Note: E. David Locke, chairman and CEO of McFarland State Bank, fronts our Jan. 15 print edition as our Banker of the Year. During a pre-Christmas interview at his bank in McFarland, Wis., Locke recounted several colorful career stories, including this one, in which he faced masked, gun-slinging bank robbers, prevented a kidnapping, shortchanged the thieves — and eventually went to meet one face to face.
Call it the impulsiveness of youth, but when masked gunmen burst into Godfrey State Bank pointing sawed-off shotguns and Tommy guns, David Locke was, as he says now, some 40 years later, a little annoyed.
“Part of you just gets mad,” he said.
Locke was the lead teller and had the keys to the vault that night. He complied when the man with the sawed-off shotgun poked it in Locke’s back and followed him to the vault. But once inside, Locke started by opening the collateral file, then the coin drawer. The thief let it be known that he wanted real money and threatened to “cut down” Locke, who acquiesced — kind of. Locke stalled around, taking his time in unloading a lock box of ones, fives and tens; he never did get to the stash of bigger bills. The thieves fled with more than $67,000, but the unopened lock box contained another $300,000.
“I just elected not to give it to them. How would they know what we had?” Locke said. “Robbers are there to get in and get out.”
But these robbers preferred to leave with a hostage, and they pointed a gun at Locke’s colleague, saying “you’re coming with us.”
“She had me by the arm, holding on for dear life, and she was really crying,” Locke said.
Locke stepped in front of the gun and told the assailants that his coworker wasn’t going anywhere but home that night. They left, and Locke ran out after them in time to see their license number. The car was stolen, but the thieves were eventually caught, tried and convicted.
Locke does not recommend his approach to other tellers. In fact the FBI investigator who first heard Locke’s story shook his head and said, “that was not wise.”
“When you’re young, 18 or 19 years old, you’re invincible; you think you can’t be hurt,” Locke said. “I would never advocate that now, but at that time, with that particular guy, it seemed like the thing to do.”
A few years later Locke was visiting his family in Illinois, near the site of the robbery. His sister said that one of the thieves was out of prison and working at a nearby hardware store. It was the one who had poked Locke with the gun and threatened to cut him in half.
Locke “wanted to see what he looked like without the holdup mask,” so he stopped in the store.
“I walked up behind him in an aisle, poked him in the back and said, hey, remember me?”
Read much more about David Locke’s career highlights in the Jan. 15 edition of NorthWestern Financial Review.
