Simmons Bank celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2003, but it wasn’t long after the bank was established in 1903 that its trust division was started. And now that department will be celebrating its own 100th birthday in June.
The trust department started small, as one might expect, but has grown exponentially over the years. One of the key individuals who witnessed and directed many years of that growth, John Rush, 87, reminisced about his decades with the trust end of the bank’s business. He was joined by his son, Lee Rush, 53, who didn’t overlap with his father’s tenure but is now well on his way to developing his own history with the department.
As a young man, John worked for First National Bank in Little Rock. He had started there as an office manager, noting he felt fortunate to have gotten that job.
“I didn’t have any experience doing anything,” he said.
Over the next decade, John moved up the ladder and began working in First National’s trust department. Then in 1967, when John was in his 30s, the phone rang. It was Wayne Stone, asking him to come run the trust department at Simmons.
John said he told Stone he would come – but only as a trust officer, as he knew he had much to learn.
“I told Wayne, ‘If I work out for you, you can give me a promotion,’” John said. “And I guess I did work out.” As he got settled at Simmons, John said he knew one person could not both manage the investments and grow the list of accounts. He chose the latter.
“I devoted my time to new business,” he said. “That way, I could still be visible to everyone. As the top person, I could see all of the people who wanted to see me.” One of “prerequisites” of the day, John said, was that trust officers were also lawyers. He had taken care of that detail while working at First National Bank, he said, adding that, even though he never practiced law, the legal background was a valuable asset to have.
“You had to know the trust laws,” he said, “as well as how to operate with certain restrictions.” When computers made their appearance at Simmons Bank, the first one came to John’s department, although he said he couldn’t see the point in having that bit of technology.
“I asked my executive assistant, ‘If I get a computer, tell me what I’m going to be able to do with it.’” he recalls. “Well, she said I could put everybody’s birthday in it.” John pondered that, and then the assistant said that, with the computer, other bank executives could place items on his calendar. That was the wrong answer, John said with a laugh.
“I didn’t want anybody else adding things to my calendar,” he said. “That means I’ve got to look at it every day. Every form I ever needed was on someone else’s computer, anyway.” The growth of the trust department has been significant across the years. When John started, there were two trust officers and three other staffers, and the total assets were $10 million. Now, the company has 160 staffers with $5.9 billion in assets at the end of 2021 and a bank footprint across six states.
John retired in 1999, but stuck around for a few additional assignments at the behest of Tommy May, the bank’s chairman and CEO.
“Every bank had to have a compliance program,” John said. “Not only did you have to maintain compliance, but you had to have a comprehensive program to tell you how to comply. He wanted me to handle that and I did, although it wasn’t as quick as Mr. May wanted it done. He always wanted everything tomorrow,” he added with a chuckle.
Lee’s story of getting into the banking business started in 1991 when he graduated from college with a political science degree. Asked by his parents, “OK, son, now what?” Lee, like a lot of college graduates, hadn’t thought that far ahead.
“I had no idea,” he said. “I had lots of interests. …” “But nothing that would make any money,” his mother, Midge Lee, interjected with a big smile.
Lee recalled that the 1992 job market was “not favorable,” but through a good friend, he found out about a job opening at a bank that he was able to get.
“I was a delinquent mortgage collection officer,” he said. “There’s nothing like the experience of dealing with unhappy people all day long.” Lee did recognize early on that he and his father had the same thought processes and sensibilities, and he wondered if maybe he might follow in his father’s footsteps at some point.
“I started to think about that path,” he said. “It took me a while to get there though.” Then Alltel called and lured him away from the banking business with an offer that included a doubling of his salary. He wasn’t there long, however, before he realized that the part of the business he was in – the wireline side – was shrinking as the wireless side grew. At that point, he realized he wanted to get back into the trust side of banking.
Eventually, he would join Regions Bank in its trust department, where he would flourish for almost two decades. He was happy there, he said, and was enjoying himself professionally, but life presented him with another opportunity when he was asked to come over to the Simmons trust department.
Even though Lee had not worked for Simmons, the bank held a warm place in his heart having been raised in its shadow. He remembers stuffing envelopes for his father when he was a kid and playing on the office machines and coffee maker. And there’s even a photo of him on the wall of his parents’ house in a Simmons Bank baseball uniform.
Eventually, Lee would accept the offer, but the courtship was not quick.
“It took me a year to fully decide that that might be a good opportunity,” he said. “Simmons was growing fast, but it was also an opportunity to be challenged. That’s what I like to do: build.” That was in 2017. Now Lee is senior portfolio manager for the business.
The two men, despite the years separating their careers, said their positions sometimes took them to unusual places. For Lee, it was railroad cars, seven of them spread all over the country.
“This job keeps the life of a trust officer very interesting,” he said. “I had just watched rail cars go by, and now I had to locate them and get them all to Memphis so we could service them and sell them.” John agreed.
“It might be a 20-year-old Toyota or just be anything that anybody can own,” he said. “You are responsible for it all. Once we had to count all of the pills in a drugstore in order to sell the pharmacy.” Asked about the rough time the stock market is having these days, Lee said it would be inappropriate to suggest strategies because each investor is different with different timelines and sensibilities. He did say that, despite the fact that some people choose to direct their own investments, there is a distinct advantage to putting that work into the hands of a professional.
“That’s our value,” he said. “We study a lot and customize plans, and in these turbulent times, we are the voice of calm and reason.” And even for a man who makes his living investing people’s money, sometimes that voice of calm and reason takes customers in a different direction.
Lee said he has a friend whose 91-year-old mother has $2 million – in a checking account. The friend contacted Lee to say that they needed to invest the money in a better way.
Lee said he asked the friend, “Is your mother happy?” The friend said she was and that she didn’t even spend all of her retirement check each month.
“Would she be able to handle the inherent ups and downs of the stock market?” Lee asked.
Absolutely not, his friend said, realizing where Lee was going.
“Then are we investing this for her or for you?” Lee asked.
The point was taken, Lee said.
“Sometimes it comes down to the ‘do no harm’ effect,” Lee said. “You have to understand why you are investing the money that you have.” Almost 20 years separate the end of one Rush’s time at the bank and the beginning of the other’s, which begs the question of why they didn’t work together.
“You never hired me or offered to hire me,” Lee said as the two shared a good laugh.
“I didn’t want to interrupt you developing your own career,” John said.
“And you know, he was right,” Lee said “I enjoyed building what I built.”