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Friday, September 26, 2008

Dear Old Dad

posted by on September 26 at 10:32 AM

I don’t have much of a connection to Washington Mutual. My first savings account was at Seafirst (Wedgwood Branch!) and when they transitioned into Bank of America, so did I. So when it comes to personal WaMu-related anecdotes, I got nothin’ (aside from a general low-grade panic about the current disintegration of the world).

But day before yesterday, my adorable dad—a now-retired advertising copywriter—applied, hilariously, to be my intern (“Ms. West: I could be an intern for you. I like movies. I especially like candy. I am not as detail-obsessed as my wife, but I could work at it. I have done some data entry, some audio transcription, and some research. I hope I qualify. Please let me know. -Paul West”). Looking over his resume, I remembered something kind of interesting.

Way back in the way-back-whens, working at a local ad agency, my dad came up with the folksy, long-abandoned WaMu slogan:


Washington Mutual, The Friend of the Family

Wikipedia tells me that their current slogan is (was) “Simpler Banking, More Smiles.” Ugh.

My dad always calls it Washington Mutual Savings Bank, never WaMu. I asked what he thought about the collapse. He said, “We’ve seen what happens when a nice little community savings bank grows into a greedy giant.”

RSS icon Comments

1

Sell Dan and Keck on using it for the slogan oon next week's ish.

The Stranger
The Friend of the Family

needs tweaking! Have pop fix it!

Posted by mike | September 26, 2008 11:44 AM
2

...and they were on of the key players in the campaign of lies against the monorail project, and tried to do a mega-development on some of the last wild land in Southern California.

Posted by Grant Cogswell | September 26, 2008 11:49 AM
3

You all know that SeaFirst was bought by B of A in the late 80's and they waited a decade to change the name to avoid freaking people out. (They slowly introduced the Versteller accounts etc) But there was a legal problem with B of A doing business under SeaFirst in the Northwest so they changed the branches over.

Something similar is supposed to happen with Washington Mutual before everything changes to Chase; but all the branches will get new signage probably within the next year to 18 months.

And when we all have one SUPERBANK, when that collapses we are so totally fucked!!! YEAH!!!!

Posted by Andrew | September 26, 2008 12:13 PM
4

I remember that slogan, which was always followed by the terse but reassuring words "Member FDIC". How I always wondered if a day would come that we'd need the FDIC to save us.

Posted by --MC | September 26, 2008 12:20 PM
5

“We’ve seen what happens when a nice little community savings bank grows into a greedy giant.”

It can happen to anyone.

Moral: Beware giving anyone or anything the benefit of the doubt.

Posted by Gomez | September 26, 2008 12:29 PM
6

Hire him as your intern! Great writing skills, great sense of humor.

But he has to change his name to Paul Lindy West, and then perform selections from Bye Bye Birdie on YouTube.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman | September 26, 2008 12:33 PM
7

I remember that campaign. They used to fly Booth Coleman up from LA every couple of months to tape the spots.

Posted by Toe Tag | September 26, 2008 1:11 PM

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