[FRIAM] (not) leaving Twitter

[David Eric Smith]

On Nov 17, 2022, at 12:23 PM, Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org> wrote:
> 
> The old Los Alamos National Bank, LANB, was founded by a LANL scientist as an antidote to big-bank homogenization.  There are still hints of that origin in https://www.linkedin.com/company/los-alamos-national-bank/ <https://www.linkedin.com/company/los-alamos-national-bank/>, but LANB sold itself out to a big bank several years ago.

Yeah, btw, that really sucked.

I got to know LANB when I had first moved to Los Alamos, was getting around only on foot, and was there sitting on their curb on a morning before work waiting for them to open.

Some guy in a suit came by and asked if he could help me, and I said something snotty and completely uncalled-for about bankers working bankers hours.  So he let me in and started the opening of an account for me.  That was Bill Enloe.

A few years later I needed a mortgage loan for a house, had just lost something like 100k in two days on a Pharma that didn’t get a good outcome on a clinical trial, which I had wanted to have for collateral, and could not sell a house in Austin that I was in because I had a renter who had just lost his job in the market downturn, and I wasn’t willing to throw him out, even as the house lost about 1k in market value per week as the whole market there was falling apart too.  Then got Salmonella or something from an egg sandwich in the ABQ airport flying back from somewhere (Austin?) to make the loan.  People who knew me said they had never seen anyone as white as I apparently was for several days after the first 24 hours of violent illness.  I went to the loan officer’s office, and after about a minute sitting there talking to her, asked if I could lie on my back on her floor while we spoke so I wouldn’t pass out.  Finished the loan negotiations in that form.  When my realtor asked to look through the various papers as part of negotiating the closure, he commented “man, you got a really good loan”.  I will protect the loan officer's name for her own privacy, but remember it instantly in any context.

In the decades after that, I spent increasing time with George Cowan at work and sometimes off-line, and got to learn a little more about the history of that effort, along with some of his others.  What an extraordinary guy he was, and it showed in the things he built.  He richly deserved the Baldridge award, and much more.

The bank that acquired them does not have that kind of history, I think.

Those kinds of proud relations have always been rare, and they seem to be damned near extinct any more.

Eric



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