Garland Certain and the arithmetic of staying local

A bank retirement can be measured in assets, years and branch offices. Garland Certain’s came with a hug. In a photograph from a Kentucky Bankers Association group meeting, the association’s president, Ballard Cassady, has his back to the camera and his arms around Certain. There is a table, a blue cup, a row of chairs. Certain, in a pale blue shirt, returns the embrace. The room has very little interest in looking grand.

The photograph accompanied the announcement of his retirement as chief executive of United Community Bank of West Kentucky, effective May 1, 2022. He had spent 45 years in banking. His bank had reached approximately $450 million in assets and employed more than 60 people. These are useful measures of a career. The embrace offers a different sort of accounting.

Certain had been a mathematics teacher and a coach before becoming a banker. He helped found a bank whose headquarters were in Morganfield and whose work spread through nearby western Kentucky towns. He died on November 22, 2024, aged 81. To follow his working life is to keep returning to the same small part of the map, finding another institution with his name attached.

Before the balance sheet, the classroom

Born in Dekoven, Kentucky, on April 6, 1943, Certain graduated from Sturgis High School in 1961 and earned a master’s degree in mathematics at Murray State University. In 1965 he began teaching mathematics and coaching football at Henderson County High School. The following year he taught at Sturgis Junior High, where he coached basketball as well as football.

His education career also included service as assistant principal at Union County High School and a brief period as principal of Uniontown Elementary. Between 1968 and 1976, he worked weekends in the recreation department at Earl C. Clements Job Corps. Housing management was another responsibility: he managed the Sturgis Housing Project and Kelly Brook Apartments.

The sequence matters because banking arrived after all of this. The classroom, the playing field, school administration and housing work preceded the executive title. It would be easy to turn that sequence into a tidy theory of leadership. The more interesting fact is the variety of work itself. Before he was responsible for a bank, he had already held several jobs in which local people depended on an institution doing its ordinary work well.

A bank takes its own address

Certain entered banking in 1977 at Farmers State Bank in Sturgis. As the institution became First Kentucky and later Integra Bank, he rose to president and then regional manager of several branches. The move gave his career another set of responsibilities without taking its center of gravity away from western Kentucky.

United Community’s formation followed around the turn of the century. Its application to Kentucky and the FDIC was filed on August 3, 2001. The bank began selling stock that September and received its state charter and federal deposit insurance on December 10. Staff began training with live transactions that day. There is something pleasingly practical about that milestone: an institution learning to operate by operating.

The Morganfield office opened to the public on January 2, 2002; Sturgis followed on January 8. These dates give the founding story its useful edges. Organizing a bank, receiving permission to operate and welcoming customers are separate events. Certain was the founding president and chief executive. Brucie Moore, the bank’s board chair, later credited his recognition of a need for local ownership with setting the project in motion.

Expansion kept adding nearby names. Clay opened in March 2005. A second Morganfield office opened on East Main Street in October 2012. Poole followed in May 2019. Read together, those addresses describe a business enlarging its presence within a region it already knew. The ambition had a recognizable geography.

What “local” contained

In February 2014, Certain and bank president Gary Lovell signed a letter to the Federal Reserve describing a $210 million community bank with four branches, 46 full-time employees and eight part-time employees. Its main territory was Union and Webster counties, with customers in neighboring Henderson and Crittenden counties. The letter makes an abstract business model unusually concrete.

Commercial lending accounted for 34.5 percent of its loan portfolio, residential lending 30.5 percent, agriculture 19.7 percent and consumer lending 15.3 percent. Its customers included small businesses and farms. The bank described partnerships with schools to teach financial literacy and reported more than $39,000 in local contributions during 2013. Community banking, in this account, involved a fairly crowded appointment book.

The letter also argued against the burden of new regulatory requirements, including staff time and vendor oversight. These were the executives’ views, expressed to a regulator, and they belong alongside the warmer language about service. Running a local bank meant contracts, training and compliance as well as familiar faces. The same letter described the “privilege of knowing our citizens and customers.” That was both a relationship and a business proposition.

“privilege of knowing our citizens and customers”

From the letter co-signed by Garland Certain and Gary Lovell · February 2014

Friday came with popcorn

The workplace had its less solemn rituals. In 2016, the bank held monthly birthday potlucks, and employees and customers could have free popcorn on Fridays. A photograph from that period showed staff acknowledging college basketball rivalries. Banking permits a remarkable amount of paperwork; it can apparently accommodate a little teasing about basketball, too.

By 2018, Kentucky Derby hats had become another office event. Employees wore elaborate headwear, and community members voted on social media to choose a winner. Board meetings included monthly slideshows introducing three or four employees in a staff-recognition feature. A board’s business could include learning a little more about the people behind the numbers.

These details appeared while Certain was chief executive. They describe the institution he led without requiring him to have invented every contest or supplied every bag of popcorn. That distinction leaves room for the employees who made the workplace their own. The bank appeared in American Banker’s Best Banks to Work For coverage repeatedly, including in 2020 and 2021. In the latter year, its entry recorded 62 employees and $360 million in assets.

Dixon was close enough to matter

The next expansion brought United Community into Dixon, the Webster County seat. Its own history dates the opening to December 31, 2020, with a month-long grand-opening celebration planned for January 2021. It was the bank’s sixth office. The new building measured 2,900 square feet, and the expansion brought five new employees.

Certain explained the move in terms of helping local people and small-business owners with their banking needs. Gwen Paris, then president, pointed to the existing Clay and Poole offices: Dixon made three locations in Webster County. Office manager Lesley Ronemous was a lifelong Webster County resident with 21 years in financial services. The expansion came with a person who could describe the place as home.

Later in 2021, United Community Bancshares announced an agreement to purchase Dixon Bank, an institution with a history stretching back 126 years. Certain emphasized the geographic fit and local decision-making. Dixon’s chief executive, Tripp Ramsey, emphasized customer service and a workplace for staff. The language on both sides concerned continuity, even as the ownership was changing.

The transaction was expected to bring United Community to about $450 million in assets. Its history records the purchase in February 2022 and the merger on April 23. With an existing Dixon office nearby, the deal joined two operations already serving the same area. Growth here meant becoming more established in a county where the bank had already chosen to build.

Leaving the office, keeping a seat

Certain’s chief executive tenure ended eight days after that April merger. The retirement plan included part-time work with the board and Paris on ongoing projects for the following year, along with continued board service. The arrangement allowed a change in executive responsibility while keeping his experience available to the institution.

His other commitments had long extended beyond the bank. They included the Sturgis Kiwanis Club, the Union County Chamber of Commerce, economic-development organizations and the Elkwood Golf Course board. He chaired the Kentucky Bankers Association in 2009-2010. The combination placed him in local civic rooms as well as statewide industry discussions.

There is a danger in letting a list of boards turn a person into a directory. Certain’s earlier teaching, his banking work and these civic appointments give the list a thread: schools, housing, employers and financial institutions all occupied the same regional life. His professional connections crossed those boundaries. A town’s organizations often share more than a postal code; in his case, they shared years of his time.

The numbers, and the people beside them

Certain’s story includes the familiar measures of an executive career: a founding role, a sequence of new offices, an acquisition and a larger balance sheet at retirement. It also includes an unusually long prelude in education and a workplace where the Derby hat contest could involve the customers. Those particulars keep the career from dissolving into a series of titles.

The question running through the bank’s expansion was how much a local institution could grow while continuing to serve a defined place. Morganfield, Sturgis, Clay, Poole and Dixon supplied the answer during his tenure. They were the places where the branches opened, where people worked and where the bank asked customers to trust it.

Return to the retirement photograph. The assets are elsewhere on the page, the official resolution below. In the picture, two bankers are holding on to each other in an ordinary meeting room. Certain’s career had plenty of arithmetic. Here, at its close, somebody had found another way to show what counted.