By Evan Sparks
Photos by Kevin Brusie
On the morning of December 7, 1941, an unassuming harbor tug called Hoga was moored in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. At the precise minute of 7:48 a.m. Hawaii time, Japanese bombers began a 90-minute barrage on the Pacific Fleet in the harbor.
The Hoga got moving within 10 minutes. She steamed into Pearl Harbor, where she picked up two sailors in the water. She steamed directly to the long row of battleships moored against Ford Island, where she towed the repair ship Vestal away from the burning and sinking Arizona.
Meanwhile, the battleship Nevada, which already had some steam up when the attack began but had been damaged by a torpedo, made a run for the open ocean. Recognizing the strategic opportunity posed by sinking a massive ship in the narrow entrance to Pearl Harbor, Japanese pilots focused their efforts on the Nevada, raining bombs around her. Nevada began to sink.
“There she is in the channel, and there is going to be trouble if that ship sinks in the channel,” thought Rear Adm. William Furlong. He sent Hoga over to Nevada to nose her toward a nearby point. The entire remaining Pacific Fleet could have been bottled up for weeks or months. Working with another tug, Hoga freed the Nevada from the channel and shifted her to soft sand nearby, then worked for an hour to put out fires on the battleship.
After saving the channel from a disastrous blockage, the crew of the Hoga spent the next 72 hours putting out fires in the battleship fleet, then began helping with the cleanup of the harbor. The little tug and her crew received a citation from Adm. Chester Nimitz for its distinguished service and was later named a National Historic Landmark for her efforts on December 7, 1941.
Owen with her father, Harry Hastings Jr., the founder of Eagle Bank & Trust.
Seven decades later — after a second career as a fireboat in Oakland, California — the Hoga was a hulk in the Navy’s mothball fleet. That’s where Cathy Hastings Owen first saw her. “She was this little rust bucket beside these huge ships in a naval boneyard.”
Owen was there as an emissary of the city of North Little Rock, Arkansas, which wanted the boat for its riverfront maritime museum. The North Little Rock team had just a couple days to collect their boat and move her to dry dock, but it would be just the beginning of a much longer journey.
“Although the outcome of the war would not have changed, the Hoga’s heroism may have shortened the time frame of the war by allowing our ships that could get under way to escape the harbor where ships were being bombed,” says Owen. “She was a small boat that could.”
Owen, who is herself five feet tall, gets tears in her eyes when she talks about the Hoga and the heroism of its crew. What she didn’t know when she first laid eyes on her that it would take another story of dogged persistence to take care of that little boat — and that a person, small in stature but powerful and determined, would be part of her story.
Lessons from the shred closet
In 1967, the doors opened at the First State Bank of Sherwood. Its founder was Harry Hastings Jr., a Little Rock businessman who had noticed — while flying over in his plane — the growing bedroom community of Sherwood. The town had no bank, and Hastings fixed that. With only six months’ time to locate a site and open an office, his daughter, Cathy, and her brothers were there scrubbing the linoleum as the bank prepared to open and handing out pens on opening day.
While Hastings was never a banker professionally — the family businesses focused on wholesaling and real estate — he wanted his daughter to understand banking. At 16, he sent her to work at the bank for the summer. The bank president was not enthusiastic about his new employee.
“He let me know that not only did he not want me there, I was not to go home and tell my father about anything that went on there — nor did he intend to babysit a spoiled child all summer long,” Owen reflects. She had three choices: “I could walk out and prove him absolutely right. I could stay and have a bad attitude and prove him right. Or I could do as I did — and I responded, ‘Yes, sir.’”
“Little did I know,” she adds, “that that decision at 16 years of age would change the whole trajectory of my life and career.”
Her first job was shredding documents in a closet. She got to the bank each morning before the president, and she got the documents shredded in a month — far less time than he had expected. She began to stay after closing time to learn how the bank balanced its ledgers each day and learned more about banking. By the end of the summer, the president invited her to come back and work at the bank over Christmas.
Owen continued to work at the bank on breaks. She went on to college at the University of Arkansas, and about a month after she graduated, she received a call that the bank president had died unexpectedly. Owen was asked to run the bank, and she felt like it was a calling to serve the bank’s employees and community.
But she knew there was a lot about banking she didn’t know. “I was also very concerned if I would be accepted by the customers and the regulators.” She took on the role of secretary/treasurer, which would give her the opportunity to serve on the board and be involved in the bank’s executive management while learning the business in greater depth.
‘Do you want to drive?’
At a certain point, she says, she was “running the bank from behind the scenes.” Her role became more public in the 1980s, during the savings and loan crisis, when she negotiated a deal to purchase a troubled bank in Heber Springs. She flew her father and the bank attorney to Heber Springs, and she signed the paperwork on the plane’s horizontal stabilizer. She then visited the bank to announce the purchase to the staff.
“I became the president of that bank,” says Owen. “I shrank it, turned it around, recapitalized it, and set it on a path to return to a healthy bank. In that case, the city and the people knew the bank needed help, and they wanted the bank to be saved.”
The banks later merged — Arkansas having maintained limits on intrastate branching longer than other states — and took on the name Eagle Bank & Trust. Today, the bank has more than $500 million in assets. In addition to the bank’s focus on small business banking and commercial real estate, it includes a substantial mortgage origination business for the secondary market with a footprint well beyond Arkansas. Owen is executive chair of the bank and chair and CEO of its holding company.
Eagle Bank & Trust has an unusually large mortgage division for a bank its size, closing nearly 2,000 mortgage loans last year, all of which are sold into the secondary market for fee income with servicing released. The mortgage division has operations in several states as a result of mortgage loan originators who were looking to join a community bank, Owen says. Eagle Bank’s mortgage originators work with local real estate agents on referrals and get underwriting, approvals and closings done quickly.
Despite all this growth, she hasn’t forgotten the lessons of working the shred closet. “Cathy is not going to ask you to do anything that she’s not willing to do herself,” says Jeff Lynch, the bank’s president and CEO. “If it involves attending a community event or on a weekend or a holiday, she’s the first one to sign up and attend with you. If it involves volunteering, maybe a clean up after a storm, she’s got her gloves on, and she’s working right beside you. If it’s a bank event and we’re wrapping up and we need to take out the trash, Cathy’s grabbing a trash bag and taking it out with you as well.”
Owen’s willingness to do what needs to be done feeds her adventurous streak, from piloting her own plane, to riding on her brothers’ shoulders on a motorcycle, to driving an 18-wheeler. “We had a truck in Kentucky, and dad flew us up there to pick it up,” Owen’s older brother Lee Hastings recalls. “I was driving, and we got about halfway back and I said, ‘Do you want to drive?’ She said, ‘Well, yeah.’” Owen drove the rest of the way home — with the assistance of a cushion to see over the dashboard.
Owen’s willingness to do what needs to be done feeds her adventurous streak, from piloting her own plane, to riding on her brothers’ shoulders on a motorcycle, to driving an 18-wheeler.
Quiet confidence
Owen became a bank president at a time when she was still often the only woman in a roomful of her Arkansas peers. “Most of the time, people have thought I was the spouse or an assistant that was there,” she says. “Vendors would nearly always turn to my husband at conferences and have conversations with him.”
She was the first female chair of the Arkansas Bankers Association, and she chaired the board that hired Lorrie Trogden as the association’s first female president and CEO. “I’ve heard many women in banking say the same thing about Cathy,” Trogden reflects. “When Cathy walks into a room, she carries a quiet confidence that’s easily recognizable. When she talks, people truly listen to what she has to say because they know she’s going to say something of value and meaning.”
Terry Hartwick, the mayor of North Little Rock and a former chamber of commerce president, describes Owen’s leadership style as deceptively quiet. “It’s so easy to sit there and look at her and think she’s not in control. But the more you talk to her, you see how in control she really is with everything.”
Owen speaks with Eagle Bank & Trust colleagues in Heber Springs.
A dedicated advocate
Owen has been active in bank advocacy for her whole career — a “cheerleader and champion for policy and industry-related issues in Arkansas,” says Arkansas Bank Commissioner Susannah Marshall. She works closely with Arkansas lawmakers to promote the industry’s ability to support economic development, Marshall explains.
“I don’t think you will find a more passionate and dedicated advocate for the banking industry,” add Trogden, who notes that Owen is always ready to “drop everything” and help with a tough legislative issue in the Arkansas Capitol.
As Owen turns her quiet determination to her new role as chair of the American Bankers Association, she is focusing on three key issues: first, ensuring the industry navigates the digital asset marketplace successfully. “We want to protect our marketplace, we want to be regulatorily compliant, we want to grow very thoughtfully and we want to modernize as we grow,” she explains. She praises ABA’s resources on digital assets.
Owen with Arkansas Bank Commissioner Susannah Marshall preparing to testify before a congressional panel.
Fraud and cybersecurity also remain on top of her agenda. “It’s not only important that we’re able to protect the bank, but we need to be able to help protect our customers,” she says.
Owen’s associates marvel at how she manages to get everything done between family, business, community leadership and industry roles. “I don’t know that she ever has a down moment,” says Marshall. “She is always there to raise her hand and say yes. She shows up all the time. How does she have that many hours in her day to get it all done?”
Owen has worked her whole life in family business — her brothers, Lee and Stan, run other businesses founded by Harry Hastings, and Owen’s two children Sara and Steven work for the bank in Bank Secrecy Act compliance and appraisals, respectively.
Business can divide families — “my dad taught us a family only destroys itself from within” — so Owen and her brothers work hard to disagree well. They sit on each other’s boards but defer to each other on decisions about their respective businesses. “We’re making decisions for the next generation and the generation after that, not necessarily for today,” she says.
A banker who cares
In addition to her bank leadership, “Cathy’s fingerprints are all over the broader little Rock area,” says Stephen Reynolds, a mortgage loan officer at Eagle Bank. She has been a trustee of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts and president of its volunteer organization, on the executive committee of the local Junior League and president of the Arkansas Baptist Health Foundation Board.
For Owen, volunteering started young. “My mother volunteered a lot, so that was something that I learned from her. I also learned from my younger days and even high school and college, and especially when I started my banking career full time, that volunteerism is a fabulous training ground for those who want to grow their leadership roles.”
Steve and Cathy Owen aboard the Hoga.
In North Little Rock, she chaired the chamber of commerce, where CEO Derrell Hartwick says describes her as “instrumental in making North Little Rock the city that is today.” It was that community involvement — in North Little Rock in particular — that helped Owen and her husband, Steve, get involved in the effort to bring the Hoga to the Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum, located on the banks of the Arkansas River.
“She was coated in rust, and it just broke our heart,” Owen says of the first time she saw the Hoga. There were five people on that trip, including the mayor, and seeing the boat fired them up for the mission.
They came home to Little Rock and grew the team. They publicized the little tug and fundraised. Together they raised the money to restore her in California and then ship her back through the Panama Canal, up the Mississippi River and up the Arkansas. The journey involved deft passage under bridges and through locks, negotiating complex international shipping regulations and even advocacy in Washington, D.C., before the Hoga arrived in North Little Rock in 2015.
Today, the boat is a centerpiece of a museum educating Arkansans about World War II. Cathy and Steve both serve on the museum’s board. Steve won an award from the Historic Naval Ships Association for his role in bringing the Hoga home, and Mayor Hartwick named November 10, 2012, as Catherine H. Owen Day for her part in the effort.
As a floating museum exhibit, the Hoga still requires constant maintenance. You can find Cathy and Steve Owen rolling up their sleeves to join groups recovering the tug in Navy grey. The little banker who could still takes care of the little tugboat that could.
Evan Sparks is editor-in-chief of the ABA Banking Journal.
