BANKING: Individualist

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BANKING Individualist

One trouble with banks is that they all have vacuous names, stone fronts, impenetrable vaults, courteous tellers, identical services. In Pasadena, Calif, the president of First Trust & Savings Bank (assets: $16,331,000), tall, easy, white-haired James S. (for Smellie) MacDonnell, now 62, long ago found a way to kick his bank into the public eye. In 1917, as cashier, he won local fame by writing persuasive ads for the Liberty Loan and Red Cross drives. Since then, as president, he has sporadically taken advertising space in the Pasadena Post and Star News (morning and evening twins of conservative Pasadena Publisher Charles Henry Prisk). To write his copy, Banker MacDonnell retires to his handsome office and there composes his editorials on public affairs.

Onetime newspaperman (for two years Parliamentary correspondent for the Montreal Gazette), Banker MacDonnell is no amateur, no fuddy-duddy. After Munich last year he composed 36 lines of blank verse on Chamberlain. Excerpt: . . . the butt of every neutral gibe; And stupid in the eyes of arrogance. . . . He took a great, intrepid, lonely step, Biding his time amid the arctic night Of calumny and ridicule and fear, With little company. . . .

Lately, Author MacDonnell has gained notice for himself (and bank) by a blank-verse stand against isolation: "For twelve months past we have called Great Britain coward, traitor, dolt, because she did not jump into a war. We chalked her down a third-rate power, we pilloried appeasement, we covered her with lavish scorn—too old and dead to fight; and when at last she draws the sword, we turn our backs. ..."

The institutional part of these advertisements is confined to this signature: "J. MacDonnell, President, First Trust & Savings Bank of Pasadena." Nothing more.

Says he, loquaciously: "After all, a corporation is considered a person, so there is no reason why it shouldn't have a personality. And since advertising is news, it ought to deal with current topics." Of his poetry: "I've been sticking my neck out with that stuff, but apparently I got away with it."