Pub. 12 2015 Issue 1

O V E R A C E N T U R Y : B U I L D I N G B E T T E R B A N K S - H E L P I N G N E W M E X I C O R E A L I Z E D R E A M S 6 “I believe that the best day you can have is one where you make someone else feel better.” PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE KEN CLAYTON NMBA PRESIDENT Western Bank, Artesia S everal months ago, I was asked by the American Bankers Association to be a speaker at the February 2015 ABA National Conference of Community Banks in Boca Raton, Florida. I was both incredibly honored and overwhelmed to accept the invitation. I am a community banker and proud of it, so that was the theme of my presentation. I wanted to share with you a few of the comments I made to the audience (1,000 plus participants) about my “American Dream”. I am president of Western Bank, a $185,000,000 one bank-bank in Artesia, NM. With no branches and located in a town of 12,000, we consider ourselves the true definition of a community bank. I was raised in Petrolia, PA, a town of only 300 people. If you did any- thing wrong, your mother knew about it well be- fore you got home. My mom raised three boys on her own. She taught us at an early age that just because you don’t have a lot of money, that doesn’t mean you are poor. Only my mother could have envisioned her three sons becoming a banker, engineer and a Marine Corps Major respectively. Growing up in a small town, we assumed we couldn’t afford to go to college and nobody convinced us otherwise. I taught myself to be a draftsman and spent four years drawing high temperature materials for the steel mills in Pitts- burgh. During that time, a friend had moved to New Mexico. Drawn to the weather of the Southwest and the adventure, I moved to Ros- well, New Mexico in April of 1985. I had never been to New Mexico before and didn’t have a job waiting for me when I got there. Luckily for me, I used my bowling skills and a little hustle on the golf course to get by for a while. Then, one day, the President of Sunwest Bank in Roswell approached me and offered me a position in the bank. I told him I had not attended college and that I didn’t know anything about banking, so I might not be his guy. He said not to worry and that he could teach me that part. So, my career in banking began and I have loved it ever since. I knew my goals and one of the ways I motivat- ed myself was to get my mail and scratch out any of the words in my title that were ahead of Presi- dent. Then, I would put it back in the stack as if I didn’t know it was coming and then it appeared: Ken Clayton-President. In 1998, I had the op- portunity to move to Western Bank in Artesia. Mr. Bill Dampeer had a list on a yellow tablet and said if I was able to get the items on the list accomplished, I would have a chance to become President of the bank. That was all the motiva- tion I needed. In April 2003, Mr. Dampeer came Proud To Be a Banker