"We're here tonight to honor my friend and partner Ben Mitchell as Banker of the Year," Perry Bergen intoned from the dais to applause from the audience in the ballroom of the Palace Hotel.
Sitting at the head table just to the right of the podium, Ben tried to look simultaneously humble and gratified. The truth was that he'd rather be almost anywhere else that night. Recognition and publicity made him intensely uncomfortable. Yet he had to admit that it felt pretty good to be celebrated for the dream that he'd striven so hard to make a reality. "At least," he rationalized, "it's good publicity for CFB."
The Community First Bank was an idea that he'd been developing and refining ever since college. Instead of creating a bank that would vie for large corporate accounts, Ben had based his business model on serving individuals and families. "Investing in People" was the bank's slogan.
Many people had told him that retail banking was dead. In fact, when he'd submitted his idea in the form of a paper for his Banking and Finance course in college, the professor had given him a failing grade because "your idea will never work." Even Perry Bergen, the Finance major who had become his friend, had his doubts. Basically everyone hated his plan except the people in the community who were his target customers. In an age of impersonality, they loved the personal service Ben offered. They took advantage of his small business loans and personal lines of credit, and repaid his faith with a remarkably low default rate.
The result had been that Ben's bank, which he had idealistically named the Community First Bank, turned a profit well ahead of its forecast, growing at a rate that had amazed industry analysts. Now the word was that it was only a matter of time before one of the big boys came knocking with an offer to acquire the bank. Such a buy-out would have been extremely lucrative for Ben, but he had no interest in selling out because he believed so strongly in what he was doing.
As Perry's speech droned on, his wife slipped back into her seat beside him and handed him a cup of coffee. Ben smiled and gave her a quick kiss in gratitude. His addiction to caffeine was almost his trademark - he was never without a cup or mug in front of him.
"Of course, it hasn't always been easy for Ben," Perry continued from the podium. "He's faced major challenges along the way."
Hearing Perry's words, Ben thought somberly, "They don't know the half of it!"
Growing up, Ben Mitchell had made three major decisions about his life. Teenagers frequently make such decisions, but unlike most Ben actually kept his.
His first big decision was to avoid alcohol in all forms. The reason for this was simple: his mother was an alcoholic. While Ben was still in grammar school, she had managed to function fairly well. She wouldn't start her drinking until dinner; then she kept going until she would fall asleep and Ben's father carried her off to bed.
Gradually, though, drinks with dinner grew into cocktails over lunch. Once that became the norm, Ben had quickly learned to avoid her as much as possible in the afternoons. He'd never forgotten the time he hadn't eaten all the chili she'd prepared for lunch and she'd drunkenly thrown the rest of it in his face.
His father was not oblivious to the problem and had tried repeatedly to change the course of his wife's downward spiral. He'd taken her liquor bottles and poured the contents down the drain; she simply became more resourceful at hiding her booze. He'd taken her spending money away; she replaced it with the grocery money.
When interventions and counseling sessions failed, Ben's father was forced to accept the truth that he couldn't save his wife unless she helped. Unfortunately, she adamantly refused to admit that she had a problem. So his Dad shifted his attention to Ben, focusing on protecting his son as much as possible from the side-effects of his mother's illness.
Although he had a promising career at the bank where he worked, Ben's father turned down several promotions in order to remain at the bank branch near their home. He wanted to be close to his son in case he was needed. There had been several occasions when Ben's mother had forgotten to pick Ben up from school. Later, when her driving became problematic, Ben's father sold her car and Ben began riding the school bus.
His father's precautions paid off the day that Ben came home from middle school to find the front door wide open and their house empty. Tearfully he had called his father, who rushed home to be with his son. After a futile search of the area, the father called the police. It was three days before they found her, sleeping in a homeless shelter downtown. Even worse, she refused to come home, a decision that hurt both father and son, though in different ways.
Ben's mother never did return home. A year later, police found his mother unconscious under a bridge. By then Ben's father had divorced her for abandonment. But she was still Ben's mother, so father and son went to see her in the charity ward where she was being treated. Ben would never forget what a person dying from cirrhosis of the liver looked like, and he swore never to touch alcohol as long as he lived. Instead, coffee became his drink of choice, and he was seldom seen without a mug in front of him.
Ben's second major decision had been to become a banker like his father. His Dad had always been a major influence, and as his mother began to withdraw from Ben's life, his father became that much more important. So it was little surprise that Ben decided to be like his Dad when he grew up.
But the path to get there had not been straightforward. During his teenage years Ben rebelled against his father like so many teenagers do. It was during Ben's first year in college that things came to a head.
Ben was attending the local branch of the state college and living at home to save money. His Dad expected Ben to follow the same rules he'd had during high school, and Ben resented the lack of freedom. Having lost his wife, Ben's father, not surprisingly, was overprotective of his son.
After a semester filled with tension, the conflict came to a head during the holidays. Already chafing under his father's restrictions, Ben's feelings catalyzed when news of a banking scandal hit the papers. That was all the idealistic young man needed to decide that his father was part of a bankers' plot to oppress the nation's poor.
To dramatize his disdain, Ben boldly declared that he would not observe any holiday festivities because the season was just a capitalist conspiracy between retailers and bankers that took advantage of the gullibility of the poor. Instead of arguing, Ben's father ordered his son into the car on Christmas Day and drove him through one of the poorer sections of the town. He slowed down and pointed toward a small home on one side of the street. "See that home? I arranged the loan that helped the owner to buy that house," he told his son.
"But it's a crummy little house in a terrible neighborhood," Ben exclaimed.
"Maybe so," his father acknowledged, "but it's his home and he works hard to keep it up. More importantly, he's building equity, which means that with any luck he'll get the money he's put into it back and make a little profit to boot. Isn't that worth something to him?"
Twisting and turning through the streets of the neighborhood, his Dad took Ben by a home with a three-year-old car sitting in the driveway. "I helped loan the woman who lives there enough to buy that car," he told Ben proudly.
"So she bought a used car, so what? That just means she has a car note to pay along with all her other bills," Ben sniped.
His father nodded gravely. "That's right, Ben, but buying that car meant that she could get a better job across town, and that meant more money for her family. And here's another thing: if she had financed her car through the dealer instead of with our bank, she'd probably be paying significantly more each month."
At the next house they passed, a large tow truck sat in the driveway. "Our bank loaned him the money to buy that truck several years ago. Now he has his own towing business, and since he got on with AAA he's making a good living for his family. Sure the bank charges interest on the loan, but I don't think we're exploiting him. That loan means that he's got a chance to make something of himself."
After he'd pointed out several similar examples, Ben's father turned their car back toward their home. "Banking and lending are like anything else, they can do good or harm," he told his son. "But done fairly and honestly, banking is a lever that can help people do more than they thought was possible."
Ben said nothing on the ride back, but it was clear to his father that his son was thinking about what he'd seen. Sure enough, the next semester Ben switched his major to Business and began taking courses in banking and finance. Later he would tell people that the ride on Christmas Day had been the thing that helped him commit to that path.
That same excursion also helped change Ben's perspective on his father. Before he'd seen his Dad as an inflexible parental figure who didn't understand his son's needs. But hearing his father's enthusiasm for his work gave Ben a new insight into his father's personality. At first Ben merely asked his father questions about banking and his work at the office. After a while he began to seek his Dad's opinions on a variety of subjects. Finally, he dared to ask about his mother, and he learned about his Dad's carefully concealed pain and the shame he felt in not being able to save his wife from her addiction.
This new closeness between father and son was something that Ben cherished, and he was even more grateful when, during Ben's sophomore year in college, his father had a massive heart attack and passed away. Ben's sense of loss was at least partially mitigated by the closeness he'd developed with his father in the last year of his life.
After the funeral, Ben found he had even more reason to be grateful to his father when he learned that he was the beneficiary of a substantial life insurance policy. There was enough money to allow Ben to finish college and start his career with a nice nest egg left over. Many young men would have been tempted to travel the world and enjoy life to the fullest before settling down to work. Ben had other plans. The nest egg his father had provided became the seed money to fund Ben's dream: starting his own bank. It also enabled Ben to pursue the third decision he'd made.
Ben had made that decision back in his sophomore year in high school. He had signed up for a community service project at his school, and on the day that the group of student volunteers met for the first time, he saw Elizabeth Pearson. Afterwards, he couldn't say exactly what had happened, but he was so overwhelmed by the sight of her that he didn't hear the sponsor of the group call on him. The other kids laughed and Elizabeth had turned to look at him as well. Ben blushed furiously and looked down at the sign-up sheet in front of him. When he finally dared to look up, he found Elizabeth still looking at him with a strange expression on her face.
