By April Marciszewski and Julie Porter Scott
This fall, dozens of Denver community leaders and members gathered for festivities celebrating the newest Kirkpatrick Bank location—and the bank’s 55 th anniversary. The mayor spoke, children ate cookies, and guests left with bank-themed gifts. Chairman Christian Keesee, President George Drew, and President-Elect Kyle Powell were in attendance. It was a special day.
“Our success really depends on your success,” Keesee told the crowd, “and we look forward to the opportunity to serve you.”
Keesee’s family traces a long history in banking, starting with his great-great-grandfather, Samuel Diggs Blake, who swaggered larger than life.
The youngest of eight siblings, Blake chafed at the bit to start his own businesses on the Texas frontier after the Civil War. From wholesale clothing to groceries, he cast his entrepreneurial net wide. In 1888, he led the family’s first foray into banking, foreshadowing the success his family would find in serving communities for over 137 years.
Blake, who opened a new business as late as his 60s, passed his ambition to his dapper and equally determined son, Mack Blake. The younger Blake joined a group of investors to found Liberty National Bank of Oklahoma in 1918.
Within 15 years, the Great Depression was strangling the American economy, and Liberty was on the brink of collapse. Mack Blake—with a wife, daughter, and mercantile empire—mortgaged his own home and cashed in his personal insurance policies, convincing fellow board members to chip in, too—a gamble that kept Liberty alive when so many other financial institutions fell.
That kind of grit set the tone for what would become a family tradition of commitment to community—first by the Blakes and then the Kirkpatricks as the family expanded.
In June 1932 with his ship in port, then-U.S. Navy Ensign John Kirkpatrick returned to Oklahoma to marry the Blakes’ daughter, Eleanor. The happy couple began their married life, and Kirkpatrick stepped quickly into the role of Blake’s protégé.
Kirkpatrick entered the Liberty boardroom in 1947 after Blake’s death. For the next four decades, the Navy Rear Admiral-turned-oilman led the bank through expansion to become one of Oklahoma’s most powerful financial players in the early 1970s. But oil prices collapsed in 1981, Penn Square Bank failed spectacularly in 1982, and only two of Oklahoma’s 10 largest banks remained in 1988—Liberty and one other. On the verge of failure, Liberty faced selling to a national company.
The Kirkpatricks, with their daughter, Joan Kirkpatrick, and grandson, Christian Keesee, voted to put $20 million of their own money into saving the bank and keeping it locally owned.
The plan worked, and a new generation—represented by the young, ambitious Keesee—was waiting in the wings to take the helm.
As a teenager, Keesee had spent summers working his way up from the mailroom to bookkeeping at May Avenue Bank and United Oklahoma Bank. The industry got into his blood—or perhaps it was already there. The profession not only ran strong in Eleanor Blake Kirkpatrick’s family, but also in John Kirkpatrick’s, with his great-grandfather Lewis Mortimer Spencer involved in founding First National Bank of Yukon in 1892.
In 1988 at age 24, Keesee acquired an interest in American Bancorp of Edmond, which would eventually merge with Intermountain Bank of Colorado Springs and become Kirkpatrick Bank.
Keesee recalled renaming American Bancorp in the early days of the internet: “There were something like 500 banks in the U.S. with ‘American’ in their name. My grandfather had been in the banking business in Oklahoma City, as had his father-in-law, and they were legendary figures in the community. So I did a quick search, and there was no Kirkpatrick Bank. It was unique, and it tipped our hat to my grandfather.”
Today, the bank boasts flagships in Oklahoma City and Colorado Springs; locations in Boulder and Westcliffe, Colorado; and its new highlight in Denver.
With new plans on the horizon, Kirkpatrick Bank leaders harken back to lessons of the past. Keesee described a paramount focus on maintaining a “fortress balance sheet” as the bank deepens its kinship to Oklahoma and Colorado communities.