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THE MAN OF THE MONTH
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luxurious office of Chairman — -while Joe and George W. Dillon began to share the big first-floor Commerce Trust office looking out on the corner of Tenth and Walnut. Financial history has been made in that corner office — and will continue to be! But graphology will have little to do with it.
Years of constant travel made Joe Williams better known to bankers outside of Kansas City than to the businessmen here at home. After many Association jobs in minor offices, he served as president of the Missouri Bankers' Association, and chairman of the post-war planning committee. In the American Bankers' Association, he has served as a member of the executive council, and is a member of the legislative committee and small business credit committee. Traveling to New York, Chicago, Detroit— throughout the Middle West, the South and the West — he came to know bankers everywhere by their first names. And that means the big bankers, as well as hundreds of smaller ones. One of his proudest achievements within the banking industry is his successful endeavor to build the Association of Reserve City Bankers into a top-echelon organization. When he joined it, in 1922, the membership was composed principally of bank transit men and assistant cashiers. Joe worked to bring into the group the chairmen of boards, the vice-chairmen, the presidents and the executive vice-presidents of banks in Federal Reserve cities. There are 450 such members today — all top executives in their own banks, commanding, as a group, immense respect and power.
Joe Williams knows 90% of them with nick-name and first-name intimacy, and has served the association as treasurer, vice-president, director and as a member of various committees.
IN the rush of affairs today, hobbies no longer take much of Joe Williams' valuable time. In Springfield days, when one of the Williams farms had been turned into a golf course, Joe used to shoot a fair game of golf. He liked the game because, owning the course, he and his brothers could move the tees at will, to suit their whim. The Williams family, incidentally, are truly "landed gentry" in the Ozarks region, having expanded their holdings (with elder-brother Dr. Robert F. Williams as business head of the clan) to include some 2,400 acres of dairy farms. The golf course was sold to the government as a site for the O'Rielley Veteran's Hospital.
After Joe and Mrs. WilHams had moved to Kansas City, where they were raising their four children in their former home at 606 West 52nd Terrace across from the Loose Park Rose Gardens, Joe for a while did a bit of rose gardening. But when the children had grown, and Joe and Nona moved with their unmarried son Robert to an apartment in the Sophian Plaza, there was no further opportunity for rose culture. In recent years, Joe has taken up fishing — lake fishing, brook trout fishing, deep sea fishing. Joe, Nona and son Bob (who is in the women's ready-to-wear department of Emery, Bird, Thayer on the Country Club Plaza) spent their summer vacation this year at Lake