Thursday, December 28, 2006

Roz Jackson calling it a career at Kendall State Bank

by Clarke Davis

Rosalind “Roz” Jackson, Valley Falls, will retire from the Kendall State Bank at the end of this month ending a 45-year career.

The Valley Falls native was first employed by her father and bank president, the late Robert Simpson, in 1961 in the bookkeeping department. She will retire as the senior vice president and branch manager at Nortonville.

Photo by Clarke Davis

Rosalind Jackson at her Valley Falls home.

Refreshments were served
at the KSB Nortonville Branch to honor Roz on her last day, Friday, Dec. 29.

The bank will then host a
retirement celebration open
house in her honor Sunday,
Dec. 31.

KSB President and CEO Jayne
Coleman has issued a public
invitation to the reception from 2 to 4 p.m. at the bank’s community room in Valley Falls.

Looking back at those early years and reflecting on the changes, she recalled having a few customers who relied on the bank to balance their business accounts each month.

“They would bring their book in and we entered each check by hand and balanced their account,” she said.

Bank statements were done on a large posting machine and the checks written on the various accounts were of a wide variety.

Those were the days of counter and universal checks. Each bank had a pad of checks on store counters and a universal check could be written on any bank. Only a person’s signature identified who had written the check.

There were no bank codes or account numbers and no plastic debit or credit cards.

“It was the horse and buggy days of banking,” she said.

Simpson and H.D. Wyatt, president of the Citizens State Bank, merged the two banks into one in the early 1960s retaining the KSB name. The bank experienced financial problems at the end of the decade, when Wyatt wound up president and sold the bank to Duane Stoskopf in 1971.

Jackson became Stoskopf’s secretary and later gained experience in the loan department with the departure of one of the loan officers.

She also had an insurance license, which involved her in the insurance business, the only aspect of her job she grumbles about.

“I never felt adequate in dealing with insurance,” she said, tipping her hat to the professionals in that line of work.

“He [Stoskopf] changed the way we did a lot of things,” she said, “and banking was changing, also.”

Encoded checks, new banking regulations, and the Uniform Commercial Code were all coming into play at about this time, she said. With technology advancing, customers were becoming numbers whether or not they liked it.

Roz’s mother, Lillian, was a native, the daughter of Herman Hauck, owner of an elevator. Her father came here at a young age, the son of a farmer who wanted an area where a larger variety of crops could be raised, unlike the wheat country farther west at Minneapolis.

Robert Simpson, a University of Kansas graduate who had been a member of the Reserve Officer Training Corps, left for the service Dec. 6, 1941—the day before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

Roz was born Dec. 10. She would be 4 1/2 years old before she saw her father for the first time. An officer with an artillery unit, he spent the war years in the South Pacific.

He had some bank experience before the war, so when he returned to Valley Falls he joined R.W. Ferguson at Kendall State and would later buy the bank from him.

Rosalind married classmate Larry Jackson following graduation in 1959.

“Twenty-five percent of that class married each other,” she said. Eight class members married to make four couples.

The Jacksons moved to Emporia where Larry went to college for a short time and Roz worked in a hassock factory. They returned to Valley Falls where he would work for Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. for a while, farm, and operate a feed store while Roz worked at the bank. Larry died of cancer 20 years ago.

Roz has three children, Jay Jackson, a physical education teacher in the Jefferson West district and a junior varsity basketball coach at Seaman High School; Jan McKnight, Valley Falls, an insurance specialist employed by a medical firm; and Jo Simons, Topeka, a computer room supervisor at Seaman High School. Her family includes eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Jackson currently serves on the Valley Falls City Council and is frequently called on as one of the few vocalists in town to sing at funerals. She’s not sure how that got started, but said they had excellent music instruction when she was in school.

Besides being involved with family, she hopes to do some traveling following retirement.