Examiner Spotlight: Don Stephens

When Don Stephens came on board as a bank examiner in 1963, trust supervision was in the midst of a transformation. James J. Saxon was the Comptroller, and the advisory committee he commissioned to review the national banking system and the rules governing focused heavily on necessary changes in national bank trust powers.

Among the committee's most far-reaching recommendation was that the trust activities of national banks­—then overseen by the Federal Reserve Board—should be supervised by the OCC. So the OCC reorganized and enlarged its trust division and started to recruit law school graduates to join as trust examiners.

Stephens, a young lawyer toiling away in the district attorney’s office in a small Texas town, decided to take the plunge. He had enjoyed his law school course work in trusts and estates, and figured that the OCC offered a chance to make an interesting career of it. So he completed the paperwork, took the oath of office, and headed up to Washington to meet his new colleagues and get marching orders from his bosses

Stephens knew that the examiner’s life required travel and mobility—things that attracted him to that life—but he had no reason to think that his first move would occur so soon. Signing on in Dallas, he was immediately transferred to Cleveland. That was the first of many relocations to follow. Indianapolis, Louisville, Lexington, New Orleans, Memphis, and, finally, Jacksonville, were among the cities he came to call home.

Not that he spent much time in any of those places. Being an OCC examiner meant living out of your suitcase and your car, going straight from bank to bank. During Stephens’ first years of service, he never saw a duty station. Then when he finally did see one, he realized that he hadn’t missed much; “Some were no more than large closets with storage for supplies—no equipment, no phones.”

Although travel was an incentive, expense reimbursements were low, cash advances hard to come by, and vouchers not infrequently rejected. Driving through a snowstorm once, Stephens checked in to the only motel in town whose one vacant room was big enough to accommodate six. For that reason, he was denied reimbursement.