UNBANKERLY BEHAVIOR
By
Daniel Koehler
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * *
PUBLISHED BY:
KSI/Noosphere Publishing
Unbankerly Behavior
Copyright © 2010 by Daniel Koehler
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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For the late Bob Ginnaven, who dreamed up the Unbank advertising campaign, and for my friends and banking colleagues, Hall McAdams and Bob Connor, who helped clean up the Unbank mess and shared such wonderful stories about it with me.
Prologue
In the summer of 1968, the Arkansas River molassed its way between the overgrown river banks separating the cities of Little Rock and North Little Rock, Arkansas, its waters an indeterminate shade of brown.
Depending on the time of year, the river’s color ranged anywhere from dark khaki to muddy red. That summer, however, were a god to view the mighty Arkansas from an Olympian vantage point, the pagan deity might well liken the river’s hue to that of the effluent resulting from Hercules’ cleaning of the Augean Stables.
When the inevitable spring floods came, the river would often carve new channels for itself and establish its banks further inland. At these times, the flood plain of North Little Rock appeared as though Lord Poseidon himself had ladled a foul-smelling batch of primordial soup over its extent with a malicious lack of regard for the petty boundaries ascribed it by geographers and politicians.
Despite the colonoscopic aspect of their river, the people of Arkansas took justifiable pride in what the future held for their state’s alluvial namesake. That summer, on the front page of the Arkansas Grenadier newspaper, Chief Engineer Charles Dorsey Maynard of the US Army Corps of Engineers predicted the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation Project would be completed by October.
At last, the people of Arkansas could breathe a sigh of relief. Washington, D.C. had finally addressed foursquare the river’s tragic brownness problem as well as its propensity to inundate its least-prepared citizens at the most inopportune times. The tenacious US Army Corps of Engineers had constructed a series of locks and dams along the Arkansas with the aim of regulating this fourteen-hundred mile long, undisciplined torrent and transforming its silt-tauped waters into a clear, placid stream navigable to commercial traffic.
Although the advent of river navigation was an obvious feather in the cap of Little Rock, its sister city on the north bank of the Arkansas River, dubbed “Dogtown” by the capital city, was less than giddy with anticipation with the prospect of barge traffic. Being a railroad town, North Little Rock was not anxious for more freight-hauling competition.
The south side of the river, Little Rock, being the capital city of the state, seemed to tutter at Dogtown across the chicory waters of the Arkansas River as a society matron would at an arriviste using the wrong fork at a fancy dinner party.
At dusk, colored people would line the Dogtown bank of the Arkansas, fishing the sloughs and eddies with cane poles for drum or buffalo. Considered “rough” fish by most sport anglers, Field and Stream usually did not rhapsodize about these species in its pages, but nonetheless they were plentiful, of sufficient size to feed a family, and quite delicious when breaded and deep-fried.
A caste system of a different sort, however, existed in Central Arkansas that transcended indigenous fresh-water fish. This hierarchy reached higher up the food chain to embrace the hominids dwelling on both sides of the river.
Little Rock was home to the Arkansas Grenadier newspaper, which, by virtue of its coverage of the city’s 1957 high school desegregation crisis, had won a Pulitzer Prize for Journalism. As one grizzled newspaper veteran put it: “Hell, back then, the editorial staff was all eat up with integration like they had invented the word.”
After 1957, Arkansas stoically borne the opprobrium heaped upon it by the national press, which skewered the state as the home of rednecks, racists, and rabid Razorbacks fans. Nonetheless, the two million people of Arkansas benefited disproportionately from the comfortable politics of incumbency in the one-party Democratic “Solid South.”
In Washington, D.C., thirty-year Arkansas incumbents held major sway in both houses of Congress due to the seniority system, chairing key congressional committees such as Appropriations and Foreign Relations.
Appropriately, the Arkansas State Capitol building was a three-quarter scale Doppelgänger for the U.S. Capitol, both architecturally and politically, since Democratic incumbents had historically dominated state and local politics.
However, in 1968 the political status quo in Arkansas had changed, sending a tidal wave of fear through the Democratic political machine that for decades had run state government like it were its own private stock pond.
In 1966, Winston Rothschild had ascended to the Governor’s seat. A transplanted Boston millionaire and Republican, he had the distinction of being the first GOP Governor of Arkansas since Reconstruction.
What most frightened the Arkansas Democratic machine, however, was that the wealthy Republican appeared well on his way to landing a second gubernatorial term. In preliminary polls for the upcoming November 1968 election, Governor Rothschild was handily outpolling the Democratic candidate, Odell Fougerousse.
Despite being a scion of an old-money Eastern banking family, Winston Rothschild had always thumbed his nose at his Brahmin kinfolk and their playboy traditions back east. He had moved to Arkansas in the 1950’s based on friendships cultivated in World War II, when he enlisted in the Army as a buck private. In 1961, Rothschild gave Little Rock the Rothschild Cultural Center, which attracted world-class art exhibits and curators.
For a sleepy Southern city, a Pulitzer Prize and a Rothschild can be stout brew, but such acclaim often exhibits itself first as triumph and subsequently as folly. One suspects the latter case was in full bloom at the Arkansas Grenadier in 1968. Pulitzer fervor had trickled down to even routine local beat stories, which suddenly became laden with racial implications. Take, for example, this story of June 12, 1968:
Branch Bank Robbed By Crazed Man in Norge Carton
By Tucker Entebett
LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS. Hiding inside a large appliance carton, a white man of small stature spat racial imprecations at the female branch manager of the Union Guaranty Bank on East Roosevelt Road and forced her at gunpoint to drag the large carton inside the bank just before closing Friday.
Once inside, the racist white man made remarks about the local Negro population and then placed a Kraft paper sack over the female bank manager’s head, making off with $16,500. The courageous female bank manager, Eudora Lukas, 44, was found dehydrated but otherwise unharmed after spending the weekend locked inside the bank’s “whites-only” restroom.
A spokesman for the LRPD was unwilling to confirm that the bank job was racially motivated. However, Henry Potts, President of Union Guaranty Bank, was quick to assure all bank customers in this primarily Negro section of town their money was “safe and 100% insured by the U.S. Government.”
Indeed, now that it could tout itself as the “Pulitzer Prize-winning Arkansas Grenadier,” its editorial page began to ooze censure from every pulpy pore. Unenlightened public opinion was castigated daily for being—well, unenlightened, and the unwashed were mercilessly taken to task for innate failings by the crusading Pulitzer winners on the editorial staff.
For their own good, of course—the unenlightened, that is.
Despite the Grenadier’s censure, and perhaps in spite of it, Little Rock kept advancing deliberately to higher heights of urban urbaneness. The capital city could boast a prize-winning newspaper, a relocated Rothschild scion, a rudimental Republican Party apparatus, a Cultural Center, and a nascent “skyline.” Little Rock’s urban silhouette consisted of two venerable ten-story hotels, an eighteen-story office building, and the pièce de résistance, the twenty-story, white marble-and-glass skyscraper of the Union Guaranty Bank, a gleaming Doric tower that presided over the squatty business landscape of Little Rock like Kilimanjaro over the African savannah.
Beyond the Union Guaranty Building, near the water’s edge of the Arkansas River, two grande dame hotels held court. The Marion Hotel, with its flowery, Jacquard-loomed drapery, ponderous, nailhead-upholstered furniture, and even a suite boasting a bidet, looked like a Presbyterian riff on the Waldorf-Astoria. One-hundred yards East on Markham Street stood the pencil-thin Grady Manning Hotel, its facade embellished with a three-story metal grid of abstract Mondrian metal-sculptures in primary colors, suggesting the architect intended it as a Bible Belt te deum to the Stardust Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
Clearly, by virtue of its famous “Gar Hole” bar and grill, the Marion Hotel held the edge in local cosmopolitanism over the Grady Manning. An eponymous alligator gar prowled the large aquarium near the carved mahogany bar, yet despite its fishy name, the Gar Hole made no pretense of being a seafood establishment. Barbeque was the kitchen’s forte, and its basement location protected patrons from the depressing view of the diarrheic sluice eddying below in the Arkansas River.
The Gar Hole also served as situs for Little Rock’s version of the Algonquin Roundtable. Local cognoscenti gathered within, and politics, civil rights, modern art, culture, and the Arkansas Razorback football team’s prospects were the usual topics of conversation. However, when the legislature was in session, all manner of mayhem could ensue. Emotions often ran high when the rowdy politicos decamped to the Gar Hole for late-night beer-guzzling disguised as legislative strategizing, and opinions varied widely when some upright Baptist legislator brought up the Spa City of Hot Springs. Cleaning up vice, gambling, and corruption there was a sure way to win approval from the state’s churchgoing voters and, hence, reelection.
A short distance from the Gar Hole, one could sample good Chinese fare at the Canton Tea Garden and then afterwards catch an “art” film at either The Main or The New theaters across the street. The New featured the film, The Sky Above, the Earth Below, a film so arty the Catholic Legion of Decency condemned it, while The Main offered gritty cinema verite like the documentary, The Birth of Twins.
Despite Arkansas’ low stature in the national mind, Little Rock always comported itself like medieval Florence under the Medici. The Arkansas Grenadier led the cheers, the newspaper a veritable Pharos of Alexandria offering blessed illumination to the pastoral state’s bucolic dim bulbs.
Suffice it to say Little Rock, urbs inter urbis, did not suffer fools lightly. Sharing the adjacent, riparian landscape with gritty North Little Rock and its carpetbagging, Snopesian railroad people seemed to unsettle the capital city of Petit Roche as though it were being forced to sit next to a poor relation at a posh soirée.
Thus, when Little Rock bestowed the blemished soubriquet of “Dogtown” upon its roughshod sister-city, North Little Rock threw back its head and laughed, reveling in the role of playing Sparta to Little Rock’s Athens. Dogtown had never disputed its colorful history as a blue-collar company town on the Missouri Pacific Railroad line.
Therefore, when Little Rock periodically deigned to traverse the river, hat in hand, and suggest Dogtown give up its independence and merge into Little Rock in the “interest of more progressive municipal government,” Dogtown responded with the verbal equivalent of a roundhouse right in telling Little Rock what specifically it could do with its hat.
Ten-story hotels, subsidized arts centers, and Pulitzer Prize-winning newspapers were never Dogtown’s “way.” It was a town defined by the MOPAC hump yard, which broke down freight trains and reassembled individual railcars into new trains bound for different destinations.
In Argenta, Dogtown’s original name, one could locate nary a restaurant requiring coat and tie, although there were plenty of places serving fabulous pirogies, kielbasa sausages, sauerbraten, and Schlivowitz plum brandy to the railroad workers of German and Slavic ancestry.
Yet, despite the Grenadier’s stern editorial declamations, many Dogtown eateries still fiercely displayed signs reading: “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.” Such signage often appeared beside the “No shirt, no shoes, no service” placards, and there was certainly no public clamor in North Little Rock for establishments like the Gar Hole catering to the art-loving, social reforming, suit-and-tie beatnik crowd.
If the Gar Hole were the symbol of Little Rock’s cultural standards, then the countless beer joints flourishing north of the river were such for Dogtown. The Southern Gentleman’s Lounge, near the railroad hump yard, set the tone for the rowdy potables trade on the north bank of the river, although, truth be told, the Lounge was the last place in the world one could expect to find a true gentleman austral.
However, in 1968, a distressing development had the Old Little Rock aristocracy scratching its head in bewilderment. The poohbahs at the Little Rock Country Club doubtless wondered why one of their own, bank president, Henry Potts, would authorize a ridiculous, poor-mouthing public relations campaign to promote the venerable Union Guaranty Bank as the “Unbank, especially when he possessed the newest and most glittering bank skyscraper in the state.
This tale began with a description of the Arkansas River and the cities flanking it—Little Rock and Dogtown. However, to get to the meat of the coconut, you have to start with the Union Guaranty Bank of Little Rock. There, a larcenous patrician banker plied his greed behind the respectable façade of the Executive Suite until one of his bank employees, a back office bean counter from Dogtown, exposed his treachery.
Chapter 1
Untraditional Advertising
“Admit it, Jimp. Union Guaranty’s advertising is just pitiful!”
Bob Gillavrey stubbed out his cigarette and paced the bank office. A handsome, compact man with brown sanpaku eyes and thick, dark hair, he had been a decent high school running back in Memphis and now, at thirty-one, still moved with the gait of an athlete.
“You’re preaching to the choir,” John Jimpson said.
Gillavrey threw up his hands in frustration. “C’mon, man—it’s 1968! Your father-in-law needs to get hip to the times.”
He walked to the window of the fourth floor conference room in Union Guaranty’s flagship headquarters at 4th and Louisiana Streets and stared westward at the State Capitol campus.
“Well, that’s Henry Potts for you,” John said. “Won’t spend a damn nickel unless he gets back a quarter. Still thinks it’s the Great Depression out there.”
Bob sighed. “What Union Guaranty needs is a professionally managed advertising campaign. A new bank image with some… pizzazz. I mean, what Henry calls ‘advertising’ is laughable.”
“He’s laughing all the way to the bank,” Jimpson said. “Literally.”
Gillavrey slumped into a chrome-and-leather chair at the teak conference table and lit a fresh Camel. He canted his shell cordovans up on the striated, orange wood surface and blew a perfect smoke ring at the ceiling. “I’m telling you, pal, three measly column inches a week in the Grenadier does not an advertising campaign make.”
John Jimpson watched his friend contemplatively French-inhale the unfiltered smoke. Son-of-a-bitch looks just like JFK, John thought. Right down to the Kennedy Swoop haircut. If he hadn’t bailed, he could have made it big in Hollywood by now.
“Six-point Times Roman. No artwork or even a logo,” Bob groused, “Lord, son, Union Guaranty’s ads are about as thrilling to read as Beowulf in the original Anglo-Saxon.”
“That’s why nobody reads them,” John Jimpson said. “Hell, I don’t even read them.”
“Face it, Jimp, bank copywriting’s a joke.” He tore off the paisley tie circling the neck of his striped Gant shirt and threw it on the table. “It’s like everybody’s looking over the other guy’s shoulder.” He shot John a coprophagous grin. “Yes sir, sports fans, slap a different bank name at the bottom and—voila!—another instantly forgettable bank ad.”
John scratched his head. “Banking’s not like Hollywood, Bob. People just want to know their money’s safe.”
Bob gritted his teeth. “Depression Era thinking, John. C’mon, we’re in a creative profession. Is this the best we can do?”
“It’s a wonder banks even advertise in the first place,” John said, pursing his lips sourly. “They already have a license to steal.”
“Amen to that.” Gillavrey paced the floor, puffs of Turkish tobacco smoke enveloping him like the pyrotechnics from The Wizard of Oz. “Look—basically there are only two variations to your local bank ad—the ‘We’re Just-Folks-Like-You’ approach and the ‘Friendliest Bank’ approach. You dig?”
John watched Bob’s eyes dance, their wryness reminding him of Mort Sahl’s during one of his hip tirades. “Go on.”
“See, in the ‘Just-Folks’ ads, you got these young, attractive bankers standing around at a construction site, sleeves rolled up. They’re holding their Brooks Brothers suit jackets over their shoulders with two fingers. Like this.”
Bob struck the pose.
“And they’re standing with some plumber the ad agency hired to play the construction foreman. The plumber is pointing to some blueprints and the young bankers are acting like they’re intensely interested in the progress of the construction they’re financing.”
“Yeah,” John chimed in, riffing on Bob’s setup. “And don’t forget the young bankers are all wearing yellow hard hats and horn-rimmed Steve Allen glasses. Like they’re ready to push a wheelbarrow around the construction site to help out.”
“Hahaha. Exactly.” Bob Gillavrey reached into a credenza drawer and produced a bottle of Wild Turkey. “Looks like we’re on a creative roll here. Want a belt?”
“Why not?” John said. He took the proffered Dixie Cup brimming with amber cheer and drank it down in one gulp. “Let’s get good and stinko. Henry’s easier to take if you’re half in the bag.”
“Very true, kemosabe.” Bob downed the bourbon, swishing it around in his mouth before swallowing it. A tight grimace spread across his face as the whiskey hit his belly.
John refilled his partner’s cup. “Cheers.”
Bob raised his Dixie Cup. “So, like I was telling you, in the other standard bank ad, you got these yahoo country bankers with their potbellies and bad haircuts standing around in the lobby with a bunch of young, cute female tellers in this—you know, Ogilvy Two display ad—and the headline reads: ‘We’re the Friendliest Bank in Town.’”
“Real state-of-the art bank marketing there, huh?”
“Indubitably.” Bob grinned and poured more liquid anodyne into John’s cup. “Make no mistake, amigo, deep Freudian cues are lurking in that ad.”
“I’m sure. Like what?”
Bob arched an eyebrow. “Like, ‘Hey folks, open an account at Bubba Bank and you just might get lucky with the cute female teller staff.’”
John Jimpson nodded in amusement and sipped his drink. He savored the bite of the whiskey and remembered the day he first met Bob Gillavrey.
They had been lunching on plates of pork barbeque at the bar of the Gar Hole restaurant in downtown Little Rock, and John asked the stranger next to him to pass the sauce.
“Bourbon or Scotch?”
“Sounds good. You pick.”
That was three months ago.
Bob told him that day of leaving Memphis at nineteen in hopes of becoming a stage actor in New York City. He had modest success Off-Broadway, starving for a few years in a cheap flat below Fourteenth Street on Avenue C before finally throwing in the towel and moving back home.
At Memphis State, Bob earned his English degree, married a coed from Little Rock, and moved there in 1958 to accept a TV anchorman job his theater experience and clean-cut good looks had secured him.
After years in front of the television cameras, Bob admitted to John that day he had lost his taste for local broadcast journalism and was casting about for a new career to get his creative juices flowing again.
After six hours of non-stop brainstorming at the Gar Hole—lunch turning into dinner, John suggested they strike out on their own.
Thus, the firm of Jimpson and Gillavrey had been born.
Bob would helm the creative side and John would be the rainmaker by virtue of his political and banking contacts. Soon, John’s familial connections landed them their first customer—the Union Guaranty Bank.
Today, they were poised to launch their first major ad campaign and were unanimous about the thrust of it: banks were just too stuffy.
Customers avoided banks as much as possible, so they both believed it was their job to make banking at the Union Guaranty Bank as much fun as possible, and to do that, they knew they would have to break a few rules.
Turns out, they broke every last one of them.
“Know what would be wild?” Bob Gillavrey said, his eyes darting beneath his whiskey-drooped eyelids.
“What?”
“We cook up a campaign that says, in effect, ‘Union Guaranty Bank is the complete opposite of your stuffy little local bank. We’re hip and not wedded to all the old banking stereotypes. We are to banks what Lennie Bruce is to the old Borscht Belt comic in the tuxedo and the one-liners.’”
“Unconventional,” John said. “Unbankerly.”
Bob’s eyes lit up and his hand traced a long horizontal line in the air in front of his face as he spoke. “The Unbank! Union Guaranty is the Unbank.”
The ideas started to flow fast.
“We get a hip spokesman,” Bob said. “Someone urban, well-known, and most of all, funny. Steve Allen or—”
“Why not Lennie Bruce himself?” John replied.
“Okay, I was thinking of a Jew, too, but Lennie’s too...blue.” Bob Gillavrey scratched his chin and brushed back the swoop of his forelocks. “What about that deadpan guy that’s always on Jack Paar? You know, he’s fat and he does that shtick— ‘I’m temporarily out of work. I’m a shepherd.’”
“Jackie Mason? No—Jackie Vernon.”
“Exactly!”
“I love that sad sack routine he does!” John’s face grew animated. “He doesn’t have to say anything and I’m laughing my ass off.”
“The Uncomic for the Unbank! God, it’s too perfect! The same understated tone as the Volkswagen ads the guys at Doyle Dane Bernbach used.”
“The Volksbank campaign!” John shouted, snapping his fingers.
“Naw. Too Nazi sounding. The Unbank’s better, and it piggybacks on the Seven-Up national ads to boot.”
“True,” John said. “People are already hip to the Uncola. Henry will go for that.”
John Jimpson knew Bob’s idea was a winner, but he wanted to take the Unbank one step farther than mere sloganeering. John wanted Disneyland-on-the-Arkansas-River.
“People like to have fun in their free time,” John said, his mind racing as he spitballed ideas. “So why not turn all those expensive bank facilities into a weekend theme park? Elegant restaurants in the executive suite, rock and roll bands in the bank lobby every weekend, a private club on the top floor for high-net worth individuals, and free drive-in movies in the bank parking lot for the rest of the customers to generate concession stand revenue.”
“Well…yeah,” Bob said. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet.”
“Not get ahead of ourselves?” John snapped. “Wake up, amigo—it’s a perfect fit. You got one-hundred percent utilization of the bank’s valuable real estate around the clock. Earning money just like a U.S. Treasury bond in the investment portfolio!”
“You think Henry will spring for all that?” Bob said. “I mean, what you’re talking about is going to cost mucho denario, partner. Face it, philanthropy is not Henry’s best quality.”
“Leave Henry to me,” John said. “When he sees how much there is to gain, he’ll spring for it like a Jack-in-the-Box.”
Chapter 2
Unwelcome Usurpation
“For God’s sake!” Henry Potts bellowed. “What do you two think I’m running here? Disneyland?”
The old man paced behind his ornate, hand-carved executive desk.
“No, Henry, of course not, but—” Bob Gillavrey stopped short when John nudged him.
“But nothing.” Henry glared at the two ad men. “What I’m running here is a ‘HenryPottsland.’ We got us a big pond full of sitting ducks, boys. Fat, dumb sitting ducks.” Potts was a skinny, wrinkled, bald man in his mid-sixties whose sallow, liver-spotted face wore a perpetual frown. “Now, you two idiots are champing at the bit to flush them.”
“No, Henry, we’re not,” John Jimpson said in a calm voice. “All we’re trying to do is get the customers of the other banks to move their bank accounts to us.”
“And I’m telling you that they’re not going to do that unless we appeal to their irrational instincts.”
“What you mean,” John said with a wink, “is trick them.”
“Call it what you will.” Henry shrugged. “As far as I’m concerned, we appeal to weakness. The Seven Deadly Sins. Look, only two of the Seven Deadly Sins compel people to change banks—envy and greed. Let’s use them to our advantage. Use this damn Unbank idea of yours to make us a big asspocket full of money. I’m talking about OPM, boys.”
“Opium?” Bob Gillavrey said, aghast. “Geez, Henry! Narcotics?”
Henry laughed and slapped his knee. “You haven’t been around banking very long, have you, son?” He shook his head. “O. P. M. As in ‘Other People’s Money?’”
“Oh.” Bob swallowed hard.
Henry stared at them for a long moment. To him, “other people’s money” was what banking was all about. OPM existed for only one purpose. To filch.
John jumped into the fray. “Admit it, Henry, we do need to roll out something big for the Grand Opening of the Union Guaranty Plaza, the tallest building in Arkansas.”
“You mean, ‘The Grand ‘Unopening,’’” Bob Gillavrey said with a grin.
Henry’s eyes burned and he clenched his teeth.
“Look, Henry,” John said, breaking the thick silence. “Just give us a couple weeks to flesh out the Unbank campaign. If it doesn’t fly with you then, we’ll go back to square one.”
“You got two weeks.”
The old banker spat out the words like they were broken glass.
***
Through old theater friends in New York, Bob contacted Jackie Vernon and, in a whirlwind two weeks, produced a series of pilot spots with the deadpan comedian playing a tone-deaf trumpeter.
Going table to table like a crazed Levantine mariachi, Vernon blew his tuneless, unwelcome trumpet and then grabbed the lapels of the stunned restaurant patrons to praise the Unbank. Bob staged the ad against a stark, white background as though it were an absurdist play. Everyone previewing the spots produced by the Jimpson and Gillavrey Agency thought they were brilliant.
Everyone except Henry Potts.
* * *
“Drop the TV spots with that fat New York Jew,” he told them after the screening. “Television is too expensive and nobody down here will get those ads.”
Bob shot an incredulous glance at John.
“Henry,” John said, his face reddening, “these are compelling spots. At least give them a chance. The feedback we’re getting is terrific and—”
“Look,” Bob broke in, “the very essence of the Unbank institutional promotion is its shock value. I promise you, Henry, these spots will have people scratching their heads and talking about them around the water cooler. We’ll get a strong word-of-mouth response that will generate top-of-mind awareness all over Arkansas. Not just retail customers but correspondent banking clients, too.”
“In your dreams, actor-boy.”
Bob ran his fingers through his hair and then punched his palm for emphasis. “Dammit, Henry, I promise you the ‘Unbank’ campaign will do the same thing for Union Guaranty that the ‘Uncola’ did for Seven-Up.”
“I highly doubt it,” Henry Potts said, his scorn obvious. “What’s going to happen, Gillavrey, is people will scratch their heads and say: ‘I don’t get it—a fat guy with a trumpet?’” He threw his head back and hooted. “My God, I’ll be the laughing stock of Central Arkansas. I can just hear my friends at the Little Rock Country Club now,” he said, twirling his index finger at his head. “‘Ol’ Henry’s gone clean around the bend.’”
“Television is the best way to capture the mass market audience, Henry,” Bob said. “The numbers bear it out.”
“Hah!” The old man smirked. “The best way to ‘capture’ the mass market, dumb ass, is to play it cheap, stir up class envy, and fool the damn yokels into thinking they are getting a better deal than they really are.”
“I don’t appreciate your tone, Henry,” Bob said, his eyes narrowing. “That was out of line.”
“I don’t give a damn what you ‘don’t appreciate,’” Potts said. “Understand one thing, Gillavrey—I call the shots, not you and John.” Henry Potts waved his hand dismissively. “I mean, I know why you two really want these TV spots to run—to get your damn fifteen-percent commission from the television stations.”
“I give up,” Bob said, eyeing John Jimpson.
“Henry, it’s not the Great Depression anymore, for God’s sake!” John said.
“To poor people, it’s always a depression, son,” Henry replied. “Look, most folks are poor, okay? So naturally they hate the rich, especially us bankers,” Henry said. “Why not use that? Make customers think the other banks are screwing them over—not paying ‘em diddly for their deposits. But wait—here comes ‘the Unbank’! And we don’t look like a high-falutin’ snobby place; we look like a bargain-basement fire sale, and we pay them a lot more interest than they can get from the blueblood banks. I promise you, class envy and good ol’ fashion greed have folks falling all over themselves to move their accounts to us.”
Bob Gillavrey’s lips fused into a taut line. “But, Henry—”
Henry saw John shake his head at Bob as if to say, “Save your ammo.”
“Remember what the Kingfish did in Louisiana,” Henry said. “He attacked greedy ol’ Standard Oil. Something along the lines of ‘We ain’t gonna tax you, friends, and we ain’t gonna tax me. We gonna tax that Standard Oil man hiding behind the tree.’”
John Jimpson rubbed his temples with both hands. “I just don’t think that approach will generate enough interest to do any good, Henry.”
“Hell, boys, we’re talking about giving them almost a half-percent more on their savings accounts!” Henry ranted. “Pretty soon, the boobs add it up—the Jones’s are driving Buicks while they’re still driving Plymouths.”
“What about Regulation Q?” John asked. “I thought the most the Feds let us pay was 5.5%?”
“Clearly, you geniuses don’t understand the beauty of continuously compounded interest.”
John squinted. “Is that legal?”
“What do I look like?” Henry Potts said, arms wide. “A lawyer?
“Fine, Henry,” John Jimpson said, shaking his head. “Have it your way, then. That’s just where you and I disagree. We’ll talk about it again after a good night’s sleep. Let’s go, Bob.”
Henry saw Bob’s face reddened and his fists clench. The old man noticed his son-in-law cast a cautionary glance at his advertising partner that seemed to say: “Cool it. I’ll finesse the old man later.”
Bob took a deep breath and followed John out of the office.
As Potts watched the two men exit his spacious, luxuriously appointed Executive Suite chamber in the Union Guaranty Bank tower, he took no small modicum of pleasure from the devastation he had caused the two.
Battlefield surgery on their beloved Unbank brainchild, Potts thought. Hah! Those two boys live in a fool’s paradise.
Strange as it might seem, Henry actually did like the “Unbank” idea well enough, although not because of his son-in-law’s quirky vision.
He liked it because it provided the perfect smokescreen.
People were stupid children, Henry knew. Promise them a Shetland pony but deliver a cheap picture postcard of one.
All legal. All sophistry. All very profitable.
God, it’s good to be King, Henry Potts thought.
***
“The Unbank! Bedrock Banking Means Higher Rates for You.”
Billboard signage for the Unbank campaign went live in the spring of 1968 all over Little Rock. The word “Unbank” was fonted in blocky Stonehenge granite characters receding to the central perspective vanishing point like in the movie poster for Ben-Hur.
The only creative input Henry Potts had permitted the firm of Jimpson and Gillavrey was designing the stone-carved font face for the billboard.
The Unbank campaign, in Potts’s mind, was simply a ruse to trick his customers into thinking the bank could pay the highest rates in town due to Union Guaranty’s fiscal frugality and the mythology of compound interest. Thus, in contrast to the “virtuous” Unbank, his competitors would appears as stingy, closed-minded snobs living the high life on the hard-earned deposits of their customers but too miserly to give them a fair rate of return.
He smiled. Union Guaranty would become Huey Long and the other banks Standard Oil. Henry would strip down the institution to bare bones. The Unbank “look” would be spare and functional. Customers seeing the gutted bank facilities would know immediately why the Unbank could pay higher rates.
No expensive antique furniture. No sumptuous lobbies with expensive art. Just basic banking and high savings interest rates. Yet, more importantly, wearing the hair shirt of austerity, Henry Potts knew, would provide a convenient smokescreen to hide his looting of Union Guaranty from the inside.
Henry proceeded to sell off bank furniture and fixtures to his contractor brother, Oleander Potts, who sold prefurnished “luxury” homes to the upwardly mobile middle-class flocking to West Little Rock. “Project an ‘Everything must go!’ mentality to the public,” Henry had instructed Oleander, who promptly stripped out the bank’s expensive paneling, marble façades, paintings, sculpture, and antique furniture and replaced them with war-surplus grey desks, linoleum, and painted sheet rock walls.
Naturally, Henry got kickbacks from Oleander just as he had gotten a “taste” from the fake floor-planning loans to car dealers like Dewitt Sebastian and also wet his beak on the brokered commercial loans he fobbed off on the country correspondent banks.
God, Henry told himself. This Unbank deal is a damn bird nest on the ground.