Donald Tisdel, who led fierce banking fight, dies at 83

Donald Tisdel

Prominent Portland bank executive Donald Lawson Tisdel, who led a headline-making legal battle against federal banking regulators, died Sept. 9 after suffering a stroke. He was 83.

Tisdel was one of the dominant bankers in Portland for much of the 1970s and '80s. He led Oregon Bank when it was a strong No. 3 behind market leaders U.S. Bancorp and First Interstate.

In 1985, he moved over to Far West Federal Bank, a deeply troubled savings and loan. He sold bank regulators on an ambitious plan to save the struggling institution with federal financial assistance. Tisdel closed the deal in 1987 after raising $27 million from private investors.

Barely two years later, the regulators abruptly changed their minds. They informed Tisdel and his roughly 1,000 employees they intended to take over the bank.

Tisdel, a jovial family man who preferred to confine his combat to the tennis court, was appalled at what he considered the injustice. He found a kindred spirit in David Nierenberg, the 37-year-old venture capitalist who had contributed the $27 million. Together, they fought back, launching an unlikely lawsuit against the bank's own regulators seeking to block the federal takeover.

The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post covered the story closely.

"He was a great wartime leader," Nierenberg said. "We spent seven years and nine months fighting back against a regulatory and political witch hunt that was arduous, nasty and totally underserved."

The courts sided with Far West. The institution won at the federal district court level and kept on winning.  Regulators appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1996, the Supreme Court voted 7-2 in favor of Far West, ordering the regulators to repay the $27 million with interest.

It was pyrrhric victory. By then the regulators, after being initially blocked by a court order, had managed to seize Far West and sell off the assets to the highest bidder. Tisdel never worked in the banking industry again.

"They needed someone to blame, someone to vilify," Nierenberg said. "Don, by virtue of his prominence, was that guy. They wanted a scalp."

Born in Lowell, Mass., Tisdel grew up in Salt Lake City. In high school, he met Geraldine Weiss, who would become his wife of 61 years. He served in the U.S. Air Force and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. He and his wife were a formidable pair, remembers Clayton Hering, a friend and long-time Portland real estate executive. Tisdel served with Hering on the Oregon Symphony Board and various other civic groups while his wife was the first woman to head the Portland Rose Festival.

"He loved to joke, he loved to laugh, he had a very tender heart," said Carol Frohoff, his long-time executive assistant. "I remember what a wreck he was when he took his youngest child off to college."

Outside of work and family, Tisdel's great passion was tennis. He was one of the city's top age-group players for nearly four decades. Jim Jackson, a retired Portland dentist who played with and against Tisdel for 45 years, remembers his tenaciousness.

"He was a person of focus," Jackson said. "When he's returning serve, he was staring you down. He was a big guy. He had a monster reach up there at the net. Even in practice, if we lost the first set, when we were changing sides, he would look at the other guys and say, 'Now it's going to get tough.'"

Later in life, Tisdel managed to combine tennis and finance when he served for 12 years on the board of the United States Tennis Association. He played a key role in the association's $750 million renovation of the Billie Jean King Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, New York.

"We borrowed $550 million for that project and Don helped lead us through that," said Katrina Adams, association president. "He was always like the smartest guy in the room."

He is survived by: his wife; children Stephanie, Kevin, Jennifer and Bradley; and seven grandchildren.

A memorial service is scheduled on Oct. 22 at 10 a.m. at the Agnes Flanagan Chapel at Lewis & Clark College.

-- Jeff Manning

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