The roster of people who got their start working for Ben Love during his nearly two decades as chairman and chief executive officer of the old Texas Commerce Bancshares reads like a who's who in banking and politics.
It includes Florida Gov. Jeb Bush; Eduardo Aguirre, the U.S. ambassador to Spain; Richard Hickson, the chairman and chief executive of Trustmark Corp. in Jackson, Miss.; Scott McLean, the president of Amegy Bank; and Joseph "Jody" Grant, the chairman and CEO of Texas Capital Bancshares Inc. of Dallas.
Mr. Grant seemed to be speaking for many Texas Commerce alumni when he called Mr. Love, who died of cancer Jan. 13 at age 81, "the best leader I ever worked for" - and Mr. Grant began his banking career under the legendary Walter Wriston at Citibank.
Mr. Love had "great stature, in terms of raw IQ and intellect," and "was the smartest person I ever worked for," Mr. Grant said.
He said that to this day he applies Mr. Love's teachings. In a letter he wrote to Mr. Love a few days before his death, he noted that in many ways he modeled Texas Capital, which he founded in 1997, after Texas Commerce.
"It is no accident that our acronym is TCB," Mr. Grant wrote.
Mr. Hickson called Mr. Love "the reason I am where I am today.
"I came to Texas Commerce at age 34, and he was my first exposure to what I would call exceptionally strong leadership," said Mr. Hickson, who is now 61. "He was extremely charismatic and intelligent. When he came into a room it was like radar. Everyone just turned to him."
Mr. Love led a remarkable life. He grew up on a hardscrabble cotton farm in northeast Texas during the Depression, flew 29 bomber raids over Europe in World War II, and built a highly profitable paper company from scratch before selling it to Gibson Greeting Cards in 1962.
Banking was his second career, and he made an extraordinary success of it.
"In my view he was an icon," said Walter Johnson, Amegy Bank's chairman and a longtime competitor of Mr. Love's.
"I don't think I ever hired anyone away from Texas Commerce," said Mr. Johnson, who was the president of Allied Bank of Texas in Houston from 1964 to 1989. "They loved Ben Love as their leader and they did not want to leave him." (Amegy, of Houston, was sold to Zions Bancorp. in December, but its name and management team have been retained.)
Other banks rarely stole Texas Commerce's customers, either.
"If you could get Ben Love in a room with a customer he would rope them and lasso them in good fashion," Mr. Hickson said. "If we knew we were about to lose someone, we would call in Ben."
Mr. Love headed Texas Commerce from 1972 to 1987, building it into one of the state's largest banking companies, with $19 billion of assets, and one of the country's most profitable, before selling it to Chemical Banking Corp. for $1.1 billion. At the time it was the largest-ever U.S. bank merger.
Mr. Love stayed on for two more years as Texas Commerce's chairman. (Chase Manhattan Corp., which bought Chemical in 1995, changed Texas Commerce's name to Chase Bank of Texas in 1998 and merged it into its flagship subsidiary two years later.)
After retiring from banking, Mr. Love remained an active civic leader and philanthropist, earning the moniker "Mr. Houston" for his tireless efforts on behalf of his adopted hometown.
He spent much of his time in the last few years before his death writing his memoirs, and his 313-page autobiography, "Ben Love: My Life in Texas Commerce," was published in October by Texas A&M University Press.
As he recounted in his book, the Texas Commerce he joined in April 1967 as a vice president had little in common with today's banks. It had no organizational charts or job descriptions, no annual budgets, and its bankers did not call on businesses.
Mr. Love changed all that. One of his chief reforms was to start a program having Texas Commerce's loan officers visit business owners in their offices to pitch loans.
It is a universal feature of banking today, but in the late 1960s it was revolutionary, and it landed Mr. Love in hot water with his boss.
CEO John Whitmore's attitude was "any customer worth having will come to us," Mr. Love wrote. He reprimanded Mr. Love but allowed the calling program to continue on a trial basis. Later he extended it throughout the company.
Mr. Grant, the author of "The Great Texas Banking Crash," published in 1996, said Mr. Love's book also provides another valuable insider's account of the turmoil that beset the state in the 1980s, when the meltdowns of its energy and real estate industries caused hundreds of bank and thrift failures.
Mr. Love, who as a boy watched the cotton-trading business his father worked for go bust in the early 1930s, sold Texas Commerce before the worst of the storm hit in the '80s; it was one of only two Texas big banks that survived. (Allied was the other. It was sold to First Interstate Bancorp of Los Angeles in 1988.)
The final chapter of Mr. Love's book is a compilation of "lessons learned." He wrote about his approach to strategic planning, nurturing young executives, measuring progress, and communicating with a company's various constituencies.
"This is Mr. Love at his best," Mr. Grant wrote in an unpublished review, calling the concluding chapter "the highlight of the manuscript."
"It is full of lessons that are clear in logic, tested by experience and presented with example," the review continues. "These will resonate with young people seeking successful careers … or just a self-fulfilling life."
Mr. Grant, who was hired as Texas Commerce's economist, recalled his former mentor's steel-trap memory.
"We had a weekly officers meeting and I would always give an update," he said. "A month later, Ben would cite some number I had reported right down to the decimal point."
Mr. Hickson said Mr. Love was the one who put him on the path to becoming a bank CEO. He still remembers the day in 1979 that Mr. Love told him he wanted him to run one of Texas Commerce's subsidiary banks.
"He called me and said, 'Richard, everybody needs a friend at some point in their lives, and I'm going to be yours today. I want you to go to El Paso and learn how to run a bank.' It turned out to be one of the best moves I ever made - but Mr. Love knew that when he called me."
Amegy's Mr. Johnson recalled something else about Texas Commerce's culture under Mr. Love.
"They were always the sharpest dressers," he said of the Texas Commerce bankers. "You would stand them up and they would look like a bunch of penguins in their black suits and red ties - but you could not get a customer away from Texas Commerce."
