Harry Volk

After he retired from Union Bank in 1980, he became head of the Weingart Foundation, a California charitable organization with $155 million in assets established by a longtime banking customer of Volk, Ben Weingart. By the time Volk retired from the foundation in 1993, its assets had increased to more than $500 million.

Volk’s wife of 41 years, Marion, died in 1972. He was survived by his second wife, actress Marjorie Lord, who died in 2015. Lord was best known for playing the role of Kathy, the second wife of Danny Thomas, on the long-running television series, The Danny Thomas Show. Volk's stepdaughter is the actress Anne Archer.

In the turbulent economic times of the 1970s, Volk and Union Bank had their setbacks. He took Union into insurance and mortgage banking, only to have California regulators insist that it pull out of those enterprises in 1975. The bank never quite regained its vibrant growth. Many of its higher-level executives departed, and a significant number of the bank's business customers followed them to their new employers. During the bleak days of the mid-1970s as banks began to fail, Volk managed reductions in staff through attrition, telling a reporter: “There were no wholesale firings. We simply adjusted our staff to the workload.” Union Bank was taken over by Standard Chartered Bank of London in 1979. Volk retired a year later.

Because of his work with Prudential, which included instigating the return of unclaimed funds to beneficiaries, Volk was recruited as chairman and chief executive officer of Union Bank of California in 1957. Volk was considered a banking pioneer. He helped bring about new offerings like daily compounding of interest and banking by mail, which were radical for the time. It was Volk, a trained lawyer, who spotted the loophole in federal laws that made it possible for banks to form holding companies, and in 1967 he established the country's first one-bank holding company, Union Bancorp Inc. He also had a knack for spotting executive talent, hiring such individuals as Carl E. Reichardt, later the highly-successful CEO of Wells Fargo Bank, and Donald Prell, a visionary venture capitalist who was responsible for producing Union Bank’s first and only 30-year Strategic Plan.

He joined Prudential Insurance Company in 1930 as a vice president and, as senior vice president, created the company’s first regional home office in Los Angeles, California, in 1947. He helped mastermind Prudential’s decentralization and originated the family policy, a life insurance innovation.

Harry Volk grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, and attended Rutgers College, where he obtained a bachelor's degree in 1927 and a law degree in 1930.

Harry J. Volk (1906-2000) was an American banker and philanthropist.