Banking: Young Bill's Battle

Coming from the staid First National Bank of Denver, the biggest bank in the six-state Rocky Mountain region (assets: $530 million), last month's outburst was an eyebrow raiser. Calling the first press conference in the bank's 108-year history, President Eugene H. Adams declared that "We are very mad about this situation." Next day First National further vented its anger by placing full-page newspaper ads to denounce what it described as a "blatant, selfish attempt of a part-time Coloradan turned New York Wall Street raider to take over."

Object of the unbankerly attack was a 29-year-old, Yale-educated multimillionaire named William Mathews White Jr., a bachelor who tools around Denver in a fire-engine red International Scout, acts on the belief that "the only people who are ever heard are those who stand above the crowd and shout."

A vice president of Manhattan's Allen & Co. investment banking firm, White made himself heard back home in Denver in 1964 by parlaying $100,000 of his own money into control of Colorado Milling & Elevator Co. He then shook up Denver's old guard with some financial wizardry that enabled him to take over the venerable Great Western Sugar Co. He has since merged his two companies into the Great Western United Corp., a diversified $259 million-a-year food products firm, of which he is both chairman and president.

Disruptive Influence. The young entrepreneur's differences with the First National stem from the fact that both his grandfather and father were directors and prime movers of the bank. When William White Sr. died in 1966, First National pointedly passed over his two sons in filling the vacant directorship, even though the White family held a major interest in the bank.

Determined to remedy that oversight, Bill White became embroiled with First National after it decided to form a holding company, a step that two rival Denver banks had already taken as a way of circumventing a Colorado law prohibiting branch banking. When the Whites suggested last month that five family-owned banks in southern Colorado be included in the holding company, called the First National Bancorporation, the bank replied that it would consider the request only after the new company went into operation.

That was not soon enough for the Whites. Pointing to its 24% stock holding, the family demanded "pro rata representation," presumably meaning at least six seats, on the bank's 25-member board. First National countered by offering the family two seats, specified that both be filled by family representatives other than Bill White. "Young Bill is a very smart man," explains First National Chairman Montgomery Dorsey, 67. "But he doesn't have the maturity of judgment or outlook to go with his brilliance." Adds Adams: "We feel that he would be a disruptive influence on the board."