Des Moines Bank Merger

When half the banking resources of the commercial filter of the country's richest, most literate agricultural State become concentrated in one bank, that situation is significant. The State is Iowa--farm products $750,000,000 yearly, industrial products $800,000,000. The filter is Des Moines, population 151,900. The bank will be the lowa-Des Moines National Bank & Trust Co., resources $40,000,000, result of a merger (to be formally voted next week) which has more relative importance to the corn belt than the recent stupendous bank mergers in Manhattan, Chicago or San Francisco have to their districts. It means that small metropoles--and Des Moines is typical of several--are moving against dependence upon the great financial centres. It means too that the half-billion and billion-dollar banks must look increasingly to the country's greater corporations and to foreign commerce for their business. The banks of smaller cities are tending to look after their regional affairs.

In Seattle, likewise, the same tendency was at work last week. There was announced the merger of three banks. First National, Dexter Horton National, Seattle National. This merger, with $10,000,000 of capital surplus and undivided profits, will have total resources of over $119,000,000. What is more it will have a $2,000,000 securities company, with a name that could only be more imposing if written in the German fashion: First-seattledexterhortonsecuritiescompany. But Seattle is a city two and one-fourth times as large as Des Moines, and its achievement is of a different calibre.

Des Moines is a city of a few dozen men. They operate its dozen banks (total resources $80,000,000), its 43 life, fire and casualty insurance companies (total assets $209,684,400), its 400 manufacturing establishments,* its newspapers, national magazines (Meredith Better Homes & Gardens [circulation 1,000,000] and Successful Farming [circulation 1,000,000]), its five department stores (Younkers, notable)--all the means which the Des Moines trade area of 1,000,000 people need for their business. Most of the men who control all this business are on the directorate of the new bank.

Directors will include the Hubbells, richest Iowa family after the Maytags (washing machines) of nearby Newton. The Hubbells own the $100,000,000 Equitable Life Insurance Co. of Iowa, and $15,000,000 to $20,000,000 of Des Moines real estate. Connecticut-born, lawyer-trained Frederick Marion Hubbells, 90, is head of the family. He acts as chairman of the insurance company. Two much younger Hubbells, Fred and Jim, financed and starred on the Des Moines polo team for several years.

Chairman of the new bank is to be Louis Charles Kurtz, 62, jocularly called a tinner because he learned that trade in his father's wholesale hardware, plumbing and heating supplies company. To him was left the responsibility for a bank when its president went off to work for the famed Chicago Banker-Brothers Reynolds, who were also onetime Des Moines bankers.

Active head of the new bank will be Clyde Edward Brenton, 61. The Brentons are an old Iowa banking family, with homestead at Dallas Center, 24 miles west of Des Moines. The late William Henry Brenton founded a private bank at Dallas Center, and extended it into a chain. He also acquired Iowa farm land. When he died his sons inherited the banks and 10,000 acres of land. Clyde Brenton has no children of his own, so he adopted Harold, his nephew, who, now 30, married and father of two children, is the sole heir to the Brenton fortune. Harold's hobby is the Iowa Young Men's Christian Association. He is to be vice president of the new bank, his father the president.

* Notable: Armand's Powder, Chamberlain Medicine, Hawkeye Portland Cement, Rollins Hosiery, Green Colonial Furnace, Falcon Milling, Sheuerman Woolen Mills. Old Golden Coffee & Spices, Standard Biscuit, Waterbury Chemical.