Examiner Spotlight: “Preacher” Knight

The 1950 gray Plymouth parked in front of the bank, and the driver strode in the front door, his cowboy boots tapping the floor and his battered typewriter, “Old Blessed,” at his side. “Preacher is here with lots of cheer,” the man said. “He came to you from far and near.”

That was P. Brantley “Preacher” Knight’s standard greeting in all the banks he examined throughout New Mexico and Texas for 32 years. Nicknamed after his impersonation of a clergyman, Knight was well-known to bankers for his disarming ways: “I can talk slow and act dumb.” His memoirs are full of occasionally salty tales: collateral consisting of horses and hogs until the horses died and had to be fed to the hogs, small banks without “the facilities to give a person the necessary relief to protect the ecology,” and drunken cowboys threatening to “lick” the examination team.

Knight cut and pasted thoughts about his profession and life in general on Old Blessed’s case. One of his best thoughts was “Those of us bank examiners who think we know it all must be particularly annoying to those of you bankers who do.”