Two of Houston’s most prominent businessmen of the past generation — former Houston Chronicle publisher Richard V. Johnson and former Texas Commerce Bank chairman and CEO Ben Love — died over the weekend.
Love was Houston’s most well-known banker since Jesse H. Jones. He oversaw the building of Houston’s Texas Commerce Bank into a Texas banking powerhouse during the 1970’s and early 80’s, and then engineered Texas Commerce’s merger with Chemical Bank after the mid-1980’s economic downturn in Texas caused several major bank failures and near-failures. Love later authored a book about his life in banking, Ben Love: My Life in Texas Commerce (Texas A&M Press 2005).
After his retirement from banking in 1989, Love dedicated the remainder of his life to charitable and civic causes, particularly the University of Texas Health Science Center and M.D. Anderson Health Science Center in the Texas Medical Center. Love’s son Jeff is a prominent lawyer with the Houston office of Locke, Liddell and is well-known in Houston legal and business circles for his formidable vocabulary, which his father helped him develop by requiring Jeff and his sisters to learn and discuss a new word each evening at the family’s dinner.
Johnson oversaw the expansion of the Chronicle into Houston’s sole daily newspaper over most of a 20 year period from 1975-95, and was instrumental in the sale of the Chronicle by the Houston Endowment (created by Jesse Jones in the late 1930’s) to the Hearst Corporation in the late 1980’s. Johnson was also active in a wide array of charitable causes, including the Texas Medical Center Board of Trustees, the Houston Food Bank, the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, the Houston Grand Opera, the Museum of Fine Arts and the United Way of the Texas Gulf Coast.