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Mr. Hugh L. Mccoll, Jr X-T7 THIS INTERVIEW IS RESTRICTED AND REQUIRES THE INTERVIEWEE'S WRITTEN PERMISSION FOR ACCESS. THIS COPY PROVIDED FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY TO MS. KATHLEEN COLLINS, ARCHIVIST, BANK OF AMERICA CORPORATION The Southern Oral History Program (SOHP) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Transcript of Interview: Mr. Hugh L. McColl, Jr. Chief Executive Officer and Chairman, Bank of America Corporation Bank of America Corporate Center, Charlotte, North Carolina June 14, 1999 Interviewee: Joseph Mosnier SOHP Series: "The North Carolina Business History Project" Note: See also the second session with Mr. McColl recorded July 23, 1999, included within the same series. Mr. Hugh L. McColl Jr., June 14,1999 SOHP "North Carolina Business History" Series Page 1 of38 JOE MOSNIER: Mr. Hugh L. McColl, Jr. the Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Bank of America Corporation in the Bank America Building in Charlotte, North Carolina on Monday, June 14, 1999. My name is Joe Mosnier of the Southern Oral History Program in the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This interview is being conducted for our series entitled, North Carolina Business History. The date is June 14, 1999 so the cassette number is therefore 6.14.99- HM. Thank you very much for sitting down with us for this session. Let me start with just a couple of questions looking back to the kind of perspective and values you brought with you because one of the things that I want to explore is the reasons why and the ways in which your views have evolved and shifted over time on many fronts as they appear from the record to have done. Let me start with a sense of why was college not so particularly engaging for you? HUGH MCCOLL, JR.: Well truthfully I found it quite easy to make Cs and do nothing. Secondly, well secondly, I would say that being in the Naval ROTC limited the menu of electives we could take. Naval Science took up most of the electives, and so I was in the core courses almost the entire time I was at the university. That is, taking the basic required courses in General College, I think they called it at the time, and then again in business school. In looking back on it, in business school is quite limiting in its curriculum, and so I had no chance to broaden my education particularly until about my senior year at which time I didn't particularly care. Arguably I didn't know what I wanted to do particularly. Our lives were proscribed. We knew that we were going in the military, and that's about it. JM: Why the choice-? HM: I had no academic aspirations. JM: Why the ROTC choice? HM: Because at that time, we had universal military training. You either had to go in the Reserves and meet weekly or monthly really either in the Army Reserve, the Navy Reserve, or the Air Force Reserve. The platoon leaders PLC program in the Marines, or I decided to opt for Naval ROTC. I guess romantically thinking the Navy was better. One of my cousins, Duncan McColl who is still living a man whom I admired had been a Naval officer during the Second World War. I guess, sort of all of the above. Mr. Hugh L. McColl Jr., June 14,1999 SOHP "North Carolina Business History" Series Page 2 of38 JM: Tell me about, tell me in particular about what sort of came into vision by virtue of the trip to Europe you made after leaving the Marine Corp. Was that an especially significant trip? HM: Well, it was significant in that I met my wife here in a train station in Charlotte, traveled with her for whatever eleven or twelve weeks, came home, and within two months married her. So first it was significant in that sense. I know Europe opened up a lot of vistas that I hadn't seen. In the Marine Corp we basically saw the Mediterranean, sort of outline of North Africa, and the Caribbean. So I had not been to any really big cities prior to going on this trip. I enjoyed the big cities, the Londons, and Parises and Romes of the world and saw a whole—it put sort of meat on the bones of things I had read about as a child in the novels that I had read and what have you. So I found it intriguing, interesting, probably didn't get as much out of that as I should've, retrospectively. JM: Tell me if getting married changed you in some sort of fundamental way, changed your perspective or changed your outlook then as a young man? HM: Well, absolutely. First I don't think I cared two hoots about what I was going to do and had been sort of blase about it prior to going to Europe. Came home and got married. Neither one of our parents wanted us to get married for the logical reasons. I was not established, had no money. My father believed that you should be able to pay for a house and everything before you got married. So it changed me in the sense that I suddenly had thrust upon me a lot of responsibility that I had not contemplated and had not really thought out. But it made me really serious about keeping my job and then trying to be successful at it. JM: What do you think you would locate the roots of seemed to be a rather considerable intellectual flexibility, nimbleness? HM: Well, first I think I've given my mother a great deal of credit. It's impossible for people who didn't grow up that way to understand it. We were read to every day of our lives from the time we were little, tiny children. Mother read to my father and to all the children and grandmother. It was a house full of books. There was nothing to do but-there was no television. We never had a television while I was growing up. All of our, a lot of our activities were in our minds. We lived in what you would call the wrong side of town although we were well off. The reason was the family had always been there, and the town had moved away from-as towns do. Even little towns do. We're not talking a mile or two, but in Mr. Hugh L. McColl Jr., June 14,1999 SOHP "North Carolina Business History" Series Page 3 of38 those days seemed like a lot. To go play in a proper neighborhood, we'll call it, you had to get on a bike or somebody had to be brought in by their parents. So we had a lot of, we played a lot of imaginary games with imaginary friends. We also made do with the people who lived around us. They became friends and part of our pick up football and baseball games, which went on constantly, basketball. My family talked business a lot at the table, or sort of not politics, because Jane, my wife's family, grew up talking politics and social issues. We talked more about business and other maybe world affairs during the war. When I was a young person, we talked a lot about the war. I've had a lot of curiosity about Europe long before I went to Europe and since, most of my adult years, I've spent reading about the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Second World War. It was only after I was in my fifties that I began to read US History. I guess the reason was, like all South Carolinians, the Confederate states had been glamorized out of the role, we'll say out of the role of the revolution of Francis Marion and Pinckney and all those had been, we grew up on Simm's History of South Carolina. All of the, I'd call it the heroics of the Swamp Fox, et cetera. And so I identified with that, didn't really, I'm a person who likes to win. I would never read about the Civil War because we lost. I was only read extensively about it from my fifties forward. I can't answer the question you asked. JM: I'm wondering when you're looking back, you compare your caste of minds say to that of your contemporaries in college. Would they have been likely to say of you that you were someone who was relatively receptive to a new idea, somebody who sort of liked to kick around a new notion? HM: I don't know that. I don't know what they would've said about me. I played a lot of poker, played a lot of basketball down at the Tin Can, and went to a lot of movies. That's fundamentally what I did was play intramural sports, gamble and go to movies. Did very little studying. But I had a good time in that sense of the word. I wasn't so—I talk a lot. I'm very gregarious. I don't know what they would've said about me. I was elected president of my fraternity. So that says something, whatever that means. JM: Friends say that the significant troubles for the bank in the mid-seventies were the first real sort of crisis period you had to witness at the bank in your-at that point. HM: Yes. We had had a blip or two in '69 when Red Cue was still in effect.
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