who needs it.”
The foundation is still trying to develop an endowment. Beneficiaries so far include the Du Page County Historical Museum and the Du Page Easter Seal Treatment Center in Villa Park, of which Bradshaw is a board member.
Bradshaw is also president of the Du Page Heritage Gallery in Wheaton. He got involved with the gallery, he said, because he thought it was time that some positive things were being said about Du Page County.
The banker lives in a Victorian home several blocks from Gary-Wheaton`s downtown headquarters. He and his wife, Betty, helped restore the century-old house. They have one daughter. Another daughter was killed in an autobmobile accident two years ago.
Bradshaw will remain president of Gary-Wheaton following its merger with First Chicago, and the bank will continue to operate as a separate entity, with its banks in Aurora, Batavia, Carol Stream, Downers Grove, Warrenville and Wheaton. And much of the executive suite, as well as the teller pool, will remain. The closely held bank has only 1,000 shareholders, many of them bank employees and executives whom the buyout will make wealthy.
The irony of Gary-Wheaton`s merger with First Chicago is that in 1871, Gary-Wheaton was founded as a branch of a Chicago bank. The parent bank failed 18 months later, and two local residents-lawyer Elbert Gary, who would go on to found U.S. Steel Corp., as well as become the namesake of the Indiana city, and Jesse Wheaton, a farmer-bailed out the suburban branch.
More than a century later, the merger with First Chicago is a climax to Gary-Wheaton`s explosive growth, especially in the 16 years since Bradshaw, 56, has been the bank`s chief operating officer. Bradshaw says he still doesn`t know all the factors in its success and refuses to take the credit.
”In the end, success is a random thing, even in banking,” a professor told Bradshaw at the University of Chicago`s business school, where he was enrolled in the late 1960s. Bradshaw says his career has confirmed that.
Bradshaw, who grew up in Buckley, Ill., a town midway between Champaign and Kankakee, was graduated from the University of Illinois in 1955. On the advice of a professor there, he then spent six years as an itinerant bank examiner for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
”Banks are just like people. They have personalities and I think I saw that so clearly as a bank examiner,” he says. ”Gradations, from good, clean banks right on down to banks that didn`t always have dirty floors but sometimes had dirty books.”
But, Bradshaw adds, ”There was a lot of good will in those days, and there really weren`t big banking problems. Today, there are.” That his career path steered him clear of them, he says, has as much as anything to do with his success.
Bradshaw in 1961 moved to Beverly Bank on Chicago`s Southwest Side, where he eventually rose to executive vice president and chief operating officer. Beverly Bank was a member of a consortium of local banks, since dissolved, that included Gary-Wheaton. After the consortium broke up, Gary-Wheaton grew to be the largest of them, and Bradshaw in 1972 took the helm.
”The fact is that it`s easier to run a bank in Du Page County,”
Bradshaw says. ”Yes, we`ve done some things that have caused us to grow faster than others, but if I`d gotten in a Gary (Indiana) bank when the industrial base was shrinking it would`ve been much tougher. Hey, the closest thing we have to a foreign loan is in Warrenville.
”But again, all of these banks did well. They`d tell you Bradshaw was just lucky.”
