- LaRae changed the whole atmosphere for women in business.

She was one of the first pioneers to bring a woman's presence to the C-suite of a bank.

- A women's bank was necessary in those days.

Women could not get credit in their own names.

Women didn't have checking accounts.

They either had 'em with their father or with their husband.

- The Women's Bank wasn't just for women, it helped a lot of really strong men succeed.

[bright upbeat music] As strong and enduring as the Rocky Mountains they stood beside, as visionary as the views of the grand plains they looked across, the women inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame are trailblazers whose work has improved and enriched our lives.

They are teachers, scientists, ranchers, leaders in business, education, religion, and the arts.

Women who have been recognized for their many contributions to our state, our country, and the world.

I'm Reynelda Muse, and these are the stories of Great Colorado Women.

[gentle music] - When I first came to Denver in 1955, women were just not seen in positions of authority whatsoever.

- When she was growing up, there weren't women bankers.

They were secretaries and ran errands and made coffee, et cetera, et cetera.

- One of her best attributes was her ability to build teams, not only intellectually, but also financially.

- And she developed a reputation of being someone who was smart, was quick, honest.

- She changed things that most women would not have attempted.

- LaRae was extremely effective at providing leadership for women throughout the Denver community.

- LaRae helped them start businesses.

- She believed in.

And she told them that she believed in 'em, and she expected them to succeed, which is very powerful.

- [LaRae] I had a wonderful opportunity to grow up in Salt Lake City, Utah.

- Her family joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Armenia in the late 1800s.

- My grandfather there was a rug merchant and a money lender.

- [David] During that time, there was a lot of conflict in Armenia and her family was told, "You need to leave."

- They were told by the mayor of the town, "Take your family and leave because the Turkish Army will be coming in the next couple of weeks and they may kill all of your families."

- Her grandfather packed up their family and moved to Salt Lake City.

- [Barbara] The Mormon missionaries helped them leave Armenia just before the terrible genocide where a million and a half Armenians were slaughtered by the Turkish government.

- LaRae was born during the depression.

Times were tough.

Mom was a homemaker and very bright woman.

Her dad worked at the Amoco Refinery.

- [Darrell] She was the oldest of four kids.

- From the time I was very young we had to learn to work and do things that helped the family.

During the summers, there was a family and they raised lots of fruits and vegetables and we would go pick strawberries for 2 cents a cup and we'd pick cherries for 3 cents a pound.

And I used to be pretty good at climbing up the trees.

We had to pick cherries with stems on 'em so they stayed fresher.

Work was an ethic I grew up with and loved it and still do to this day.

I loved school.

I was very active in a lot of different activities and from the time I was very young, I learned to be competitive.

I think I got that from my mother.

- LaRae's mom was a very good athlete and played softball and so LaRae started playing softball when she was a teenager and became a catcher on the fast pitch team known as the Shamrocks, the Utah Shamrocks.

They came in second nationally.

She was the youngest person on the team.

Some of the women with whom she played were in a league of her own.

She was a great tennis player.

- I also was a president of the girl swimming club.

Embarrassing, I can't swim, but I was still president of the club, so I guess I was meant to be a leader.

- If you were to ask LaRae of all the sports she excelled in, what is her favorite?

She'd tell you, basketball.

- We had some pretty good teams.

In those days women's basketball, you could only play a half a court.

We always had to look quite a ways to find another girls or women's basketball team.

We would go up into Idaho, up into the state of Washington and then we'd go out to California and play women's teams out there.

I finally joined another team so we could play the whole court.

The Harlem Globe Trotters would come into Salt Lake and play basketball and we'd get to play the preliminary game.

- For her and her family to be able to go to college she would've had to do it all on her own.

They weren't wealthy by any means.

And I don't think that was in her vision at that point in time so she took another route and decided she wanted to be a banker.

- She recognized early the importance of working hard and she wanted to be a professional.

And in that era and within that culture, that was unusual.

- At that time, my banking career was moving.

I had started as a messenger girl at a Salt Lake City Bank.

It was called Tracy Collins Trust.

- Again, her first assignment was to make coffee for the board meetings.

And that was a real challenge for LaRae because being a member of the church, they didn't drink coffee and she didn't know how to make coffee.

And so they were very, I think very kind to her and explained to LaRae this is how you prepare coffee and she picked it up quickly.

- And within a few weeks, I received my first promotion which was from messenger girl to coin wrapper.

I got so good that I could get 50 pennies there without counting 'em and so I kept that coin wrapper's job plus the messenger job.

Then I was promoted to file clerk.

Now these were very important jobs to me because I was starting my way up the ladder.

And the interesting thing is every time I got a new promotion somehow I still kept those other two jobs.

- They never gave up the first job to have her do a higher ranking job, they just kept adding the jobs.

- So then from file clerk, I went to loan typist and eventually at that bank I became head of the FHA Title One Loan Department.

Then I became secretary to the officers of that bank.

- And she was very motivated to advance in banking and she was in touch with the fact that 90% of the demographics in banking were men.

- I suspect that she felt she would have a much greater opportunity succeeding as a banker in New York and Wall Street than in Salt Lake because that wasn't going to happen.

Culturally it wouldn't happen.

- And I decided I wanted to work on Wall Street.

I had been engaged to a missionary.

In the Mormon church they go on missions for two years.

So when he came back, things just didn't work out.

- [David] And so she decided to leave and work her way across the country.

- And that's how she got to Denver.

She was starting her trip east.

And as far as she got was Denver.

- I settled here and got a job in a bank as a secretary to the officers.

- And then proceeded up, up, up.

- I still wanted to go to Wall Street but I was moving up in the ranks.

- When she started out, she wanted to be a loan officer.

And you know, one of the things that she wanted to do as a loan officer is, you know, the banks would send you to banking school to get the training and get the knowledge that they wanted you to have.

- That was not afforded to women.

- They would only send men and they would only pay for men.

- For 14 years, she went to graduate banking school and used every single summer vacation to do so.

- And then she went into night school and got all her certificates through ABA, American Banker's Association.

But she had to do it all off work and the men got to do it during the day and the bank always paid for it.

- And as she enhanced her skills and abilities she became of value to the men that she supported.

And at some point it was reasonable that she could benefit the bank if she were an officer.

- It had to be frustrating for her.

She was training future men presidents to takeover.

And I think finally she got to the point where she just asked, when am I gonna be president?

And he said, "LaRae, this city is not ready for a woman to be president of a major bank."

- After Herman and I had had the conversation about why I couldn't become president of the bank, the women's group had approached me and presented me with a proposal starting as president of the Women's Bank.

It was a hard decision.

I had been with Guaranty Bank for 20 years and yet I kept knowing that this was the peak of my career there.

- In the seventies, women couldn't get loans.

They weren't financially literate.

And a very influential group of women decided that Denver was prime to have a Women's Bank.

They looked around and of course the highest ranking woman in banking in Colorado was LaRae.

- And I had a great customer following.

I had a large loan portfolio and had made many good relationships with my customers.

- And it was a momentous decision for her to go with a group of untried women who didn't know a lot about banking, if anything.

- One day I woke up and said, "Why am I being so reticent?

Why don't I just take the risk and see what the reward's gonna be?"

And after that, I never looked back again.

- She felt it was such an important mission and that she could make a real difference in women's lives and their financial wellbeing.

- Women really could not have the authority to sign off on anything without the approval or signature of their husbands.

- The Equal Credit Opportunity Act actually passed prior the time that the Women's Bank opened but still the banks were not being receptive to allowing women to come in and get credit in their own names.

- [Karen] And this group of women decided to start a bank to help with that.

- [LaRae] We had an outstanding board of directors.

We had women from every walk of life.

- Of course, the chairman of the board was Mary Roebling famous in her own right as a banker.

- [LaRae] Many of you have heard of Mary Roebling.

She was the family, the Roebling family that built the Brooklyn Bridge.

- I mean, here was a lady who in 19 early thirties became president of a major bank.

- And Mrs. Roebling was the woman of women.

She had been a special assistant to two presidents.

She was the chairman of the National State Bank in New Jersey.

Several of the women got in touch with her and she said, "Well, you know, I'm asked to do things all the time and I'm very busy, but, well, Colorado sounds interesting.

Maybe I'll stop and see you girls," 'cause she always called us girls.

She was the only one that could get away with that.

And so I studied every banking question in the world.

So I went to meet her for lunch at the Brown Palace and I sat down and she looked at me and she says, "Now how do you say your name?"

I said, "LaRae."

"LaRae, okay.

And what is your sign, LaRae?"

And I thought, sign?

"I don't know what you mean, Mrs. Roebling, what do you mean by sign?"

"Well, what star were you born under?"

I said, "Oh, I'm born in May.

I'm a Taurus."

She said, "That's just fine.

You'll do just fine.

Taurus's are very determined, they're very thrifty and you'll make a fine president."

She decided if there's ever a group that's gonna make it it's this group from Colorado.

So we had invited her to be our chairman and she helped us get our charter because it had been delayed.

So a group of us went out there and Mrs. Roebling went down and she knew the head of the FDIC and she said, "Now these girls wanna start this bank.

They've provided you with everything that you need.

They're gonna be well capitalized.

They're a very brilliant group of women.

Now, what's causing the delay?"

Well, within a week we had our charter so sometimes it helps to know people.

- It was the first nationally chartered Women's Bank in the country.

- As we were looking around for a home for our bank Barbara Sudler was one of our founders.

She had suggested that we go into the old Equitable building.

It was a beautiful building just needed a lot of work to be done.

We had been working for months to get things ready and one of the most exciting days of my life was the day the Women's Bank officially opened.

It was a very, very exciting day because behind us all the way down 17th Street were people with checks and money in their hands saying, "We wanna open account, we wanna open account at Women's Bank."

So we struck a balance that night.

We had taken in a million and a half dollars our very first day in deposits.

- She's like a magnet.

Once everybody found out LaRae was in the banking business, people brought their money over.

- Immediately everyone started to say, "I don't bank at the Women's Bank.

I belong to the Women's bank."

And the other banks began to see that women were congregating at the Women's Bank.

And so at the old bank, they were very upset.

In fact, one of the officers told me they used to go through the clearings every morning.

That's when checks clear your accounts.

They would individually go through the clearings to see how many checks were being written on their bank and being deposited over at the Women's Bank.

We made a profit our first full month in business, unheard of, and we continued to do it.

We were a $12 million bank in less than a year.

- The Women's Bank that LaRae was such an integral part of was wildly successful because there was no real bank serving the needs of women.

- At Women's Bank, we had all the usual banking services, checking, savings, time certificates, loans, all the regular things that banks could do.

But in addition to that, we felt it was really important to help women particularly understand the world of business and finance.

- LaRae was invested in really providing educational opportunities for women around finance.

Certainly banking was critical to all of advancement for women.

- And we taught women how to prepare proposals for investors to invest in their businesses.

So we started a number of women's businesses here that all turned out to be very successful.

- The other banks tuned in to the fact that this was a need and provided similar opportunities slowly but surely.

- Suddenly other banks were starting to open women's departments where you'd never heard of a women's department.

When other bank presidents learned that I was leaving Guaranty to go over with Women's Bank they called their women employees in, a lot of these women were members of our National Association of Bank Women so we all knew each other, and they'd call me and say, "LaRae, you won't believe what happened.

The boss called me in today, promoted me to a higher position, increased my salary, and said, 'Don't get any crazy ideas of going over there with LaRae and that group of women."

So we felt like we had a real impact on women in banking in general.

- LaRae had an amazing group of women who would come and speak at the bank.

- Many outstanding women would come to town just to come to see the bank and to visit with us and talk to us about the things that they thought were important for women.

People such as Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and a number of others.

- LaRae was never gonna let Women's Bank fail.

I mean, that was her baby and she worked hard to make sure that women had the ability to do things on their own signature.

- You know, they were very thrifty.

They went very tight shop.

They were very careful about the risks they underwrote, the loans they made and they knew some of the higher risk industries that were borrowing a lot of money at the time they chose to pass on.

- Our first year in business I only remember of one bad loan that we had, it was an $8,000 loan.

And I'll never forget it because I personally had been conned by a very smart woman who came in and wanted a loan to expand her business.

And she had an old desk that was an antique.

Well, I found out later when she didn't make her payments that she'd gone to several banks and conned them all.

We all had an $8,000 loan on this desk.

But I have to say, I learned a lesson.

- That's why Women's Bank was so successful.

She never veered from the process.

You know, the bank, the numbers had to make sense.

You know, the timing had to make sense.

If they don't, you walk away.

- And she also, is a visionary and understood certain businesses in the future would do very well and certain businesses would not.

- In 1986, they changed the real estate laws a lot of buildings were just going up because of the tax benefits.

They weren't really making any money, but the tax benefits were so great that they just built the buildings.

Well, when they changed the law in 1986 all of a sudden all these buildings had to make sense on a income expense basis, and they weren't.

So all these buildings were getting foreclosed on and that's where the savings and loans, Columbia, all those S&Ls got in trouble and you know, they started to fail.

So the problem got so bad so many banks were failing that the FDIC and the OCC had to figure out something to do.

So they created RTC, the Resolution Trust Corporation.

- I was doing a lot of legal work during that time and know that LaRae's bank took over four or five failing banks at the request of the Fed and the FDIC.

Famously, there is a cover in the "Denver Business Journal" with all of the prominent bankers on 17th Street riding horses.

20 years later, the only one of those bankers still riding a horse was LaRae Orullian.

- A lot of people today wonder about the Women's Bank because there no longer is a Women's Bank here.

In fact, I don't think there's a Women's Bank anywhere in our country now.

Maybe it's because we don't need a Women's Bank anymore and the other banks are all filling in and giving the same services we used to.

- The Women's Bank was sold as many banks are in order to get bigger and because it had shareholders and because the shareholders would make a tidy profit from the sale of the bank.

- Originally sold the stock for $10 a share.

Well, 20 years later, stock had moved up to $187 a share.

So we felt that our shareholders were well rewarded for their investment in us and we decided it was okay to sell the bank so the board voted to do that.

- LaRae had to continue for a period of time, and she did.

- So after two years, I did leave the bank.

- And when that was complete, Ron Moore who was the chairman at Guaranty Bank asked her to come back to Guaranty and she did.

- Yeah, and I went back to Guaranty Bank as president of their holding company.

One of the great opportunities I had during my life was to be associated with the Girl Scouts.

- She served as volunteer early on and developed quite a reputation.

- I had been active with Girl Scouts as national treasurer and national first vice president and I was asked to become the national president, which is a three year term.

- [Karen] And was actually the first professional woman to become president of Girl Scouts USA.

Prior to that, it was an honorary title.

- Then the other opportunity I had was I was invited to be on the world board of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts.

This is a board of 126 countries throughout the world.

We had world meetings in the United States, we had 'em in the Philippines, we had 'em in Kenya.

So I got to go to many of the spheres around the world and meet women from all kinds of backgrounds and experiences.

- She was spending a lot of time traveling to London and back, Miami and back, New York City and back.

- She flew all over the world.

She made sure that they had what they need.

- [Darrell] I think she wanted to always make sure the girls had the opportunity to do whatever they wanted to be.

- Her path has always been around women and girls and providing them opportunities.

- [Barbara] She was a rockstar.

- A number of businesses in our community that wanted my involvement not just because I was a woman but maybe I brought a little expertise to the table also.

I was one of the founders of the new Frontier Airlines and I was eventually chairman of that board.

- And she really drove that airline into success.

- LaRae was very involved in a number of other business activities.

One of them was Rocky Mountain Blue Cross Blue Shield.

- In the eighties, it was very unusual to have a woman on a large board with a company the size of Blue Cross Blue Shield.

- And I started on that board and eventually moved to the chairmanship.

We had three states at that time.

We had Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico.

There was a group out of Indianapolis called the Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield.

They came and wined and dined us and asked us to merge with them.

And after much consideration we decided it would be a good move and a good opportunity for our, not just our shareholders but more importantly for our clients, people we provided health insurance to.

Shortly after that, we decided to take that company public which meant we would sell our stock on the New York Stock Exchange.

So we did get to go to Wall Street and ring the bell.

So I finally did get to Wall Street and I also got to New York City as president of Girl Scouts.

I had an office in New York City on Fifth Avenue so I hit the big town in two different arenas.

- LaRae was one of the leaders of making certain that women were at the table.

- [Diane] She helped form the Colorado Women's Forum.

She was a founding member of the Women's Foundation.

- Another adventure of mine was the Colorado Xplosion.

Now, a lot of people may not know about that because it wasn't long lived.

- The idea that we would have a women's basketball franchise in Denver was very important to her.

It was glorious to take young girls to see these women playing basketball, the game LaRae loves best of all.

LaRae has won so many awards and they're in at least four rooms of her house.

- A couple of things that really stand out, being inducted into the Colorado Business Hall of Fame, is one of the few women in that group and of course the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame, which I'm very honored to be in.

Another thing that happened recently that has been a great honor is a mural on a wall in RiNo district of Downtown Denver.

- LaRae had a phone call from a friend saying that she had driven by a building where her image was painted on the side of the building.

- It was done by three women who did research and wanted a woman who was active in the seventies and early eighties.

And that's how I happened to be selected.

- It's a story that every little girl can look at and recognize that they can reach as far and as high as they want to.

[gentle music]