(early 1981): Don Dixon Seeks to Buy Vernon Savings and Loan

In an unintroduced telephone call to R. W. Tanner, president of Vernon Savings and Loan of Vernon, Texas, Donald Ray ‘Don’ Dixon expresses interest in purchasing a small town S&L such as Vernon, which is located in a town where Dixon lived in his boyhood. Dixon does not reveal to Tanner, who does not recall having discussed the possibility of a sale of Vernon to anyone, that a mortgage insurer known to both men has given Dixon the referral. The phone call leads to a meeting between the two after a few days, during which Dixon says that if he bought the thrift he would continue the small-town, conservative style of savings and loan banking that Tanner had practiced for years. It appears to have been considered incidental by everyone at Vernon except possibly Tanner’s assistant, Woody Lemons, that Dixon’s other business affiliation was his real estate development enterprise, the Dondi Group. [O'Shea, 1991, pp. 2-5, 6] Dixon also does not tell Tanner at this time that Dixon’s source of cash is to be Herman K. Beebe, a Louisiana finance and real estate businessman of wide-ranging interests and a person of note in the 1976 rent-a-bank scandal that had come to light in the collapse of the Citizens State Bank (Carrizo Springs, TX) failure, and who, it will later be revealed, is involved in numerous acquisitions of smaller thrift institutions in the southwestern United States during the early 1980s. Beebe’s involvement with Vernon through Dixon is only revealed to Tanner at the point of signing the final purchase agreement nearly one year after this. [Pizzo, Fricker, and Muolo, 1989, pp. 188-192, 234, 231-235; Black, 2005, pp. 38]