Photos by Steve Lewis
For more than five decades, Cathy Owen has broken new ground for women in banking
Of all the career accomplishments and community service accolades Cathy Owen has piled up over five remarkable decades in banking, one of the most enduring of her contributions is also one of the most personal.
The USS Hoga tugboat, a piece of Navy history that is part of the Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum in North Little Rock, has nothing to do with banking and very little backstory with the Natural State — that is, until Owen was recruited to help rescue the decaying craft from its tether in a California bay where it was slated for dismemberment.
“I’ve been involved with many community projects, and that one that still grabs my heartstrings,” she said. “There were 10 of us who worked for years on raising funds to get the USS Hoga to the Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum. I happened to be chairman of the North Little Rock Chamber of Commerce at that point in time, and Mayor [Patrick Henry] Hays began to tell me about the USS Hoga and wanted to know if I would fly out to San Francisco to see her and to see if there was anything we could do to try to get her back to Arkansas.”
Owen agreed to the request and still remembers the sight of the rusty little tugboat sitting among larger, hulking ships.
“As big as she is sitting over there [in North Little Rock], she was this tiny thing in that shipyard,” she said. “Knowing her history and seeing her, basically, a rust bucket, it was just pitiful. They even told us at one point that if she wasn’t rescued, she was going to be cut up in the shipyard. I felt like she still had a life yet to go.”
If Owen’s fervor over the vessel and its story of being snatched from under the cutting torch feels like something more than patriotism, that is because it is. Tugboats are the unsung, often overlooked heroes of the maritime world. Small in stature and lacking the brawn of battleships and tankers, they are nonetheless endowed with power enough to maneuver the behemoths, be it into harbor or out of harm’s way. Time and again, tugs have sailed into the thick of things, and Hoga was no exception, have rescued sailors, fighting fires and moved other ships to safety during the Pearl Harbor attack. Small though it was, it had resolve and courage several times its size.
As a trailblazing woman in the almost exclusively male salon of banking for the past 50 years — and a physically diminutive one, at that — Owen can wholeheartedly relate. She knows what it feels like to have the big boys question her usefulness and mettle, sometimes to her face, sometimes chortled behind her back. She also knew the engine she was born with and the drive to keep chugging, keep pushing, that was fine-tuned by the people around her growing up.
“I think a lot of it came from two aspects,” she said. “One, I have two brothers, an older one and a younger one. If I was going to participate growing up — if I was going to ride that dirt bike or motorcycle or if I was going to drive an 18-wheeler or a backhoe — I had to learn to speak up and adopt the mindset, ‘I want to learn to do that. Why can’t I get out there and do that?’
“Also, my father never discriminated among the three of us. That is, if I was interested, and even sometimes if I wasn’t interested, he would encourage me to learn and be a part of whatever they were doing. That always exposed me to the same opportunities that they had. He always encouraged me and told me I can do those things. I can be there.”
That said, Owen had no intentions growing up of going into banking as a career, envisioning herself in a more art-forward pursuit such as architecture. Her first job in a bank, a summer gig taken begrudgingly as a teenager at the urging of her father, did not fully change her mind but did reveal something about her pragmatism — banking jobs being indoor, air-conditioned work — and her hunger to learn.
“At that point in time, I want to say the bank closed at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and the bank had to be balanced to the penny every day,” she said. “It was all done on calculators and these huge journal pages that were handwritten, and they were running tapes and this and that. When I finished my job every day, I asked if I could just stay and listen. After a couple of weeks, they handed me a stack of stuff to add up.
“I was very lucky that I came into banking at a time that things were done manually. There wasn’t a computer to put stuff into. You had to really learn and be able to think through what you were doing and be able to apply yourself. Also, working in the summers, I was trained for different people’s positions all over this small community bank.”
Owen attended college at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where she abandoned the idea of architecture in favor of a degree in finance and banking. She followed that up with a degree from Southwest Graduate School of Banking at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Then she came home to central Arkansas and the bank her father chartered, which eventually became Eagle Bank & Trust.
In addition to the usual nuts and bolts of banking and finance management, her educational years also prepared her for the work environment she was entering, since both the classroom and the boardroom were almost entirely male territory.
“I believe that situation made me more focused on, ‘Let me show you that I can do this, that I can be successful and I deserve a seat at the table,’” she said. “For many years, attending banking conferences, especially if it was leadership, CEO meetings, my husband would be with me, and inevitably, people would walk up to him and say, ‘How big is your bank? Where’s your bank? Yada, yada, yada.’
“I have a wonderful husband, and he started something that worked really, really well. He just looked at them and said, ‘Oh, I’m the eye candy. You have to talk to her about the banking.’ It kind of broke the ice in a friendly way.”
Owen was thrust into a leadership role early when the bank president died unexpectedly and she, fresh out of college, was asked to take on the role of running the bank.
“You have to be careful because you want to be accepted,” she said. “Sometimes the men I worked with couldn’t care less, and sometimes they’d look at you like, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ll see.’ I always looked for friendly ways to break the ice while still letting them know a serious point at the same time. I always approached things like, just give me the opportunity or let me take the opportunity, and I’m going to run with it.”
As if her mere presence alone was not sufficiently challenging enough to the status quo, Owen became known for pushing the envelope in bank operations, particularly when it came to adopting technology.
“I was the first one to have a PC in the bank,” she said. “You probably remember those huge monitors, right? You had to have a four-wheeler to carry it and a forklift to get it on your desk. I remember them carrying it into the bank, and people were like, ‘What in the world? What are you going to do with that?’”
Of course, Owen proved to be on the right side of history when it came to technology as lumbering PCs gave way to sleek smartphones and web-based banking, each development of which brought its own challenges concerning privacy and security.
“It’s very difficult today, especially for smaller community banks,” she said. “There’s a whole other security element today we didn’t used to have to deal with. We’re liable for our third-party vendors, so now banks have to have a whole vendor-management program. It has absolutely taken on a life of its own.”
In the late 1980s and through the 1990s, Owen enjoyed success growing the small, Main Street institution, something that proved to be as satisfying for shareholders as it was appetizing for bigger fish seeking to gobble it up via acquisition.
“Fifteen or 20 years ago, I’d receive regular calls: ‘Are you interested in selling? Are you interested in merging?’ Occasionally, I still get one here and there, but I think I’ve established my role enough now that people know I’m staying and we’re not interested in going anywhere,” she said
Owen not only showed the backbone to rebuff such advances; she was also pretty good at the game herself, demonstrating a keen eye for opportunities to grow by acquisition. Eagle Bank & Trust’s parent State Holding Company, which Owen has helmed since 1984, purchased Heber Springs State Bank that same year. It was a deal that had all the drama of a John Grisham novel, as Owen tells it. With regulators beating a path to Arkansas, bent on shuttering the Heber Springs institution, time was of the essence.
“I became aware that the Heber Springs State Bank was about to be closed by regulators, and at that point, when they were going to close you, they spent the night before in another town,” she said. “They had their chain of cars, and they would drive into town the next morning and close the bank. Well, I had learned about this, and I had my private pilot’s license at that point. I flew there, made some calls, got a meeting with [bank ownership] and made a deal to purchase the bank.
“Flew back to Little Rock, picked up my dad and our attorney, then flew back to Heber Springs, where we met the then-owner of the bank, who the regulators were forcing out. We inked the deal on the tail wing of the plane and called the bank to have someone come pick us up. Drove there, gathered all the employees upstairs in the office and spoke to them, telling them we’d bought the bank. Here I was, long, blonde hair, young, and I know they were looking at me like, ‘What have we gotten into now?’”
The deal made for a great story then as now, but what it does not tell of are the hours and hours of work it took Owen, as acting bank president, to get things cleaned up, shuttling between Little Rock and Heber Springs for 30 months. Try as she might to balance the demands of her job and the needs of her growing family, missing moments in her children’s lives remains one of the few regrets she has.
“It’s a constant balancing act between career and family, and it’s never perfectly in sync. You have to constantly be working at that,” she said. “I volunteered as the school homeroom mother. I ended up rising up to be [parent-teacher organization] president at the school. I helped coach soccer and volleyball and whatever they were involved with, provided drinks and snacks and did all of those kinds of things.
“Yet, although I did everything I could to be at every soccer game and every baseball game and every taekwondo match, there were certainly moments that I missed, moments when I knew I was needed here at work, so there’s give and take there, and I couldn’t have done it without my husband, Steve, which is why when young people ask me how to keep balance in their lives, I tell them, ‘Marry wisely.’”
Owen’s balancing act became all the more complicated due to her core-deep commitment to giving back to the community. Her list of charitable works and nonprofit leadership is long, including on behalf of the Baptist Health Foundation Board, the Arkansas Bankers Association’s government-relations committee, the Fifty for the Future Board, the Arkansas International Women’s Forum, the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock, the Fine Arts Club of Arkansas, Junior League of Little Rock, the Arkansas State Fair in Little Rock, the Little Rock Marathon, Girl Scouts, Pi Beta Phi and the Little Rock Air Force Base in Jacksonville, to name a few.
Along the way, she has had professional achievement, growing Eagle State Bank & Trust to 13 full-service bank locations and mortgage loan production offices in Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, Tennessee and Mississippi. National banking magazines have named her one of the country’s most powerful women in banking, and in 2018, she was named the first — and still only — woman ever to lead the Arkansas Bankers Association. Her long service to her community also has not gone unnoticed, as highlighted by her 2023 induction into the Arkansas Women’s Hall of Fame.
All of that, she was humbled to receive yet pales in comparison to the plucky tugboat she helped save, which has become a metaphor for her life.
“I am just so proud of what was thought to be an impossible endeavor that we accomplished,” she said of the long road of wrong turns and near misses that brought the USS Hoga to Arkansas. “It’s amazing the bonds that you forge with people that you work with on a project like that. You put your blood, sweat and tears in with one another, and we’ve all become very, very close because of it.
“I remember when she was finally towed in here, several of us went over and just patted her side and hugged her and shed a few tears over all that it took to get here. She is very, very special.”
Photo by Steve Lewis
CATHY OWEN ON GRIT
“My first job in banking was a shred clerk, shredding old files. The bank president at that point in time really didn’t want this 16-year-old at the bank. In fact, he told me so the first day I was there. He told me, ‘I don’t want you here. I have no desire to babysit you. I don’t want any kids here born with a silver spoon in their mouth.’ Then he put me in that closet to shred the work, probably thinking I’d quit. I looked at him, and I thought, ‘He doesn’t know me at all.’ He thought because my dad chartered the bank that I was some rich kid who was just going to hang around and do nothing all summer. I just listened to him, and I thought, OK, I can prove him right by walking out and going home and telling Daddy, or I can say, ‘Yes, sir,’ and I can prove him wrong and show him something else. The next day, I beat him to the office and was there waiting on him, and by the end of the summer, he’d approach me and ask if I could come back over Christmas break. Little did I know that one decision of mine would turn out to be one of the biggest decisions of my life.”
CATHY OWEN ON GAINING RESPECT
“If you’re going to be a leader in any organization, if you’re going to rise to the top, you’ve got to understand it’s not 8 to 5. It’s not Monday through Friday. There’s lots of other demands. There’s lots of chamber banquets to go to. There are just other elements of the job that encroach on personal time. I think young people coming out of college today, and we’re talking in broad terms, think they know everything. A title is very important to them. It’s often harder to get them to realize there are things they don’t know and how important it is to earn your respect from within the organization. What I’ve often tried to teach other women is don’t speak for the sake of speaking. Your words need to matter. It’s important to speak up, but it’s important what you say, also. It’s a rare few, and they’re usually pretty easy to pick out, who get that, who are really interested in learning and growing and willing to work hard and take on more and be exposed to more things.”
CATHY OWEN ON CONFIDENCE
“I don’t know that women are the best at promoting themselves or asking for a position. Typically, women expect someone to come up and tap them on the shoulder and say, ‘Oh, would you like to chair? Would you like to be on the executive committee?’ rather than saying to the executive committee, ‘I’m really interested in stepping into your shoes. How do I get there?’ I think what handicaps a lot of women is they feel like if they’re doing a really good job, their time will come, and someone’s going to nominate them or ask them to serve when often, if they’re doing a really good job, leadership wants to keep them doing that really good job and may not even realize their interest or their desires. I’ve always encouraged young women — and men — if there’s a position you want, let me know. As a leader, I can’t read your mind, as much as I’d like to think I can, so speak up.”
CATHY OWEN ON THE VALUE OF COUNSEL
“Everybody needs at least one person that’ll be 100 percent honest with them, and when you have that, you’ve got to be willing to listen and consider what they’re saying to you. Being raised with brothers, I always had that, and I still have that today. We sit on each other’s boards, and they’re also my sounding boards. They’re the people who will be 100 percent honest with me, and they’ll tell me if they don’t agree with me or have some suggestions. That bond is so important. Our dad always taught us that a family only destroys itself from within. My brothers and I don’t always agree on everything, but we do agree family is more important than business, so sometimes you just have to agree to disagree and then go have dinner.”
CATHY OWEN ON LEADERSHIP
“I always felt like I had a lot to give the business to help improve it or leave it better than I found it. I don’t want to sound like I’m putting down people who came before me, but I always wanted to build on things and continue to grow because if we’re not learning and improving every day, we’re falling behind. Now it’s not always easy. I would even say — and this is probably the first time I’ve confessed this — in those early years, there were times when I closed the office door and had to shed a tear or two because I would become frustrated with myself. There are right and wrong ways to express that. I never wanted to take things out on staff, and tears, with a female, are always considered a sign of weakness, so I didn’t want others to see that side. One of the things that I did learn that has become very healthy for me even today is if you can’t find me, go look out on the stairwell. I may be walking up and down, thinking about something. There’s something about pounding that concrete that lets me clear my head and think through the moment.”
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