At any given moment, John Ed Chambers III is a small-town mayor, country banker, tight-lipped cattleman, industrial investor and an avid golf course developer.
The 49-year-old Yell County executive oversees these varied multimillion-dollar interests from Danville State Bank. Two National Football League Super Bowl trophies gleam on display atop the teller’s window.
Accompanying the gridiron crowns is a personal note of thanks signed by his brother-in-law and sometimes business partner: Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys.
With the added financial weight of Jones, Chambers has set about building a banking chain approaching $300 million in total assets.
During the past three years, Chambers Bancshares Inc. has purchased three banks, with more acquisitions planned for the future. Chambers makes clear his intention to preserve the family’s banking legacy, divvied among himself, his three sisters, his three daughters and Jones.
“We don’t want to sell,” he says. “It’s not for sale, period. We just want to keep expanding. We want to be a survivor and not be forced out by consolidation.”
Banking roots in the Chambers family date more than 65 years. His grandfather converted the Bank of Belleville into Danville State Bank in 1930 and moved the operations into the former home of Yell County Bank, a casualty of the Depression.
This year, Chambers took the family business in a new direction by merging his long-time interest in golf with real estate development.
With little fanfare, he invested about $3 million in May to buy control of Quapaw Golf Links Inc. in North Little Rock. That acquisition encompasses the namesake golf course and 900 undeveloped acres planned for residential construction.
Steve Holden, who helped design and build the Quapaw course, is the lone minority partner in the venture. Holden is busy overseeing construction of a new Chambers-owned golf course near Danville.
As many as 300 residential lots could be developed around the course, which is three miles north of town at the intersection of state highways 27 and 154. Phase one, encompassing 50 lots, should go up for sale early next year.
The golf course, tentatively dubbed Petit Jean, should be opened in September. The $1.5 million project is carved out of 650 acres of rolling pasture and woods on which Chambers ran cattle for 12 years.
By the way, his family owns one of the largest cattle operations in Arkansas. Just how big and how many head, Chambers is unwilling to say. The cattle roam various Yell County pastures.
Chambers and Holden also will team to build a par-72 course on 220 acres near Hattiesburg, Miss. The work will be done for the local developers of the nearby Canebrake residential development featuring $250,000-plus homes.
“I like to have partners where I can shake their hands and we all agree at the end,” Chambers says. “That’s hard to do sometimes.”
Profitable Parts
In January 1982, Chambers teamed with Jerry Jones to provide the financial muscle for Leon Milsap to launch Petit Jean Poultry.
Milsap, whose visionary parts-is-parts know-how guides the operation, owns half the company. Chambers and Jones each own 25 percent.
Petit Jean Poultry employs 2,200 workers at deboning plants in Danville, Rogers, Arkadelphia, Wheaton, Mo., and Buffalo, Mo. The company generates more than $100 million in sales annually as an exclusive processor for Tyson Foods Inc.
Chambers has held the office of mayor in Danville for 22 years and hasn’t had a political opponent since his first mayoral race in 1973. He attributes that track record to the fact that nobody else really wants to be bothered with the job.
“When you don’t have a race to run, you’re not really a politician,” Chambers says of his candidacy.
He talks with quiet enthusiasm about local improvement projects ranging from an expanded water system to wider highways to better airport runways and taxiways.
The Danville electorate thought so well of Chambers that it encouraged him to continue serving as mayor during the early 1980s when he moved his family 44 miles away to Waldron during an 18-month stretch.
That was when he was starting Scott County Bank, a new bank charter and the first expansion of what would later become Chambers Bancshares in 1986.
In October 1993, a new subsidiary of Danville State Bank opened for business in west Little Rock. U.S. Mortgage Corp. quickly became a leader among residential mortgage lenders in the Pulaski County market and has since opened offices around the state.
Chambers has his eye on having a banking presence in northwest Arkansas, where he already has business interests and a U.S. Mortgage branch.
“We’re looking forward to having a branch bank in that area someday,” Chambers says. “If acquisition gets us there sooner, then that’s all right, too.”
Arkansas banks are now allowed to branch into any contiguous county, and Jan. 1, 1999, marks the beginning of open season for banks to branch anywhere in the state.
No Ties Please
The executive office wear at Danville State Bank is relaxed. Ties are relegated to funerals and outside board meetings. That’s a reflection of Chambers’ savvy yet common-man approach to banking. Noticeably absent from his surroundings are any opulent signs of wealth that go with being a millionaire banker.
“Contrary to what a lot of people thought, my dad was never worth a lot of money,” Chambers says. “But he used to say, ‘I can go anywhere I want. I just can’t stay as long.'”
The family fortune has grown under his stewardship, but Chambers maintains a down-to-earth perspective. Family ties and relationships are important, and that extends to in-laws, too. Chambers winces at the treatment Jones occasionally has received from the media since stepping into the national spotlight with his purchase of the Cowboys franchise in 1989. It’s as if Chambers himself feels the sting personally.
“He’s an awfully nice guy,” Curt Bradbury, chief operating officer at Stephens Inc. and former chief executive officer of Worthen Banking Corp., says of Chambers. “He saw my son and me coming in the gates of Texas Stadium for a Dallas Cowboys game and asked us if we wanted to go out on the field.
“Within minutes, we were standing about five yards from Troy Aikman during warm-ups and, of course, my son was googly-eyed.”
Relationships are important to the Chambers family, and Worthen Bank & Trust under Ed Penick’s leadership is still remembered for helping Danville State Bank survive its biggest crisis on Nov. 20, 1956.
On that Tuesday, Danville State Bank was reduced to a literal ruin when a gas leak led to a fiery explosion that leveled the bank and two neighboring buildings in downtown Danville.
Chambers remembers feeling the earth shake at the grade school playground that morning. The blast, heard as far away as 11 miles, also damaged 40 other buildings in town. Amazingly only one person was killed.
Chamber’s uncle, Jim Bill Gatlin, would survive the blast, but he was standing at ground zero when the fireball erupted. Unaware of the gas leak, he inadvertently sparked the conflagration by trying to light the bank’s stove-heater.
Many bank records were incinerated in the disaster, and John Ed Chambers II asked Penick to send over an emergency team from Worthen to help operate a makeshift bank until things were restored.
The total assets of Danville State Bank stood at $10 million when John Chambers III joined as an assistant vice president in the early 1970s. Today, that figure is at more than $115 million and climbing.
Chambers intends to leave a profitable mark on his family’s banking inheritance and leave a broad foundation for the next generation to build on. n
Chambers Bancshares Loans
Real estate$100,791,02958.1
Participations$22,076,22212.7
purchased
Consumer20,721,88311.9
Commercial20,557,97911.9
Home mortgage8,947,9725.2
Credit cards232,7440.1
Municipal
leases & other104,9450.1
Total loans$173,432,774
Loan loss Allowance2,496,469
Total net loans$170,936,305
John Ed Chambers Holdings
Danville
Chambers Bancshares Inc.40.8 percent
Danville-based bank holding company
CEO/Chairman/President
GDC Inc.100 percent
Land holding firm
Owner
JEC Enterprises Inc.100 percent
Farming & cattle business
Owner
LCR Inc.45 percent
Company used to buy assets from the Resolution Trust Corp.
Partner
Little John Air100 percent
Aircraft leasing firm for Chambers’ jet
Owner
Petit Jean Insurance Agency100 percent
Insurance firm with offices in Waldron and Dardanelle
President
Petit Jean Leasing100 percent
Land company
Owner
Petit Jean Poultry Inc.25 percent
Poultry processing firm
Stockholder/Director
Wonderstate Life Insurance100 percent
Burial insurance firm
Owner
Little Rock
MLR Inc.45 percent
Producer of Natger-brand camouflage hunting apparel
Part Owner
Solomon Capital Group Inc.n/r
Venture specializing in buying accounts receivables (factoring)
Majority Owner
North Little Rock
Quapaw Golf Links Inc.n/r
Golf course development
Majority Owner
Springdale
ASP Inc.50 percent
Screen-printing venture
Owner
Downey Co.92.5 percent
Producer of bedding comforters
Owner
Chambers Bancshares Acquisitions
o Bank of AmityMarch 18, 199368.8 percent for $3.01 million
Ownership has since increased to 98.5 percent
o Arkansas Valley BankDec. 31, 199492 percent for $5.32 million
Ownership now stands at 99.5 percent.
o Bank of AtkinsApril 30, 199580.4 percent for $2.77 million
Ownership totals about 83 percent.
