Los Banos Rotary Club History
Al Horrer Tells Of Bank's Growth

Al Horrer, manager of the Los Banos Branch of the Bank of America, was guest speaker at the Rotary Club luncheon Tuesday, Speaking in commemoration of the bank's fiftieth anniversary and relating its growth from the time it was started by its founder, A. P. Giannini, in a small office building in San Francisco to its place today as the largest bank in the world with resources of 8 ½ billion dollars.

Horrer related many of the innovations made by the bank during its youth and of the many services that have been added through the years to provide improved services to its customers and to encourage systematic savings by the depositors.

He pointed to the rapid growth of California through the years and to the part the bank has shouldered in the agricultural and commercial fields in the advancement of money for growth, expansion and handling of regular business enterprises. As to the future he said the bank would continue to grow and expand in proportion to the growth of the state, and said the bank and its several thousand employees would continue to dedicate themselves to serving California and Californians.

Kenneth Smith, proprietor of the Los Banos Locker Service, provided the concluding part of the program with a most interesting record playing recounting the fall of Wake Island to the Japanese in the beginning days of our World War II against that country. Smith, who was on the island at the time helping in the building of fortifications there, was taken prisoner by the Japanese and spent some 44 months in a prisoner of war camp. The record tells graphically of the heroic island made by the small U. S. Marine garrison and the hand full of civilian construction workers on the island.

May 28, 1954

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