Adam Jahns was CEO of Chicago’s Cragin Federal Bank for more than 20 years as the company expanded its local footprint to 27 branches and more than 650 employees before being sold to Dutch banking giant ABN AMRO.
“Adam was the engine that drove the entire company — he was the guy who had the ideas, and he hired great, great people,” said John Belter, a retired Cragin executive vice president.
Jahns, 96, died of natural causes Dec. 21, said his daughter, Donna Egly. He was a Lake Geneva resident and previously lived in Elmhurst.
Adam Andrew Jahns Jr. was born in Chicago to a certified public account father, and he grew up in a house on West Roscoe Street in the Northwest Side Portage Park neighborhood. He attended Reinberg Elementary School and graduated from Foreman High School in Portage Park.
Jahns received a bachelor’s degree from Loyola University Chicago, working for his father’s accounting firm while a student and afterward, and he later picked up a master’s degree in banking from Indiana University. He also served a stint in the National Guard.
Recruited to join what was then Cragin Federal Savings and Loan, he began work in the accounting department in 1955 for a bank with a single office on Fullerton Avenue, assets of $12 million and a reputation for conservative business practices.
“We were in a blue-collar community and people trusted the bank, and we provided every possible service for our customers that we could — we had a travel agency, we provided state license plates and we gave our customers all sorts of reasons to come in,” said Jahns’ brother, Richard, who worked at Cragin for 35 years.
By 1970, Jahns was executive vice president at Cragin and shortly afterward was promoted to president and CEO. He later was named Cragin’s chairman. When the national savings and loan crisis hit in 1986, Cragin found it had little to worry about because of its careful management, Richard Jahns said. Much of that could be attributed to Adam Jahns’ leadership, his brother said.
“He learned from what he saw and he saw the mistakes others made and he avoided those,” Richard Jahns said.
Jahns oversaw the bank’s expansion into the northwest suburbs as it followed the path of many of its Northwest Side customers, which Richard Jahns said “was the key to our success.”
Adam Jahns also was successful at building a team of leaders. Richard Jahns said most of his brother’s deputies in bank leadership had been there for 20 years or more.
“He loved his job,” Richard Jahns said of his brother. “He loved the people that he worked with and he had the reputation around the industry as a straight shooter.”
Adam Jahns also oversaw Cragin’s service corporation, which was a subsidiary that S&Ls used to make investments that savings associations were not allowed to make. Through its service corporation, Cragin helped fund several of homebuilder Joe Keim’s massive developments in the western suburbs, including Danada in Wheaton and Eaglebrook in Geneva.
Keim named Jahns Drive in Wheaton’s Danada East after the banker. He also named a nearby street after Belter.
“One day we were talking about a deal and Keim said, ‘We’ll drive over here,’ and he surprised us and unveiled the two streets, Belter and Jahns,” Belter recalled.
John Tracy, another longtime homebuilder in whom Cragin’s service corporation invested, lauded Jahns for mentoring him and helping bring his business through economic uncertainty at the start of the 1990s.
“We’d gotten overextended with a lot of inventory, and Adam and John guided me through survival. There was no handout, there was no (loan) forgiveness, but they taught me how to survive,” Tracy said. “We owe everything to Adam and John. Without Adam’s mentorship and guidance on how to survive, we wouldn’t be here. Adam was just a huge mentor on taking professionalism to the business level, and it brought a whole different perspective to my life.”
In 1991 Jahns took Cragin public. The next year, ABN AMRO made an unsolicited, $500 million cash offer to acquire Cragin, and Jahns accepted, despite earlier saying he had no interest in Cragin being acquired.
“We never thought we would do this,” Jahns told the Tribune in 1993.
Jahns served on the boards of various state and national bank organizations, including the United States League of Savings Institutions and the Federal Reserve Board’s thrift institutions advisory council.
In addition to his daughter and brother, Jahns is survived by his wife of 71 years, Virginia; three other daughters, Linda Eitmontas, Barbara Martin and Marcia Hendrychs; a son, Brian; 10 grandchildren and 20 great-grandchildren.
Services were held.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.