Working from the Heartland

Frank Wobst
Chairman and CEO, Huntington Bancshares, Inc.
Columbus, Ohio

This is what I love about my work: I have the privilege of getting to know people who have survived tremendously trying times; who have personally witnessed human events that Hollywood screenwriters can only imagine. They aren't fiction. They walk this earth among us. And every once in a while, I get to meet one.

Take, for instance, a gentleman I interviewed a couple of years ago for a run-of-the-mill business article. He had a distinctly Dutch name, so I asked him where he grew up, fully expecting the answer " Amsterdam," or some other drenched city in The Netherlands. " Indonesia " was the answer that astounded my ears. And then he said some more: "When I was eight, my family was captured by the Japanese and I was held with my mother for four years. My father was sent to the men's camp. When I turned 12, I was also sent to a men's camp. And there I just happened to run into my father, walking down a road."

If I had passed this man on the street today, I wouldn't know it. "Oh, there goes a nice-looking Dutch guy in a distinguished business suit," I might say to myself, if I noticed him at all. Certainly not, "oh there goes someone whose very own eyes have seen the horrors of a Japanese concentration camp."

I would certainly notice Frank Wobst on a sidewalk, his height, his bearing, all signal a man who has found a dignified road. And his blue eyes and warm smile give away that his life's road is paved with a kind heart. There is nothing that would give away the fact that this president of an American bank was trained as an 11-year-old to take out American tanks by opening hatches and dropping grenades onto the heads of GI's. He never did it, he's quick to point out, but he was certainly trained for it.

There is some irony in that he would later fall in love with an American girl in Germany on a Fulbright scholarship, move to the United States , and one day have an 11-year-old American grandson of his own. And this latter-day gentleman would lead his adopted city, Columbus, Ohio, to join in sister city relationship the city of his birth, the devastated, ancient German city of Dresden.

Americans may know Dresden primarily because Kurt Vonnegut wrote his novel Slaughterhouse 5, based on his experiences going into the city as a young American GI himself. His Dresden is not the centuries old cultural center of art, music, ceramics, and higher learning. His was the Dresden after days of fire bombing that began February 14, 1945, torching 11 square miles of this civilian world, and killing well over 70,000 civilian Germans just going about their urban days. He writes of going into basement bomb shelters and seeing entire families dead in their chairs as if killed by a simultaneous heart attack. Those were the bodies that could be identified. There was much left that couldn't be identified as human at all.

	Frank Wobst and the Frauenkirche in Dresden, painted by Bernardo Belloto in 1751

This was the world of an 11-year-old boy who would one day grow up to be president of this midwestern bank. After the Americans left, of course, the city was taken over by the Communists. That, he said, was when Dresden fell into a deep coma, asleep and removed from the Western world. This is where he grew up and tried to educate himself into a future.

"In a dictatorship, of course, everything is orderly, but we grew up with no sense of normal," he says. "My father left the family to join the Army in September 1939, so we lived without our father. And, since we lived in the suburbs, we weren't directly hit by the fire bombs, but we slept in the basement of our home where we turned a space into a bedroom for us all.

"My family put a great deal of emphasis on education, and I went to a school that was over 800 years old. There the teachers belonged to the Nazi party, but I remember we were constantly instructed in Latin: 'ora et labora.' That means 'work and pray.' When the Communists took over, these gifted people could no longer be teachers, which was a great loss to the future generations of Dresden."

When Wobst finished his education at this college-preparatory school, he was eligible to receive a free university education anywhere in Germany. At least that was the way it used to be, before the country was split in two. His choice was Frei University in West Berlin, but he was stopped at the airport.

"I was told they didn't recognize East German education, and I would have to repeat my senior year in a West German school if I intended to pursue my education there. In the meantime, I was told, they were hiring in southern Germany. So I could earn some money. I had two choices, I could work in the mines or work on a farm.

"I chose the mines because it paid more. But I was rejected because I was too tall. So I went to work on the farm where we harvested beets by hand and raised any kind of stinking farm animal you care to name," he says.

Eventually he returned to school, met and married his American sweetheart and then decided to come to the United States to learn English. The plan wasn't necessarily to stay. But the years do have their way of flying by.

	The Frauenkirche after the bombing raids of WW2 Reconstruction has started.

In 1958, the young German economics graduate found work in a bank in Virginia and then began his long career up the ladder. And one day in 1989 he witnessed what we didn't think would happen in our lifetime. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Communist regime in East Germany. He had been to Dresden only once in the early 1980s with his family. And perhaps the time was right to return on official business. With the endorsement of Columbus 's mayor, he contacted the Dresden mayor and made an appointment.

"At that time the mayor over there was a Communist," he says. "But the time between making the appointment and actually going over there, a mere two or three weeks, the mayor had been deposed. And a new one came in. An understated and modest person, he was far from being a politician. He held a doctorate in electrical engineering. The only person near him he could trust was his secretary, everyone else were still functionaries from the old regime.

"One thing led to another and my wife and I became friends with him and his wife. We invited them over here so they could take a look at what an American city is like...don't forget, these guys had never been out of the country.

"He jokingly said that the only way they could come over would be if they received a personal invitation from the White House, that it would be that unlikely," says Wobst. "So we arranged it."

The White House tour out of the way, Desden met Columbus in America 's heartland. And so began an enduring relationship led by the dignified German CEO of an American bank. And, as efforts continue to mature, students, musicians, artists and scientists criss-cross the Atlantic to share their knowledge in these two foreign lands.

And to mark the resurrection of the lovely city, much effort is invested in the restoration of Dresden 's most prominent landmark, the Frauenkirche. Its dome had dominated Dresden 's skyline for centuries, only to be obliterated in a matter to three smoke-filled days in February, 1945. Surviving Dresden residents poked through the rubble daily and marked the sandstone blocks where they fell, in certain expectation that one day in the far future, those same blackened blocks will be returned to their rightful place as the dome rises above the roofline again.

That day is coming. In time for the 800 year anniversary of the city. Mark your calendars: 2006. You can be sure that Frank Wobst will be there. You can also be certain that his grandson will be there too.

Copyright 2005 by Martha Finney. All rights reserved.