Maye and Faye’s Building & Loan: The Story of a Remarkable Sisterhood
By Maye Smith and Faye Hudson with Leslie Whitaker
HarperCollins Publishers, $21, 210 pages
Three years ago, Oak Park free-lance writer Leslie Whitaker teamed up with 16 women from a small central Illinois town. Few had ever heard of the town, let alone their tiny investment club.
But then the club, town and women became nationally known when their book, “The Beardstown Ladies’ Common-Sense Investment Guide,” hit the stores.
Now Whitaker is trying to revisit that success with a book written in cooperation with twin sisters from West Virginia who, with only high school educations, went from bank tellers to bank presidents to millionaires.
It’s a story of being in the right place at the right time. Just as “The Beardstown Ladies” recounts a story of common-sense investing, Maye Smith and Faye Hudson tell the story of how their common-sense approach to dealing with people helped create one of the most successful savings and loans in America.
Unlike many (boring) books about banking, their story is an easy read about a subject bankers would like people to believe is too complex to understand. It isn’t long or filled with five-syllable words some bankers throw around to describe their business.
In an era in which nothing was too risky, the Point Pleasant Federal Savings & Loan in Point Pleasant, W.Va., never spent a month in red ink and continued to turn a profit during the 1980s, when nearly half the nation’s S&Ls were wiped out and taxpayers were left with a bill for a bailout that won’t be paid for 30 years.
But Smith and Hudson don’t offer a how-to recitation of the 12 easy ways to make returns of more than 20 percent, a formula that no doubt helped sell “The Beardstown Ladies.”
This is a story about two women’s tortuous rise to power despite discrimination and rejection. It isn’t the “how-to” tome on how to run a bank, although many bankers probably should read it to learn how to better treat their depositors, without whom they couldn’t succeed.
But it’s also a story of everyday people, such as a schoolteacher who rowed a tiny boat across a river each Saturday to visit her brother and make a deposit at the S&L, gradually climbing the ladder of economic success side-by-side with the twin sisters.
As it recounts the depositors’ climb to success, the book also documents the gradual economic slide of Point Pleasant, W.Va., the town made famous by the 1967 collapse of the Silver Bridge across the Ohio River, in which 46 people were killed.
Thirty years later, the town still traces its slide to the collapse.
“The bridge’s demise still affects us. Our economy has sagged because Highway 35, which ran through the middle of town after crossing over the Silver Bridge, has bypassed us ever since,” they write.
It’s a statement to which many small towns can relate. Although few probably endured something as dramatic as the collapse of a bridge, many can point to some event, such as the opening of an interstate or bypass, that left the town and its merchants isolated.
But the book also tells the story of blatant discrimination practiced by the S&L’s board of directors, which blocked Maye Smith’s promotion to president until the intervention of a federal regulator.
Virtually everything the little S&L did was different from its competitors. It offered share loans, secured by the assets of a depositor’s savings account. While no longer offered by most banks and thrifts, share loans are still available to credit union members. But unlike the share loans offered by Smith and Hudson’s competitors, the share loans offered by Point Pleasant never required depositors “to put their passbook or CD up as security.”
Just as trust is the guiding principle in the life of many small-town businesses, trust was central to how the twins operated their S&L. And it paid dividends. Few of their loans ever went sour.
But sadly it’s a system, in an age of bank consolidation and efforts to create coast-to-coast banks, that now is nearly impossible. Only in small-town and community banks are officers able to operate on trust.
Too many depositors don’t want to waste time in a bank. They’d rather have direct deposit, checking accounts and access to automated teller machines that negate the need for ever seeing the inside of a bank. The officers, responsible for approving a loan, rarely get to know their customers.
When Smith and Hudson finally decided to cash out, after more than 40 years in the business, it was their uncommon practice that had helped transform Point Pleasant from a tiny S&L into a publicly traded bank luring merger overtures from all over the state.
And not to be outdone by the Beardstown Ladies, Maye Smith and Faye Hudson include two lists of how to make it in the world–one on how to succeed financially and the other on how to succeed in a career. Many bankers should read both.
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Book excerpt
“We refused to gamble with our depositors’ funds, even though they were insured. When others were pushing complicated accounts with high fees and installing automatic teller machines, we offered services that our customers really needed: simple passbook accounts and a ride to the bank if they couldn’t get there on their own.”
