Mr. Green's Genes -- 7Th-Generation Banker Upholds Family Tradition Of Community Service

One of the first duties Jay Green had as a junior officer at Peoples National Bank of Washington was to do some of "the dirty work" for his grandfather, Joshua Green, then chairman.

The grandfather heard hundreds of pleas for loans and outright grants from the bank, in which his family was the largest stockholder.

"He'd hear somebody's proposal, and he'd know right away that it was something we would never do," Green said. "But he would listen politely and tell the person it was a brilliant idea, `and we'll almost certainly say yes.' Then he would send them upstairs to see his grandson.

"While the person was walking up the stairs, he'd call me and say: `Mr. so-and-so is coming up to see you. He's no good. Tell him no,' " Green said.

Now the grandson, Joshua Green III, is chairman of U.S. Bank of Washington, the successor to Peoples. And if the chairman thinks your idea is nuts, you'll hear it directly from Green - nicely, of course.

"Straightforward candor has always been Jay's thing," said Chuck Riley, executive vice president at U.S. Bank.

"If there is one thing you could say about Jay Green, it is that he is a picture of diplomacy," said a woman who once worked for him.

Now Green, a seventh-generation banker in a family whose banking roots go back to Jackson, Miss., is putting that diplomacy to new uses, and taking the risk of being told "no" himself, in a mid-life career change of sorts. The change is making him more visible - and slightly less comfortable.

Green still has the titles - chairman and chief executive officer - and the 18th-floor office in the U.S. Bank building downtown.

But others are now responsible for day-to-day operations at the bank, Washington's third largest with $5.4 billion in assets and 137 branches.

Like Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, Green looks a decade younger than his age (Gates is 35, Green is 54). Like Gates, Green attended Harvard (he graduated; Gates dropped out).

And like Gates, Green commands substantial financial resources, as in large blocks of stock in big, successful companies.

The Green family's stock in U.S. Bancorp, parent of U.S. Bank of Washington, is worth about $185 million, and the private Joshua Green Corp. owns several shopping centers and $50 million worth of Safeco Corp. stock. Green says the company's net worth is "in the nine figures," or more than $100 million.

But unlike Gates, Green is unaccustomed to the rough-and-tumble of the public spotlight.

Yet more than ever before, Green's role is external, representing the bank in civic work. Green's major commitments at the moment are the Woodland Park Zoological Society Capital Campaign and the Corporate Council for the Arts. He is chairman of both.

He's a director of Safeco Corp., a trustee of the Seattle Art Museum and a director of the Washington Roundtable and two banking-industry organizations.

"Jay loves banking, but now he has these other roles which I think he enjoys less - going out and being a public figure," said Barry Provorse of Seattle, author of a 1987 corporate biography of Peoples Bank. "Jay is a very warm, generous person who cares a lot about his family. But he is a very guarded, very private person."

One reason is family history.

Green's grandfather, who died in 1975 at age 105, was highly regarded as a banker. But he also was a publicity hound who sometimes embarrassed the rest of his family.

Green said his grandfather once tried to get the city of Seattle to change the name of Green Lake to Joshua Green Lake - and to give the elder Green exclusive duck-hunting rights there.

Jay said he and his father, the late Joshua Green Jr., who headed Peoples Bank for 30 years as chairman and president, both reacted by taking low public profiles. "My father taught me that my job was to avoid publicity for myself personally, to develop other people and to let them get the credit for what they did."

Jay's father tried to steer him toward a career in medicine, but the son had other ideas. Rejected for admission by the University of Washington because of his lackluster grades at Seattle's exclusive Lakeside School, Green enrolled at Harvard in 1954.

He originally thought he would study science, but majored instead in English, taking a few business courses along the way. Still unsure about a career after he graduated from Harvard in 1958, Green became a management trainee at Citibank in New York.

Somewhat to his surprise, Green found he enjoyed banking and had an aptitude for it. After two years in New York, Green gave in to the long-standing expectations of many people in Seattle and took a job at Peoples as an assistant cashier.

Green soon startled many in the bank by writinga scathing report on what he saw as lax management practices, pointing out that the bank "had become so fond of its branch managers" that it tolerated senility in one case, alcoholism in another and laziness in others, according to Provorse's book, "The PeoplesBank Story."

In 1965, put in charge of branch administration, Green made radical personnel changes that showed he could make tough decisions - and improve the bank's performance at the same time.

A few years later, Green became a director and executive vice president. In 1975, Peoples President Harold Rogers died unexpectedly and Green became president of the bank. He was 39.

Green felt he had not had time "to learn the community aspect of the job," he said. "My primary focus had been internal."

Green thought he had his hands full just running the bank in the late 1970s - he succeeded his father as chairman in 1979 - and through most of the 1980s. He served on every major bank committee, routinely putting in 14-hour days.

That heavy internal involvement, which left little time and energy for high-visibility community activities, would later come back to haunt Green.

Green continued that pace through 1987, when Peoples was sold to U.S. Bancorp, which had just purchased Old National Bank of Spokane. In 1988, the two were merged and the combination was renamed U.S. Bank.

The sale has turned out to be highly profitable for Peoples shareholders, the largest of which was the Green family itself, through the Joshua Green Corp., of which Jay Green is president.

Green now is vice chairman and the largest shareholder of U.S. Bancorp, the $18 billion Portland holding company.

The Green family collectively owns 5.8 million shares, or about 10 percent, of U.S. Bancorp, and Green has voting power of all the shares.

Since Peoples was sold in December 1987, U.S. Bancorp stock has more than doubled, from $14.32 (adjusted for subsequent stock dividends) to more than $31 now.

In the past two years, Green's role at the bank has changed.

No longer does he routinely work 14-hour days, involved in myriad details running the bank.

But Green's emerging public visibility is motivated by more than new corporate duties. He also wants to overcome what he thinks are some misperceptions about him.

Half a dozen years of focusing almost exclusively on the bank's internal needs left Green with a reputation for being aloof. Green believes that image was undeserved, as was the reputation he acquired for being "cheap" when it came to money.

On the corporate level, part of that reputation may have been unavoidable. When Peoples was only a fifth the size of Seafirst, the bank could not hope to make civic gifts as large as those of its bigger competitors. Yet comparisons inevitably were made.

The reputation was aggravated by Green's preference for making numerous smaller contributions instead of fewer, but larger, ones.

When the bank and the Joshua Green Foundation, of which Green is president, made grants and gifts in the range of $1,000 to $5,000, some recipients regarded the gifts as "stingy." What they did not see was the large number of such gifts.

"For several years, we tried to be discreet in our giving, and I was very frustrated that the community felt that we were not giving much," Green said.

Green still prefers to spread his generosity widely. Last year, the Green Foundation made about 50 contributions totaling $312,550, ranging from $500 to $60,000.

However, partly in response to past criticisms, Green has modified his strategy of giving. Now he talks of "preemptive gifts" timed partly to establish himself as a higher-visibility donor.

Green said he and the family foundation have begun focusing their gifts on causes in the early stages of capital-fund drives. "We have found that the early gifts are a lot more appreciated," he said. "I don't want to be just one of the pack."

Nor does he want to spread himself too thin. "We are trying to identify a few major causes each year that we can make a really meaningful contribution to."

He takes a similar approach to his community-service time. "Where you will see me is where I feel I can play a meaningful role in an organization that benefits the community," Green said. Green says that's just good business.

"A bank is really a parasite on the economy," he said. "We do as well as the region we serve, and it is very much in our best interest to try to help it prosper."

When he's not occupied with the bank, family and civic business, Green often finds relaxation in gardening - he is known to have a passion for rhododendrons - and fly fishing.

When Green's wife, Pamela, threw a surprise 50th birthday party for him, the theme was fly fishing, an unusual motif for decorations at the golf club where the party was held.

Green also is an avid reader. Pamela said she woke one morning at 6 a.m. a few weeks ago to find her husband engrossed in a book on Japanese maples.

"Before the sale of Peoples, I think I was doing too much," he said. "I was accustomed, for years, to literally running from one meeting to the next and never having enough time."

Though Green feels less stress now, he retains mixed feelings about his new external role.

"I think I had more fun running the smaller bank, having my hand in all the pieces of it," he said. "But the greater success of the larger organization is more satisfying. And I think both my father and my grandfather would be delighted to see how strong we are now."

Jay could be the last of seven generations of Green family bankers. His son, Joshua Green IV, 25, is a law student in Tacoma. One daughter, 25, is a real estate broker and the other a 15-year-old high school freshman.

Green exerts no pressure on any of them to follow him in banking. "As long as they are active and working hard, they can do what they want to do and that's fine with me," he said.