Some of HomeTown's original 2,138 investors turned out Friday to open accounts.

By Rob Johnson
981-3234
The Roanoke Times


Amid predictions of quick profitability, HomeTown Bank executives and investors celebrated the institution's grand opening Friday, flanked by horse-mounted police. Depositors lined up while one employee stubbornly held on to a piece of lobby artwork that a new customer tried to buy.

All in all, it was a festive first official day for Roanoke's newest locally owned bank. Mayor Nelson Harris, a stockholder, showed up to address a crowd of 100 or so fellow investors, lobby workers and representatives of several charities, including the Salvation Army, who were promised donations by the bank's chairman, Warner Dalhouse, when HomeTown achieves profitability.

Harris told a well-received joke about a HomeTown employee who bought a business suit days before the opening but discovered that it had no pockets. The punch line: Bankers don't need pockets because their hands are in those of their customers.

It got a big laugh, and Dalhouse took the zinger in stride.

Most new community banks in Virginia get into the black within 18 months to three years, said Edward Joseph Face, commissioner of financial institutions at the State Corporation Commission in Richmond.

Face, who attended the 11:30 a.m. ribbon cutting, said the outlook is good for HomeTown. He reasoned that the bank's founders raised $25 million in stock sales to capitalize HomeTown, and returned an additional $1.5 million to would-be investors after all the planned original shares were sold.

"Sometimes people in Richmond or Norfolk and other places will ask me if their town really needs a new bank. I tell them I don't really know. The answer is whether the organizers can find people who want to invest, which is what happened here."

Some of HomeTown's original 2,138 investors turned out Friday to open accounts. "I really wanted to be part of this," said Fred Leonard, a stockholder and a retiree from Blue Ridge who was at a teller window within minutes after the ribbon was cut.

The bank actually had opened that day at 7 a.m., as it does every weekday for the start of a 12-hour day. In fact, despite Friday's event, HomeTown has been open since Monday.

HomeTown's celebration will spill into today from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. when the bank will sponsor activities for children and give away hot dogs in a parking lot at the intersection of Campbell Avenue and Jefferson Street.

But the hospitality found its limit at the desk of Barbara Kern, a HomeTown financial specialist. Her office is decorated with paintings by local Roanoke artists such as Eric Fitzpatrick -- some of them for sale. On Kern's credenza is a colorful still life of apples. When a customer offered her $500 for the painting, she admitted being momentarily tempted to cash in on HomeTown's opening. "But my daughter, Lauren, painted that. It's personal."

So it was no sale.