(mellow cheerful music) - I'm Norm Silverstein, thanks for joining us.

We're in good company today with George W. Hamlin.

George has deep roots in the area, born and raised in Canandaigua, and serving as President and chief Executive officer of Canandaigua National Bank from 1979 to 2011.

George's great-grandfather founded the bank in 1887.

And it has remained a family-run business to this day.

with George's son, Frank, currently serving as President and CEO.

George carried the skills he gained as an Air Force fighter pilot, and later as an attorney, with him when he decided to join Canandaigua National Bank in 1979.

As a leader of a community bank for more than four decades, George has remained committed to supporting the development of the Finger Lakes region through his many cultural and civic volunteer activities.

George believes a locally-run bank serves a vital role in keeping a community going, helping to shape the character of their customers as well as their financial outlook.

We are pleased to welcome George as he reflects on what he has learned during his decades as a leader, and what opportunities still lay ahead for the Finger Lakes region.

George, great to see you.

- Wow, thank you very much, Norm.

I'm happy to be here to discuss this subject with you, no matter where it goes.

- Okay, well, I feel like I'm here with Mr. Canandaigua.

So let me start by asking you a little bit about your early life as a young man and what helped shape your character as someone who has been with Canandaigua, born in Canandaigua, and working here for all these years.

- Well, the precursor, I did go away to school in other places, but I did, I was privileged to grow up in a small town.

When you were in grade school and 12 years old, had a bicycle, and you had command of your life.

Now, I think probably our mothers knew what we were doing, but we didn't know about that.

But it did lead to experimentation and responsibility.

And a group of friends that were curious.

And we felt that we could do almost anything.

And through that freedom, I think we were even more curious.

So that environment was stuff that all worked throughout the rest of our lives.

All of my friends had the same kind of experience.

I went to grade school.

I was not what you would call a good student.

- We heard some rumors.

- Yes, I don't think I read a lot.

And that whole thing followed me on into high school and prep school.

That maybe I was thinking about other things.

That was the place I wasn't being graded on, the things that I was creating.

I did get patents on them because it was original work.

Didn't know that at the time.

I just thought I wasn't very bright (laughs).

- Well, I heard that that changed when you got caught tapping into the school's electrical system.

What was that about?

- I did favor math and the sciences.

And I now know it's because I could get answers and the teacher couldn't dispute that.

But to your point, I did love electricity and everything having to do with physics and science.

I went into the Dramatic Association.

Rose to be its president, but not as an actor, but as a lighter.

I had developed other things to build switching systems because I was a Heath Kit nut.

And there was a son of a doctor.

And the two of us built every Heath Kit that was imaginable for that four-year period.

And I was designing switching systems, but I couldn't afford the latching relays.

So I figured out a way to duplicate that by rolling wire around curtain rod, and doing a whole bunch of other things.

And making entirely a switching system that you could guide with a simple code on a dial.

So that if anybody came, I could touch a button and everything would go silent, you see.

I also had all night lights when everybody else, they pulled the lights so that you wouldn't be able to read past nine o'clock, get your sleep, you see.

But being somebody that was an electrician in the theater, I figured out where I could tap in before that switch, run it up the gutter pipe along the fascia of the brick.

Yes, I had to include two other guys' rooms and have a plug that I could plug into.

And continue to listen to the radio and my Hi-Fi.

and other kinds of things at night.

- So all of this led to your getting into Yale?

- Well, I think that's probably true because I will tell you, with two months to go, I was brought into the discipline place beneath the library with Mr. Kellogg, who was the other physics teacher.

And I said, oh dear, I've done something.

I was going to get a censure or, and then several censures and you were sequestered.

And then several sequesters, you were thrown out of school.

And I had gotten into Yale.

In spite of my English.

And he sat me down in the morning.

Said, "Well, Mr. Hamlin, we've been doing "some work in the dorm, "and we find a lot of interesting things "happening in your room."

And I thought it was all pretty well covered away.

And he looked at me and said, "Will you promise me "not to burn down the dormitory?"

And I said, "Sir, I promise not to burn down the dormitory."

"You are dismissed."

The reason for that was I was at 3:00 AM allowed to roam the place to transform the dining room into a crystal ballroom when we had a prom.

And I got all the instruments out of the theater and I rewired everything, and turned the dining hall into a ballroom.

And I was wandering around at 3:00 AM and no one suspected that.

When I saw a master wandering on at 3:00 AM, I'm wondering what he's up to.

But, "Mr.

Hamlin."

"Oh, Mr.

Bulger."

I was allowed to walk around.

So, I was so grateful to Mr. Kellogg because he knew that I was up to something.

I had initiative, and the stuff that I put in that switching system, I got patented after the people at Stromberg Carlson saw it and said, "We'll give you a job, kid, "next summer, and we'll just put you in a room "and see what happens."

And unfortunately, they were bought out that summer, so I didn't get that opportunity.

- Now, somehow in the middle of all this, you developed a very keen interest in flying.

When did that start?

- Well, my eldest, I didn't have a brother.

I had an older sister.

I had two first cousins, both of them, one got me into the theater and the other one, Hank, who was the son of Henry Hamlet, who many people in Rochester know as the Morgan Machine Company, on university.

He married into the Morgan family, and ran that.

And Hank in time did that too.

But he learned how to fly with Ray Highland when he was 16, before he could drive.

He was one of those guys that was a line boy and did all that sort of stuff.

Well, I went to my cousin Hank and said, "I think I'd like to learn how to fly."

And the choices was Palmira on a grass strip or the south ramp, Rochester.

And you add the radio control and the FAA, and you might as well learn how to fly with all of that because that's what you're gonna be doing.

And so, within a half an hour, I was in the Piper Colt with Gordon Stoppelbind in his sport coat on a very hot day in July.

Sitting next to me in this two-seater.

And folded arms, and he's waiting, and he says to me, "Aren't you gonna start it?"

I said, "Well," I could see the keys were kinda hanging from the dash.

I turned them, but you'd have to know to turn it and push it in, and the engine started.

Well, that's how we started.

And within an hour I was flying the airplane.

I was really, really bit.

And so in the Spring, everybody was going to New York and interviewing for some kind of a program or going to graduate school.

And Dr. Quentin, my physics sponsor, said, "Where are you gonna go, George, to graduate school?

"I mean, you are going to go to graduate school "in physics, aren't ya?"

I said, "Yes, sir, thank you for saying, sir, "that, but I've decided that there's something "that has caught my attention."

And I mentioned the airplane.

And I also knew there was something else going on in the world other than that because I was now an entertainer.

Because being a scientist and an inventor, I spent weeks just working on things I was interested in and completely consumed and intoxicated with what I was doing.

And I know it was wonderful to redo all the old experiments, but it's very isolating.

And maybe there's something more here.

So I found my way to the other side of the brain by the arts, which I have now followed because I married into an artist family and all the rest of it.

But I was bit with being an aviator because, and at that time I had made a little promise.

I'd say, I'll take my physics degree and get somebody that I can fly with, which has gotta be the military.

- Was this during the Vietnam War?

- Well, it was before anybody knew it was.

History tells us in 1963 that there was a lot going on and most of the people didn't know anything until '65.

And that was the time I was making these decisions.

I knew that the pathway was to be a pilot, be a fighter pilot, a test pilot, get your PhD in aeronautics, and be an astronaut.

And I wrote myself a little note in the Spring of '63, and said, "If I take five years and I'm 28 "and it comes to nothing, I'm okay with that.

"That'll be fine."

And that's exactly what happened because there was a war in between me and that date.

And I didn't know about it, nor did anybody else know about it.

And I was making a lot of decisions based on just wanting to get into the fastest single-seat, single engine airplane I could get into.

And so I could realize that dream.

- [Host] You flew quite a few missions.

- Flew a hundred missions over North Vietnam in the summers of '66, '67, and '68.

- Did you ever get hit by enemy fire on all those missions?

- No, but my flight commander did.

On my eighth mission.

So, but after you get six months at Las Vegas, and it drops everything from napalm to nuclear weapons.

And it was designed to fly at 503 at Mach 1.1, and low down a nuclear weapon, below the radar and get outta Dodge.

And that's what we did.

When we were in Okinawa, where we were permanently stationed, we were nuclear against China targets.

But in the summer, we were asked to go down and drop World War II bombs on Hanoi and everything in North Vietnam out of Thailand.

And the 105, they built 600 of them, and 400 were shot down.

And it's the only weapon system in the inventory that has been withdrawn because of attrition.

Because they flew 20,000 missions.

Because they were enormously effective of delivering a bomb load of a B-17 with one guy.

Five to 6,000 pounds every time we flew.

And at a thousand feet a second, - What did you learn from that experience that you took through your life?

- We learned a lot because the people that flew that airplane were top notch candidates.

Like the composition of my pilot training class was the top 15 guys from the Air Force Academy, 15 people that were German that were older than we to fly, and learn how to fly.

And then 15 people like me that didn't know how to wear the hat.

And so these were very talented people.

The Germans were gonna fly the 104 and the Americans were gonna fly all the other kinds of stuff.

And the fighters and all the rest of it.

So, and I learned a lot about, there were people in the Southwest and the West that were really, really bright people.

And they didn't go to the Ivy League.

None of us knew what was really gonna go on is I joined a squadron, we joined a squadron in Okinawa that was sitting the nuclear alert.

But they had just come back from deployments in Thailand against North Vietnamese targets.

Courageous people, and I saw him six years later back in Phoenix where he was getting back on flight status.

I was out there because I married a girl from there, and we were getting another brother married.

So I learned a lot about these people and the people that were just in my little flight and the 67th Tac fighter Squadron.

One ended up a four-star general.

And two others, there were two-star generals.

And I'm just a bank president.

- Well, you certainly had deep roots in Canandaigua.

- Well, that is true.

The family has been here since 1791 when Elijah brought them over from the Cape to settle in Bloomfield in 1791 on 400 acres.

A farm that stayed in the family for well over 200 years.

And I thought that there were a lot of families that have been around for a very long time because Canandaigua, now we know, was organized about the same time, 1789.

And we know the story about the Phelps and Gorham purchase.

So there are many people that live in Canandaigua that may not be fully conscious of that we were really part of the promise of the revolution, which was go west and develop the whole continent.

And so, we were just doing what we were supposed to be doing.

- Well, that would be farming and developing.

And I guess eventually banking.

- Yes, and it turns out that farming, as my grandfather was writing about in 1930, I came across some of his papers.

It was interesting he wasn't mentioning 1929, which is just months before.

But he was talking about the 14 generations of agrarian life that represented not only our family but most of western New York state.

And what is to become of the urbanization of the United States, which was moving people towards the urban areas and maybe the large businesses were gonna go there.

And what did that mean to little ecosystems like the villages and towns like Canandaigua, and all the rest of it.

He was not pessimistic.

But back in the day when the bank was formed, which was in 1887, which was well after we had settled in, farmers also were merchants.

And some of them, two of my great-grandfathers, Mr. Hamlin and Mr. Parmley, one in Bloomfield, one in West Bloomfield, would also discount notes.

And that was contracts between people on installment basis.

But somebody would buy them up for 90 cents on the dollar, give the cash, so another project would happen, and then they would receive the payments or go to the big city in Canandaigua where there was not one but four banks headquartered in Canandaigua, which was the county seat after all.

And you remember right after the Phelps and Gorham purchase, Ontario County formed, and it had the boundaries of the purchase, which was from Lake Ontario to the Pennsylvania border.

It wasn't until just around the canal came a generation later that things started to break up into what we know today.

So I didn't know this when I was growing up because they don't teach the local history, tragically.

I think they should.

But we were, and the whole Rochester area was part of the pathway of the development of the entire United States as we know it today.

- So how did you move away from agriculture, from the family's history in farming?

I mean, I understand that, and now I understand a little better what I guess your great-grandfather meant when he said the bank was started to trade paper.

- You have a contract and a lot of contracts in those days, even deeds to exchange property were contracts and paid on installment, but you have to wait to get all your money.

And somebody would come up and offer you 90 cents on the dollar of obligation.

And you're happy to have that money and reinvest in the next project.

It's interesting that the farming area, which is a family multi-generational business that had been going on for a very, very long time is something that would blossom into other kinds of business, especially easily finance.

Because once I've described that piece of paper and you're discounted, that's what a commercial loan is.

In fact, we call our discount committee the commercial loan committee, you see.

- So your banking roots do go back pretty far.

- All the way.

And there were two farmers, Mr. Parmley in West Bloomfield, and now Henry Hamlin in East Bloomfield, who I think was a little older, had a son, Frank Hamlin, who was one of the founders.

Because he, Henry, said to Harem Parmley, "I know you're discounting notes and I am discounting notes.

"Why don't you, Harem, saddle up with Frank "and form a bank in Canandaigua?"

Even though there's two or three of them already.

Because there was a natural transition between business, happening to be farmer, happening to be family, and a whole community, just to expand your scope a little bit.

And it's the same thing.

It's a bigger family, but you have financial instruments and a need for banking services.

And so it was perfectly socially and almost expected that you would evolve this way.

They were very short chartered in those days.

They only had a 20-year charter, and it wasn't all that stable.

'Cause every once in a while you ran out and then you'd have to ask the legislature who was maybe asking you for a tribute in order to get re-upped.

And that was the tension that went on for a long, long time between the political power and the financial power.

So this is a wonderful story that has many tentacles.

But that's how we evolved.

- [Host] Well, you're a great believer in what impact a regional bank can have on a community like Canandaigua and why we still need smaller banks.

- My Uncle Arthur at the time who also served on the New York Federal Reserve and had a broader view of things.

Even though it was a tiny bank.

A hundred million dollars at the time.

But he was highly respected and he managed to get a slot there.

And he understood that we were the ones that were going to survive.

And not because we were cockroaches, but because we were better at it, better at community building, better at relationships, not the transactions.

It turns out that very large institutions fall into the focus of transactions.

They can't get over that hump of dealing with customers because that's more hands-on, takes a lot more time.

- [Host] George, how does a community bank like CNB impact your constituents?

And by that I mean your customers and your employees, differently than say a less community-oriented or a larger bank might?

- Well, we're very fortunate to have learned very early that this was a people business.

I thought that finance was just another language.

We have principles here, both human and financial, that have served us well in time.

We have to improve our people.

So the exponents of this, of these principles will endure forever.

And this is all customer-focused and the employee is a customer.

And I feel that, and we're very progressive.

If people wanna go to college, we will pay for it.

And they say, oh, what happens if they leave?

My experience is they leave for two years and come back and they will even work for us after they retire.

People I understand want fulfilling work first.

Money is fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh.

And everybody thinks that money and power is the important stuff.

If you devote yourself to either money or power, you will fail miserably.

If you do not use your power, I believe, for the people, it will rot you to death.

Because these are means to an ends, never a goal per se.

And most of our society is built on money and power is the goal.

And we write many books why that's not true.

We apply this very seriously and with our employees.

So we really do look at that and employ that not only in our employee relationships where we support them entirely.

I know by my own experiences in the theater that if people, our employees, when they retire they say, I come to work to play.

I tease them a little bit more and sometimes they say, I come to work to play.

I know that's what I always say, but play with the customer.

Are you kidding?

Yes.

And you don't think a word said or not, the customer doesn't feel that, if that's their attitude?

I say you add value to the customer relationship and let Frank and me worry about the regulators.

And I tell my employees, add value and improv.

This button that I wear, I'm the one that wears it.

I'm the one that hands it out.

And I give it to anybody, customer or employee, that tells me a bank story.

And our bank stories are just amazing.

Where people on their own go to a shut-in, do their banking.

Or I've fallen out of my chair and she calls the bank manager, not her daughter.

I mean these stories go on and on and on.

'Cause they say just take care of the people and it makes all the difference in the world.

And the transactions take care of themselves.

It's that simple.

And we hide in plain sight.

And we have a card.

And it has the usual values on the side.

I didn't do that.

We got, originally, we got the all the employees together and they distilled it all.

And the card says, these are the principles we live by.

Oh, incidentally, and work by.

They said it that way.

They're talking about living it.

You don't think that works in business?

Of course it does.

And it came from them.

It didn't come from me.

I teed it up, said go for it.

And that is a very, very major component of our success because a great strategic plan, and we work at those things too, is celestial in its performance if you've got people that are working on it all the time.

We worry about people burning out 'cause they will do anything for their customer.

- Well, George, we could go on all day.

- Yes.

- But I feel like I've just had a lesson in business and a history lesson.

And I wish we had more than half an hour, but thanks so much for joining me today.

- Well, thank you for the opportunity to talk with you, my friend.

- And thank you for watching.

You can also see this episode and past shows online at WXXI.org, and we'll see you next time on Norm & Company.

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