Ben Love: My Life in Texas Commerce

Acknowledgments

acknowledgments This book would not have been written without Joe Pratt, Cullen Professor of History and Business at the University of Houston. He and Walter Buenger wrote the history of Texas Commerce Bancshares in the 1980s, and the resulting book (Walter L. Buenger and Joseph A. Pratt, But Also Good Business: Texas Commerce Banks and the Financing of Houston and Texas, 1886 –1986, Texas A&M University Press, 1986) pleased us all. During that project, Joe said that my life would be instructive for young people going into business, a thought I initially dismissed. Then he encouraged one of his graduate studentsinthehistorydepartmentattheUniversityofHouston ,LydiaOsadchey, to begin to write my biography as the topic of her master’s thesis. I agreed to be interviewed numerous times, and in the course of these sessions, Joe again took up the theme that my life story would be instructive for young people. I finally gave in. With that, work began on a project that was increasingly to dominate my life. Several years into this labor, when family circumstances forced Lydia to lay down her work, Barbara Eaves picked it up, completed the research, and joined with Joe to help me draft and revise several versions of what had become my autobiography. If the book would not have been started without Joe Pratt, it would not have been finished without Barbara. She gained insight into the bank and an understanding of its place within the community during her twenty-three years as manager of employee communications at Texas Commerce. She was uniquely qualified for the job. She is a writer, she knew the bank, and she knew the players. When the first draft was completed, Bruce LaBoon, managing partner of the Liddell Sapp Zivley & LaBoon law firm (now Locke Liddell & Sapp), and a man who, in the troubled days of the mid-1980s, traded a successful law practice for a bank executive salary, again gave (literally) the bank his professional skills. He carefully read the manuscript and offered invaluable advice and encouragement for which I am very grateful. Jody Grant helped formulate our original merger policy; Walter Buenger helped write the centennial history of Texas Commerce. Both read the full manuscript and tactfully made suggestions that vastly improved the overall readability of the book. Photographer Joe Aker, who was Texas Commerce’s virtual in-house photographer during the 1980s, not only opened his huge, well-organized files of negatives to us, but also converted the pictures we chose from his collection and others from our own scrapbooks into the format requested by Texas A&M University Press. Scores of other colleagues, customers, directors, business leaders, civic leaders, and friends spent countless hours answering questions, verifying dates, and digging up snapshots, for which I will be eternally grateful. Finally, my boundless appreciation goes to my wife, Margaret, for a beyond-wifely, lifetime partnership that began when she learned to keep books at Gift-Raps and later positively entered into participating actively in the nightly social life of the wife of a bank CEO while mothering three children , Jeff, Jan, and Julie. Many times, it would have been easy for Margaret to say, “No more!” But she never did. She was a real trouper and she still is. Ben F. Love viii ★ Acknowledgments ...