Before joining Wichita’s Twin Lakes Bank & Trust as president in 1985, V. Jerry Blue ’59, a University of Wichita accounting graduate, had founded two companies: the All American Mold Laboratories Inc., which manufactured custom earmolds for the hearing health care industry, in 1964, and, in 1980, the Dallas-based custom hearing aid manufacturer Omni Hearing Aid Inc., which was acquired in 1984 by Rohrer Pharmaceuticals.
Blue had begun his successful entrepreneurial career in 1959 when he collaborated with his father in the purchase of Radionic Hearing Aid Service in downtown Wichita.
When Blue bought the Twin Lakes bank in 1985, it was already an “A” rated bank. By 1988 Blue had fine tuned the operation into Wichita’s only bank with an “A+” rating by Sheshunoff, an Austin, Texas-based bank analyst.
“I think like an entrepreneur,” Blue told the Wichita Business Journal when interviewed about the new rating. In 1989, this entrepreneurial-minded banker purchased Southwest National Bank & Trust, for which he served as chairman of the board.
A quiet supporter of Wichita and his alma mater, Blue was a longtime contributor to the WSU Alumni Association’s Shocker Auction, among many other university undertakings. From 1978 to 1981, he owned the National Baseball Congress, an organization of amateur and semi-professional baseball leagues that holds its annual championship tournament in Wichita.
Jerry Blue died Sept. 22, 2014, in his hometown of Wichita.
