After Forty Years.

In the space of about 48 hours in early May, the KBA staff gathered to celebrate my 40th anniversary with the KBA — with my favorite caramel cake from Sweet Stuff — and later we gathered to share the news it would be my last. We reminisced about the 35 years that some of us have worked together, and we took stock of where we are today as an association and staff. I’m not ashamed to admit that most of the tears were mine.

How do you leave the people you love behind? I intend never to find out. When you spend as much or more time with colleagues as you do with your family, that’s what they become. Our kids were in their teens before they figured out Miriam Cole was not their biological kin. Those bonds endure. After five years of making his own place within our association family, Tim Schenk enables me to go with the peace of knowing that our staff and industry were well served by our succession planning.

I’m sharing here a little of what was shared with our staff in these meetings.

My love for our industry and the KBA is bound up in the pride I’ve always felt to represent you. It matters that you’re ranked in the top 10% of banks with the FDIC for performance ratios. But nothing counts for more than your civic virtues, for being the backbone of your communities and supporting every good cause with your money and your time, from the CEO’s to the janitors. Without you, most communities wouldn’t exist much less flourish.

I will never forget how you stepped up to fund relief to the victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a remarkable act of philanthropy that continues to this day. Our fund for bankers in major disasters, as they perform the work of first responders, was there to make a difference when tornadoes and floods devastated both ends of our state. As with many other things we’ve built together, that model is being emulated by other states.

My pride was also a belief in our cause. For 40 years, I’ve been able to say, “I represent the Kentucky bankers” with the conviction that whatever I fought to achieve for you was also in the best interest of our Commonwealth. I’ve never met a banker that didn’t want to do the right thing, in any category. And you were always right there in every trench. We didn’t win them all, but you never failed to show up for the fight. That makes Kentucky bankers rare among all those who advocate in the halls of state or federal government.

With our staff, I recalled some of our historic victories. We have interstate banking because Kentucky bankers, along with bankers from several other states, persuaded Congress — with the critical support of KY Senator Wendell Ford — to put “entry by acquisition only” in the statutory language so our banks could preserve their franchise value. Banks have the right to sell insurance because a bank in Paintsville stepped up to be the plaintiff in a court battle that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which we won. We changed our industry’s state tax structure from a franchise to an income tax, when everyone in Frankfort said we didn’t stand a chance. Your persistence proved them wrong.

Then we talked about the ‘skirmishes’ that are more easily forgotten, the times competing interests tried to inflict unnecessary costs on us or to take away some of our services to our communities. Thanks to the relationships you cultivated with your legislators, our lobbying team was able to win more of those defensive melees than we can count.

Perhaps the moment for which we’ll be remembered longest in our communities was our part in the pandemic response. In the midst of unprecedented national panic, KY bankers worked around the clock for weeks to distribute the federal funds that saved small businesses and jobs. The late Debra Stamper, as KBA General Counsel, was also working around the clock to become an expert on the fluid PPP guidelines, sharing her work with bankers across the nation who dubbed her the Queen of Covid.

Few of today’s KBA members have their own memories of the past four decades. Those of us who do can offer some assurances to those of us who don’t. The long and remarkable history of KBA success is rooted in our members living out the virtues of community banking. We’ve never known a time in all those decades when we weren’t being buffeted by destabilizing winds of change. At times, the KBA had to act without unanimous agreement on the best way forward, and those were the worst of times for me. But our members had the wisdom to know that united we stand, divided we fall. That history may yet be our safest path into the future.