New Kidney, Same Spirit

April 12, 2009
The Boss
New Kidney, Same Spirit

By RONALD D. PAUL
NEW YORK TIMES

MY father is my role model. He was a wholesale liquor salesman and worked very hard to support my mother, my three siblings and me. We first lived in Queens, where I was born. When I was 6, we moved to Oceanside on Long Island.

Work is my passion, something I took from my dad. From seventh grade on, I always had a job. The first one was stuffing inserts into the weekend newspapers, so I had to be there by 4 a.m.

While I was at the University of Maryland, I met my wife, Joy. After we married, we moved back to Queens, three blocks away from my childhood home, while I worked at one of the Big 8 firms. But after 18 months, I was tired of working as an accountant. We both had loved the Maryland area, so we decided to move back there.

I got a job as a bookkeeper for a real estate company in Rockville. It was run by someone I had met while I was raising funds on Maryland’s campus for the American Cancer Society. For two years, I chaired fund-raisers and served on the society’s board of directors.

Without any warning, in 1985, I was told I had the beginnings of kidney disease. It came to light during a physical for a life insurance policy. I didn’t let this illness slow me down. Two years later, I decided to start my own real estate company, buying local midsize apartment and office buildings, and formed a separate firm to manage them.

That same year, a local bank was looking for a director with real estate experience to be on its board. In a very short time, I found that I loved banking.

Within a few years of the original diagnosis, it was clear I needed a transplant. It wasn’t great timing for my real estate business, and by then we had two daughters — ages 3 and 6. Luckily, my brother, Steven, offered to donate his kidney, and fortunately it was a match. I had the transplant in 1990.

Although I was still very active in real estate after the transplant, I, along with four other directors from the previous bank, decided in 1997 to form Eagle Bancorp Inc., the holding company for EagleBank.

Initially, we focused on financial services to small companies in Maryland, and then expanded it to Washington, D.C.

EagleBank has grown to $1.5 billion in assets and is a typical community bank. We deal with small- to medium-size businesses, from doctors to the local hardware stores to the real estate community.

Last spring, tests showed that my transplanted kidney was failing. Typically, such transplants last no more than 20 years, and my kidney was donated almost 19 years earlier, so it wasn’t a complete surprise.

I learned a lot about kidney disease because I served for years on the board of the National Kidney Foundation. I was its chairman in 2002 and 2003, and headed its fund-raising gala twice — raising in excess of $1 million each time.

The kidney failure came just as EagleBank was about to merge with another local bank, Fidelity and Trust Bank, and raise more capital from a group of our directors.

In December, we decided to participate in the TARP Capital Purchase Program and borrowed $38.2 million because we saw it as a great opportunity to grow the bank. In the last quarter of 2008, we increased our loan portfolio significantly.

While all of this was going on, I was fortunate that I didn’t have to search for a kidney donor. Kathy McCallum, the chief financial officer from my real estate company, immediately offered to be the donor; she has worked with me since 1982, starting as a secretary, then moving up in the company to her current position. She was a match, and the surgery took place in January — exactly 19 years and one day from the first transplant.

As told to Elizabeth Olson.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/jobs/12boss.html