ABODE The Man who Couldn’t Retire As the President and CEO of Monterey County Bank, Charles is essentially living his Fourth Life. His pilgrimage has led him through interesting pathways, least of which was a brief sojourn as a retired person. Jan 2008

Charles T. Chrietzberg, Jr.

I retired when I was 40 years old and moved to Carmel. During the subsequent six months I went on seven cruises. I discovered that there were only a limited number of hours that I could spend sitting in a lounge chair on the Lido deck of one of those floating palaces. How many drinks could I imbibe before I didn’t want another Mai Tai?

How many lobster salads could I eat before the 30-foot-long food buffets lost their charms?

After a while that kind of self-indulgence can make a brain as dull as it makes a person wide.

The non-cruising part of my life during those six months became equally dim. Following my retirement it was a real joy to sleep in until I felt like getting up, walking down to eat breakfast at Friar Tuck’s, reading the Wall Street Journal while I ate, going home to take a rest, strolling back to town to have a bottle of wine, and then walking back home to take a nap before going to a restaurant for dinner.

That’s a great way to spend a day, but it turned out to be a lousy way to spend a life, or even half a year.

Preparing for Life
One of my problems with retirement was that I love to work. I was born and raised in Mineola, Texas, which was a town of about 5,000 people. My dad worked as a car inspector for the Texas & Pacific Railroad. I got my first job when I was 14 years old in a local cafÈ as a busboy/dishwasher, and started driving that same year.

Things were a lot easier back then. We left the key to the pickup in the ignition, and the 30-30 in the rack on the back window. Life was fun! I knew everybody in town, and went blackberry picking with Willy Brown, who was destined to became mayor of San Francisco. I belonged to the FFA and raised my own cows, pigs, and chickens, which I hauled in the back of my dad’s pickup for the two-hour drive to the State Fair in Dallas.

Following graduation from high school in 1959 I thought I would get my military service in, so I joined the National Guard, becoming a Weekend Warrior while working in a meat market. I talked three of my friends into joining with me so we could get our armed service requirement behind us. Then we could go to college without worrying about the draft.

Nobody from Mineola had ever been stationed anywhere except Fort Hood, Texas. However, while working one day in the local meat market I got a telephone call from my sergeant at the armory saying that my three buddies and I had been posted to Fort Ord, California.

I had heard a little bit about California and nothing at all about any Fort Ord. The four of us came out here for six months. I kept volunteering for Cook School but spent the entire time in the infantry, eventually learning to position and aim an 81 mm mortar. I had the best accuracy record of anyone in the division so that kept me away from the potatoes and carrots.

Leave time was spent visiting Carmel. It was my first time to be near the coast and I was spell-bound by the ocean's beauty. I would sit on the beach taking picture after picture trying to capture the majesty of the waves. When I got home mom showed me the stacks of useless photos I had sent her showing only waves marching into the beach.

I was released from the army in February 1960 and spent a year at the Junior college in Tyler, Texas, which was a half hour drive from Mineola. I became an apprentice butcher in the Safeway meat department in Tyler.

In September 1961, two months after I married Sandra Gail and began college, the Berlin crises came along and my 49th Armor Division from Tyler was sent to Fort Poke, Louisiana.

We spent 14 months at Fort Poke getting ready to fly into Germany, possibly to participate in World War III. Every other weekend I would drive home on a short leave to spend time with my new bride.

The Cuban missile crises was making things even hotter and we faced a future clouded by the threat of war. I’m not sure what our 49th Armor would have done if fighting had actually broken out, but I know that our division had sufficient heavy equipment to pull down the Berlin Wall, if we had been ordered to do so.

Going to Work
The tragedy of thermonuclear war was thankfully averted, we mustered out of the service, and I went back to school. I finished Tyler Junior College and enrolled at Nacgodosus State College. The local Safeway meat department had no opening, so management put me in charge of perishables, including meat, veggies, fruit, and milk.

I loved working there and kept being promoted so when I graduated from college the Safeway people offered me a position of assistant manager earning twice what I could have made in an entry-level position in my Accounting field.

Of course, such an offer was tempting to a young guy like me. I had no ambition in life beyond doing the best I could at whatever opportunity presented itself.

Finally, I turned my back on the job offer and went to work with a large firm. I could have chosen to work at a firm in Dallas, close to my home. But, even though it offered less money, I opted for a job at Pete, Marwick, & Mitchell in Houston, which seemed a more dynamic and vibrant opportunity.

That decision proved to be the best move that I could have made. After three years one of my clients offered me a job as CFO doubling my income at that time. Three years later, in 1971, I formed my own mortgage company.

It was a great time to be in business in Houston. Big Oil was driving the economy. The growth curve was phenomenal and in ten years my company had grown to be one of the area’s largest mortgage businesses.

I finally brought Sandra Gail to visit Carmel and to see the waves that I had told her about for so long. She immediately fell in love with the Monterey Peninsula. We planned to stay two days at the Pine Inn, the oldest hotel in Carmel, but we ended up staying ten days, and even then she hated to go back to Texas.

I had no plan to go anywhere, but an S & L offered to buy our company for more money than I could reasonably turn down. So in March 1982 I retired. We had sufficient money to live anywhere we wanted so my wife made the reasonable decision to buy a home in Carmel, the community which she had fallen in love with.

So after retirement we looked at several Carmel homes that were selling for five times what a comparable place in Texas would have cost. We finally settled on a house at Carmel Point, which is where we still live.

After those months of cruising, relaxing, and drinking I went into the wine business as a way of getting my mind clear and finding something to do. Some investors wanted to do a Chardonnay Winery. Cabernet is supposed to be king so we considered Chardonnay to be the queen of wines, and decided to name the label La Reina.

Our very first vintage in 1984 took a gold medal at the Orange County Fair. We eventually were in 13 states. After ten years, in 1994, we sold out to Deliecoto Vineyards. We had good wines, earned a lot of respect and honor, and lost over a million dollars.

But money isn’t everything and I would do that again if given the chance. Running that winery business was a great thing to do! For one thing, it gave me an excuse to travel to cities around the U.S. and to find out what was happening in other parts of the country.

We sold the winery because I had become involved as a board member of the Monterey County Bank and in 1987 was elected President and CEO. My life suddenly became really busy.

I discovered that I had a tiger by the tail in the banking industry and learned only after investing in the bank how badly the bank was actually doing. Turning the bank around proved to be a big challenge and it took five years, until 1992, to actually make it profitable. However, we’ve had steady growth during the 15 years since that point.

The bank began developing an SBA lending program. We’ve grown over the years and are now the largest SBA lender in Monterey County. For a long time we were the county’s smallest bank but the largest SBA lending organization. We recently were ranked as the number one bank in the United States in average return on equity over the past three years.

Working with the Monterey County Bank has been a great part of my life! I’ve always had a passion and vision for making small businesses successful. It is a real payoff seeing somebody being given the opportunity of fulfilling their dream.

I enjoy coming to work every day and seeing what I can do to help develop communities and small businesses. Community service is an important part of my life. I’ve been a Rotary member for the past two decades. I enjoy the comradery of Rotary but especially like being part of the good work that Rotary performs for the local community as well as for people around the world.

I’m also serving as president of the Sheriff’s Advisory Council and have always been a strong supporter of effective Law Enforcement. I was the first citizen to be issued a Crystal Badge, which is a program that provides equipment and specialized training for local peacekeepers. The Crystal Badge is given to people who make a substantial donation and who successfully pass a thorough background check. Our names are then registered with the Sheriff’s Advisory Council. There is no administrative overhead; all proceeds go directly to buy equipment and support training for our deputies.

A year ago last May my daughter Stephanie left her management position in the Doubletree Hotel chain to take a position with us as the VP of Business Development.

Stephanie has a Bachelor in Business Administration with a minor in Marketing. I’m grooming her to assist in our attempt to keep the bank locally owned and managed, rather than selling out some day to one of the chains. I’m trying to teach her as much as I can about the business as fast as I can. She’ll hopefully take over at some point in the next five to ten years.

I don’t have retirement in my life plans. If I can stay healthy I’m going to work into my 90s. I have no plans to go on any more cruises.

For more information about Charles or the Monterey County Bank go to www.montereycountybank.com for contact information concerning their eight locations. Send any comments on the article to editors@65mag.com.