THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Mary Houghton

“I was proud to include, as a credential, a strong commitment to feminism.”

Interviewed by Mary Jean Collins, VFA Historian, December 2023

MJC:  So, first I’m going to ask you to say your name, where you were born, and when you were born, please.

MH:  Mary Houghton. I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on January 4, 1941. So that makes me 82 years old.

MJC:  Talk about, if you would, your early life, Shorewood, and what kind of bringing up you had, what your folks were like, and the rest of your family. Just ground us in your beginnings.

MH:  I grew up in an Irish-German Catholic family in Shorewood, the nearest suburb north of Milwaukee, and went entirely to Catholic schools, first through university. I went to St. Robert, a grade school in Shorewood, Holy Angels High School. And then I spent two years at Barat College of the Sacred Heart in Lake Forest, Illinois, and two years at Marquette University. My father was a general practitioner/surgeon; my mother was a college-educated housewife. I had two siblings, an older brother and a younger sister.

After college, I worked for a year at the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, and then obeyed my mother and figured out how to go to graduate school. I luckily got accepted at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC. I went there for two years, came back to the Midwest, and worked at the foundation started by the Johnson family who created S.C. Johnson & Sons in Racine.  I worked in a beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright building in Racine called Wingspread, for a year or so.

And then I got bored,  and started looking for something else to do. And with great good luck, during a trip to Chicago, bumped into the people who were creating a minority small business loan program at the Hyde Park Bank. It was probably the second or third such bank effort in the country in 1968. I joined it and it experienced very substantial market demand. After a while, the group of people who were doing it (the president of the bank and three professionals) said, “We can do something bigger.” And so, bigger turned out to be to try to buy a bank, and then run the entire bank as an inner-city local investment company.

And so, we bought the South Shore Bank in 1973 and built it for the next 35 years. It became quite well known nationally and even internationally. We targeted the neighborhood of South Shore, which had changed racially in the late ’60s and early ’70s. We did enough lending to effectively halt the deterioration that usually follows racial change, so that the neighborhood started getting better, and that caused us to respond to other requests to do the same thing. So, we operated on contract in Arkansas and then independently in Cleveland, Detroit, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Pacific Northwest.

The bank that we had acquired had $40 million dollars in assets, and by the late ’90s, the bank had gotten to over $2 billion dollars in assets. It was doing very well. But then the effects of the recession hit the bank. In 2008-9, there was a lot of irresponsible mortgage lending going on around the country and that also affected the neighborhood of South Shore. And so, the regulators got worried that here was a bank that was so focused on one Black inner-city community, that it must be going to be in terrible trouble. So, they were very aggressive in downgrading the portfolio, and ultimately closed the bank. So, Shore Bank’s history ended in 2010.

I’ll stop on this professional part of the history; we had been successful enough, that the idea of a bank or any other kind of lending organization actually targeting lending into low-income markets became a big idea. Shore Bank is now clearly recognized as the first community development financial institution, or CDFI, and there are today, about 1400 of them around the country. So, we started an industry.

This new industry was helped substantially by the fact that Governor Clinton, who had learned about what we were doing in Arkansas, when he became president created a federal fund resource for this new industry. And the fact that there was consistent grant funding from the federal government from the mid ’90s onward, meant that there was a resource for which to fund new organizations.

So, we had a good run and succeeded in most of our objectives.

I got a chance to finance a lot of childcare centers, and women, when I was a small business lender at the bank. One more thing about the bank: the bank was  also unique because the group of people who got together to run it were biracial. There were two White people; myself, a Polish man and two Black guys.

When I came to Hyde Park in the late ’60s, there was a local feminist effort, the Women’s Rights Committee of the Hyde Park Kenwood Community Conference. And out of that group, essentially, in one way or the other, Women Employed and the Sojourner Truth Childcare Center were created. And I personally, with Pat Novick Raby, was deeply involved in creating the childcare center. And, you know, some of those people in the group were also very active in Jane, the abortion service in Chicago. And so, from that period on, I was proud to include, as a credential, a strong commitment to feminism. So, I think that’s the background.

MJC:  That’s excellent. Well, you’ll be happy to hear I have done Pat Novick Raby’s interview and it’s in our collection. I don’t know if it’s posted yet, but I’ve done a couple of the Janes, and of course, Heather Booth is on our board. So, it’s nice to have an opportunity to come back and talk to some Hyde Park people.

MH:  A good friend of mine was Katie Frankle. Did you do her because she was active in the Jane group? So, it was an active time in Hyde Park.

MJC:  Definitely. So, your role was basically on the finance side. Can you talk a little more about the child care center and then if and how the bank was actually involved in the women’s movement?

MH:   Pat Novick and I were the co leaders of creating Sojourner Truth Childcare Center, and once it was created, I served on its board for the initial two or three years. I helped to raise money to get it started, talked to the church that let us use the space, and dealt with the management issues of the early years of the childcare center. At some point in time, the board was turned over to parents because it was intended to be a parent-run childcare center.

And at the bank, I was a commercial loan officer, then the head of the commercial loan department, and then a co-head of the organization. So, I was the senior woman in the leadership group. I’m sure that had something to do with the fact that over time, numerous women joined the organization, because they could see that women were getting ahead. Also, the purpose of the bank was so mission driven, that it just did recruit a lot of talent, male and female.

And then as I said, for a while I financed childcare centers, including very ordinary, proprietary childcare centers, where a woman would rent a storefront and then get licensed by the state of Illinois and operate a childcare center for however many people the building could hold.

And then somewhat related to that we financed new organizations that the state of Illinois was attempting to support to distribute the delivery of mental and educational services via local community groups. I was proud to figure out how the bank could lend to a brand-new community controlled non-profit. But the state’s funding lagged, because the new non-profit could only submit its expenses for reimbursement after they had been incurred. So, these groups, which had no cash reserves, didn’t have the cash to operate for the 90 days that it took for them to get reimbursed. And we figured out how to lend into that stream of income without having really ideal collateral. We did a fair amount of that around the south and west sides of Chicago. So, I think the only story about the bank’s commitment to women was women leaders, openness to women-led small businesses, and women-led not for profits, for credit.

MJC:  Mention your co-sponsor. The co-people that operated the bank with you, just to put them on the record.

MH:  Okay, so it would be Ron Grzywinski, Milton Davis, and Jim Fletcher.

MJC:  Just want to give them credit, too. So, it sounds like there was a convergence of the movement for women’s rights with this amazing project, that was unique, and gave opportunities, and was able to fund things that were necessary for women to find equality in society, which was an amazing thing, really. I remember it at the time. Amazing.

MH:  Right. There was a period of time when most banks having a policy of not lending to women. But it was about the time we started that that started to break down, that you could actually borrow as a female.

MJC:  Well, I remember at the time, and then stories that I’ve heard from this project, people not being able to get a credit card except in their husband’s name. Really, not being able to access capital very easily at all. I remember at the time, what a unique institution this was that you helped to create, and what a difference it made. I think it gave women ideas they might not have had because of the existence of the bank and the creativity of the bank.

MH:  That was absolutely the case. Right.

MJC:  So how did it affect your life? The women’s movement, and this process?

MH:  It just made it richer. It was another important way to be a leader. At some point when I was a young banker, I wasn’t so sure whether when I was interviewed, I should say that I was active with women’s organizations. Was a banker supposed to say that? But I always did. And nobody, certainly the bank didn’t worry about it; the bank was much more focused.

The primary mission of the bank was to finance low-income Black markets that were ignored, or where the banks wouldn’t go, because they were worried about declining property values and lack of income. So, the bank’s mission was 100% focused on economic and racial issues for African-Americans.  The bank never really promoted that it was focused on women. But it was.

MJC:  There’s often the criticism that the women’s movement didn’t address the needs of Black women. Do you think the bank’s activity helped to secure funds for Black women as well as White women, would you say?

MH:  For the bank, it was 100 times more interested in Black women than White women. I mean, it would finance people who lived locally in South Shore and later on the rest of the south side and the west side. So, it rarely would have financed a White woman, just by definition.

MJC:  So, the principles of equality were brought home in this institution, particularly with Black women. But you brought the feminist vision to this as well. So, did you continue to be active in the women’s movement beyond the ShoreBank activity, or how did it influence the rest?

MH:  I was on the board of a couple of organizations that were women-focused. One was in the early ’80s. It was the Overseas Education Fund of the League of Women Voters. It was a league-created institution that was working with women in developing countries. Later, I was on the board of Women’s World Banking.

I went to the founding meeting of Women’s World Banking, which would have been sometime in the mid ’80s. It thrives today as an international organization, which essentially is run by women leaders internationally, and which works only on gender issues in developing countries. So, I was on that board for a good long period of time and I would never have been invited if I hadn’t had the background that I had. I’ve been on other boards, and I’m sure I was asked onto some of them because I was a female.

MJC:  Do you continue to do some work as an activist now?

MH:  Well, I do, but not particularly on women’s issues. I’ve been retired for a while. I’m very active supporting a group of eight organizations. These organizations that are called CDFIs, that do lending in low income markets. And this particular group of eight, are CEOs of Black led, Black focused, lending organizations. And so that’s a big project that’s clearly an activist project. It’s called, Expanding Black Business Credit. And then way back, we had a rap group in Hyde Park, and I still get together three or four times a year with two of those members.

MJC:  Wonderful.

MH:  I’ve had some young women ask me, “Mary, what is a rap group?”

MJC:  Yes. Well, is there anything that I have not covered that we should cover?

MH:  No, I think you’ve got it.

MJC:  Good. Well, I thank you so very much for participating in this project. It’s just great to see you, Mary. I’m glad you’re doing well.

MH:  Nice to see you, too. I’ll go on the website now and get myself more familiar with what you’re doing. Congratulations on doing it.