William L. Brown, at 83; CEO expanded Bank of Boston
William L. Brown, 83, the enterprising and domineering chief executive officer of Bank of Boston when it was the largest financial institution in New England, died of congestive heart failure Tuesday in Epoch Senior Health Care in Weston.
''He was a very innovative and opportunistic lender who left his mark on Bank of Boston in many ways," Ira Stepanian, who succeeded him as CEO, said yesterday.
Mr. Brown was named president of Bank of Boston in 1971. He was CEO from 1983 until his retirement in 1989 after 40 years of service. During his six years as CEO, the bank's assets doubled, from $18 billion to $36 billion.
Much of that expansion stemmed from relationships Mr. Brown made early in his career with
''It never bothers me helping make people rich," Mr. Brown said in a story published in the Boston Herald in 1989. ''The richer I made someone by doing some form of imaginative lending, the better off the bank would be."
Mr. Brown was one of the first to recognize investment opportunities in the high-tech companies along Route 128. He poured millions of dollars into Bank of Boston's merchant banking operations; acquired banks in Connecticut, Maine, and Rhode Island; and pursued consumer business by aggressively marketing automobile loans, home equity loans, and mortgages.
''I think his greatest accomplishment was the democratization of business in Boston," Lawrence K. Fish, president and CEO of Citizens Financial Group and a former official at Bank of Boston, said yesterday. ''He judged people on their accomplishments without regard to color, ethnicity, or faith."
When Mr. Brown joined the bank as a credit manager in 1949, it was named
Mr. Brown knew an opportunity when he saw one. When he first became associated with Kroc, the hamburger magnate was looking for money to expand McDonald's, which had only a handful of restaurants that were little more than take-out joints.
''They didn't have seats in the buildings," Mr. Brown noted in 1989. He loaned Kroc $750,000 to expand, and McDonald's remained a customer of the bank for years.
Already well known throughout the banking industry, Mr. Brown became known to the wider public in 1985, when Bank of Boston was indicted for failing to report $1.2 billion in foreign currency transactions, some involving the Angiulo crime family. Mr. Brown testified in front of a US Senate committee investigating money laundering and denied any intentional wrongdoing by officials at his bank. The institution paid a $500,000 fine.
Mr. Brown was born in Hendersonville, N.C. He attended Mars Hill Junior College in North Carolina and Newberry College in South Carolina and he earned a master's degree in business administration at Harvard University.
He served in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II. After the war, he took a job operating a bank in Guam for the Navy. The bank was run out of a Quonset hut, and Mr. Brown packed a .45 when he went out to collect loans.
Mr. Brown was often described as gruff and impatient. ''But those are people who really don't know me," Mr. Brown explained in a story published in the Globe in 1989. ''It's true I can be impatient. If someone wants to explain something to me, they better give me the short version."
Stepanian concurred. ''Once you got to know him, he was a teddy bear," he said.
In 1989, when Mr. Brown was asked to cite the greatest accomplishment of career, he didn't mention any of the bank's acquisitions or its famous accounts. He said simply, ''I don't recall a day that I didn't want to go to work."
He leaves his wife, Helen E. Presbrey; two daughters, Kathryn B. Ballard of Needham and Melissa B. Burns of Wellington, Fla.; two sons, Richard P. of Los Angeles and Steven J. of Wayland; and eight grandchildren.
A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Wednesday in Trinitarian Congregational Church in Wayland.
