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The company Courson keeps. (Profile).

Article Excerpt
Veteran mortgage banker John Courson, president and CEO of Central Pacific Mortgage, has some real tests ahead as he takes the job of chairman of the Mortgage Bankers Association of America.

IT'S A 20-MINUTE COMMUTE ON A TWO-LANE COUNTRY ROAD. Something almost unheard of in California, especially for a financial executive. But John Courson gets to drive it every day to his office in Folsom, California, and drink in the scenery. It's starkly beautiful, in a rugged Western way.

* Sacramento is 28 miles away, yet it feels like another world. This could easily be the set of a Clint Eastwood western.

* Courson is president, chief executive officer and owner of Central Pacific Mortgage (CPM), a 90-branch mortgage company. Courson bought the company in 2000 and is the sole shareholder.

* "As all of my long-term friends in this business are retiring and getting out, I'm putting everything I've ever accumulated or owned on the line to buy a mortgage company. Go figure," he says.

* But in a boom year like 2002, you have to figure that that was a pretty smart move.

This month Courson adds a new title--chairman of the Mortgage Bankers Association of America (MBA). That job will put him on a different road--through airports, tight connections, security checks, baggage claims and taxi lines. A far cry from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and that 20-minute drive in the Buick Century.

The stretch of road he travels when he's home is classic California scenic byway, with rolling ranch land, cattle grazing and a few old oak trees. The fences are split-rail with some barbed wire, and there is not a strip mall or a gas station in sight for the full 20 minutes.

There is a sign that says "rough road," and Courson concedes it "does beat up your car."

Yet, as you approach CPM's two-story building in what looks like a prosperous, well-landscaped new business park, the signs of civilization rapidly appear. Just before you pull into the mortgage company's parking lot, you pass a massive 8,000 employee Intel campus that is so huge it warrants its own street sign that merely says, "Intel."

Signs of prosperity and new homes and solid employment are all around in this outer suburb of the Sacramento metro area. It is the kind of booming housing market that CPM has helped finance all over California and in many other states with its network of loan originators.

Courson is clearly at home in the mortgage banking business. It is the only business he's ever known, and he has deep roots in the industry and close friends that go way back.

Roots

Courson was born in southern Illinois in a little town of about 5,000. His family moved to Denver in 1952. His dad was in the oil exploration business, and oil was hot in Denver back then.

In high school Courson had odd jobs, including being a delivery boy for Peter Pan the Menu Man. That stint allowed him to drive a 1949 Chevy, he recalls. But what launched him into mortgage banking was having a high school friend whose dad was an executive vice president for a mortgage banking company in Denver. The company was called Kassler and Company, which later became Security Pacific Mortgage.

Courson started as a delivery boy and worked summers in high school and college from 1958 to 1963. He says each summer he worked his way up to do a few new things. He did construction-loan inspections or servicing calls, and eventually graduated to taking loan applications and doing some processing.

Then, at the University of Colorado, Courson met his wife, Marcia, whom he married between his junior and senior year in the summer of 1963. At that point, he went to work full-time at the mortgage company and was a producing branch manager in a two-person production office in a Denver suburb.

He originated by day and took classes by night to finish his degree in four years. Courson graduated...