Ozark Bank history

Johnny Harlin eventually became bank president in the 1920s.

In 1932, Hugh met Billye Key when her family came here from Texas to look at land.

But after a tour with the Air Force, several years of working in broadcasting and then a three-year stint at First National Bank of West Plains, he and his wife, Linda, a Houston, Missouri native, moved back to Gainesville in 1966.

In 1969, the bank’s 75th anniversary year, it moved to its current location on the northeast corner of the Gainesville square.

One day in December 1971, Hugh called everyone into his office. “There was no warning.

After graduating in 1977, he overlapped briefly with Hillary at the Rose Law Firm, where he worked mostly on bank mergers and securities filings.

A 2,000-square-foot expansion was completed in 1978, the same year the bank opened a branch office in Theodosia, something previously prohibited by Missouri banking regulations.

She’d worked for the bank since 1980 and remains a director and loan-committee member.

In 1986, after getting divorced from Ross, with whom he has two sons, Gleason married his current wife, Linda.

In 1992, after graduating from what is now Missouri State University and working three years at Boatmen’s Bank in Springfield and Exchange National Bank in Jefferson City, Chris and his wife, Missy, moved to Gainesville, where he joined the bank as assistance vice president.

Chris’ mother, Linda, joined the bank’s staff in 1994.

A year later, the Bank of Gainesville acquired the Douglas County Bank in Ava, and in 1996, the bank’s name changed to Century Bank of the Ozarks.

Gleason took Ozarks public in 1997, and its share price has climbed an average of 21 percent annually, three times the rate of the S&P 500 index.

In 1999, Chris Harlin was named president and CEO of the Century Bank of the Ozarks.

A big reason has been the Real Estate Specialties Group, a unit Gleason started in Dallas in 2003 with the help of Dan Thomas, an attorney and accountant there.

Another expansion in 2006 added a new, freestanding two-story training and financial services building, including an elevator and a skywalk connecting the addition to the bank’s main building.

When the government offered bailouts to many troubled banks around the country in 2008, Chris Harlin replied in a way that surely would have made his feisty great-granddad Johnny Harlin proud.

Ozarks didn’t have a New York office until 2013; this year, industry watcher the Real Deal named it the city’s third-biggest construction lender.

But the concern raised by Muddy Waters’ Block in May 2016, that Ozarks’ growth will prove unsustainable, hadn’t gone away. “You have people in the media who don’t understand our business,” Gleason lamented. “You end up with some ridiculous headlines and stories.”

After a big run that pushed average Manhattan condominium and co-op prices above $2 million, they dropped more than 8 percent in one year, starting in April 2017.