The loss of an Ozark County icon: JOHN HARLIN...A multiple-personality comic in the spotlight, he was simply 'a good man' in real life

For more than 30 years, Ozark County legendary banker John Harlin enjoyed a sideline job as a professional entertainer, performing impersonations of a zany cast of famous celebrities and fictional characters for audiences around the region. He loved making people laugh at annual conferences, Chamber of Commerce gala events and nightclubs with quips mimicking personalities ranging from tipsy crooner Dean Martin to hillbilly matriarch Granny Frickert.

As Ed Petterson, one of the original organizers of Gainesville’s Hootin an Hollarin festival, said, “Whenever John was invited to take the stage, you never knew who was going to show up.”

As an entertainer, John Harlin had multiple personalities. But outside the spotlight, there was just one John. Those who knew him well said he was the same caring, even-tempered, laughter-loving man inside and out, whether he was with his closest relatives and friends or working alongside employees while serving customers at Century Bank of the Ozarks, the institution his family founded as the Bank of Gainesville in 1894. None of those questioned could remember the last time, if ever, they had seen him visibly angry, frustrated or upset.

John died March 15 at his Gainesville home after a seven-year struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 86.

Repeatedly, as news of his death spread around the area, he was described with the same simple words. “He was a good man,” people said. “A great guy.” One called him, “a gentleman’s gentleman.”

Born into banking

 John Layton Harlin was born Jan. 8, 1937, in West Plains, the son of Hugh Tan and Billye Key Harlin. He was named for his grandparents, John C. and Clara Layton Harlin. John and his sister Sherrill (now Sherrill Hardcastle), two years younger, spent their earliest years in a small house on what is now Harlin Drive, surrounded by other homes where their relatives lived. Their maternal and paternal grandmothers were their first babysitters while Hugh and Billye worked at the bank. 

A few years later, the family moved to a house on the eastern edge of town, just past the iron-rail curve on what was then US Highway 160.

Both kids attended all 12 years of school in the old school building on what is now Elm Street in Gainesville. After school, John and Sherrill walked to the bank in its small, 1924 building on the west side of the square, where their parents or their granddad, Johnny Harlin, usually had some little job for them to do. Sherrill remembers filing checks and operating the huge Recordak camera that took microfilm pictures of checks. She assumes John ran the machine sometimes too. 

“You punched a button and took a picture of each check. Then you turned the check over and pushed the button again to take a picture of the other side. Most boring job there ever was,” Sherrill recalled. “The employees hated it, but I loved it.” She especially liked it (and the employees hated it) “because, to do the bottom tray of checks, you had to sit on the floor.”

As they got older, John and Sherrill sometimes joined the teller line, cashing checks or making deposits for customers. Once a month, the Harlins – Johnny, Hugh, Billye, John and Sherrill, along with Hugh’s sister Madge Brown and her husband E.T. – and all the bank employees worked late, sometimes until 10 p.m., getting the monthly statements ready to mail. 

“They set up tables, and everyone had a long tray of checks. You checked off every check, one by one, on the statement,” Sherrill said. “Then you folded the statement, put it and the checks in the window envelope, licked the envelope and licked the stamp.”

She doesn’t remember what they did for supper. “You couldn’t order a pizza,” she said, laughing.

When John graduated from high school in 1954, Sherrill remembers their granddad Johnny Harlin bought him “an old car that, when you stopped, it would just bounce.”

Johnny Harlin died in 1955, leaving their dad, Hugh, in charge of the bank.

John enrolled in Southwest Missouri State College, now Missouri State University, majoring in speech and dramatic arts. Sherrill followed after her own graduation in 1957. Their parents gave Sherrill $50 a month for living expenses. John got $100 a month “because he had the car,” Sherrill said. 

During college, John also worked for KYTV, managing a boom-microphone for shows including the nationally broadcast “Ozarks Jubilee.” 

As junior and freshman, they saw each other frequently on campus but not every day. “And every time our paths crossed, he was always wanting to borrow money from me,” Sherrill said. “I can specifically remember handing him 50 cents one day – a half-dollar coin.”

By that time, another young college co-ed had caught John’s eye. 

A drive-in engagement 

During his sophomore year, John had noticed Linda Fleenor, a freshman, in the college cafeteria. She hadn’t noticed him. He had joined the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity, and Linda had joined the Alpha Sigma Alpha sorority, where John knew some of the other members. He asked one of those girls to introduce them. And that’s how John met the woman who would become his wife for more than 65 years.

They dated – while also dating other people. “But after a few months, we decided we liked each other best, so we started dating pretty steady,” Linda said. 

John never officially proposed, she said, but one night at Taylor’s Drive-In, a popular hamburger joint, he gave her an engagement ring – kind of by accident.   

“We were sitting in John’s car at the drive-in,” she remembers. “The thing was, I always let down the glove compartment door to set my drink on it. That night, it was locked. I got kind of angry. I said, ‘Why is it locked? What have you got in there?’”

She thought maybe he had alcohol in the glove box. Instead, he unlocked the glove box and said, “Well, OK. Here’s your engagement ring.”

John had planned to give Linda the ring later that evening but had forgotten the glove box would need to be opened at Taylor’s so she could set her drink on the door. 

They were married Saturday, Sept. 14, 1957, at the Methodist Church in West Plains, where Linda’s parents, Lowell and Lela Fleenor, were teaching at the time. Linda wore a short dress trimmed with beige lace. “I couldn’t afford a big, fancy dress,” she said. At age 12, Linda’s sister Lesley (now Trottier) was too young to be a bridesmaid; John’s sister Sherrill filled that role. John’s hometown friend Larry Clark, an SMS grad and Air Force veteran, was best man.

 John and Linda spent their brief honeymoon at the Harlins’ cabin on Bull Shoals Lake and were back in Springfield Monday morning. Linda, who had completed two and a half years as a music major, left school to begin married life. John, then a junior, decided to take a break from college and enlist in the Air Force.

Air Force adventures and accolades

Linda joined John in San Antonio, Texas, after he completed basic training at Lackland Air Force Base there. 

  “We lived in a place near base. What we could afford was hideous, like all the other places near base,” Linda said. “I had to drive him from that place to Lackland every morning about 3:30 to 4 a.m. then drive back home and hope I didn’t get mugged or murdered. . . . We had a cardboard box for a table, but you didn’t think about those kinds of things. Whatever it was, you coped with it.”

Their next stop was Clinton Sherman Air Force Base near Burns Flat, Oklahoma. “That name described the place, for sure,” Linda quipped. They lived in a small house trailer they had bought in Springfield and pulled to Oklahoma themselves. Inside the trailer in Burns Flat, Linda said, “It felt like the wind was blowing 100 miles per hour all the time.”

The facility was a new base in the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command, a Cold War program that managed, among other aircraft, B-52 heavy bombers, capable of delivering nuclear weapons. “We finally got used to hearing the sonic booms all the time,” Linda said. 

When the Air Force asked John what job he would like to do, “he said he wanted to be in finance or entertainment,” Linda said. “So they made him an Air Policeman. He had to guard the airplanes out on the runway.”

Six months later, he heard about an opening in the finance department, applied for the job, and got it. 

Each year the Air Force held a worldwide talent contest, and the first time he entered with his celebrity impersonations and comedy routine, John came in second behind a friend, Willie Tyler, who had a ventriloquist act.

John entered the contest again the next year, 1962, and won, and the attention given to the honor in regional Oklahoma newspapers “really launched his career as a comedian,” Linda said. “He entertained at officer and NCO clubs and other places around the base. Nearby Elk City, Oklahoma, had a night club, and he appeared there. He was in demand.”

A return to banking

After his honorable discharge later in 1962, John and Linda returned to Springfield, where in 1963 he finished his bachelor’s degree – in finance, rather than speech. He and Linda didn’t think they would ever return to Gainesville and go back into banking, she said. Instead, they settled in West Plains, where John’s dad helped them purchase a dress shop that happened to be for sale. 

“He went to market with me in Kansas City and helped pick out things to sell. Then he would help unpack the things and get them ready to display, and he helped with the store’s checkbook,” Linda said. 

Then John was offered, and accepted, a job at First National, a West Plains bank that had historical Harlin-family connections. 

In 1964, Gainesville’s Hootin an Hollarin organizers asked John to help emcee the new festival, and later Linda was invited to organize, stage and direct a Hootin an Hollarin queen pageant. She had accompanied her sister, Lesley, through competitions that would lead to Lesley being named Miss Missouri 1965. Linda modeled the local pageant on events she’d seen in Missouri and in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where Lesley, as Miss Missouri, would compete in the Miss America pageant. 

John was the pageant emcee. 

The Harlins’ work with Hootin an Hollarin would continue for decades, as Linda staged and directed the annual pageant and John served as festival and pageant emcee. Years later, when John turned the emcee job over to Don Sullivan and Linda stepped down as pageant director, they both continued to serve on the Hootin an Hollarin committee, helping raise funds, plan activities and serve in other ways. 

 In the mid-1960s, John’s uncle, E. T. Brown, announced his retirement as a longtime officer of the Bank of Gainesville. Hugh Tan called John about that time and said, “Your mother and I are tired, and we’re considering selling the bank.”

John listened quietly and then said, “Dad, if I move home, will you not sell?”

“That’s what I hoped you would say,” Hugh answered. 

John and Linda moved to Gainesville in February 1966, settling into the little two-bedroom house on Harlin Drive where John had spent the earliest years of his childhood. 

Their son Chris was born in 1969.

‘John’s the president’

Re-joining his family at the bank, John worked alongside his parents and his aunt Madge. 

“I think he came in as a bank officer,” John and Linda’s son Chris said. “That means you did everything. You might be making a loan one minute and then you’d step into the teller line and take a deposit the next.”

John was involved in more than the day-to-day bank operations. He and his dad, Hugh Tan, were constantly thinking of the future and considering ways they could improve the bank to serve their customers better. That led to a new bank building that was completed in 1969 at the bank’s current site on the northeast corner of the Gainesville square.  

“I think it was in the fall when the bank moved into the new building,” Chris said. “My grandparents were on an American Bankers Association trip somewhere, maybe Hawaii. “They told my dad, ‘Don’t move while we’re gone.’ But he did it anyway [probably thinking he was helping them]. And until my grandparents both passed, they would say, ‘There’s stuff we never found again.’”

Despite the unsupervised move, Hugh and Billye obviously liked the way John stepped into all the roles he was assigned to at the bank. But everyone, including John, was a little surprised when Hugh “walked into the bank one day in 1972 and said, ‘John’s the president of the bank now,’” Chris said. 

John might have been shocked at the way his promotion to president occurred, but he wasn’t unprepared to take over the role. He practiced the kind of leadership his dad and grandfather had modeled: a calm, friendly demeanor, rarely, if ever, allowing anger or frustration to show. And, of course, like them, John loved to laugh.

Dyana Crawford, who worked for John at the bank for more than 18 years, described him as “a heck of a boss and a very good people person. We all loved him,” she said, remembering especially how, whenever things seem to be stressful or dull at the bank, “Here he’d come, walking across the lobby with his Walter Brennan limp, saying something to make us all laugh.” 

Carol King worked as John’s secretary for 40 1/2 years and agrees with Dyana that he was “a wonderful boss. He was fun and patient,” she said. “He could talk to anyone.” 

If John ever got mad about something – and that didn’t happen very often, she said – “he didn’t express it like some people do. He was a good man.”

Among other accomplishments, John expanded the bank into other communities, first opening a branch in Theodosia in 1978 and then wrangling a bill through the Missouri legislature to open another one in Bakersfield.

“There were very restrictive laws and regulations on bank branching back in the late 1970s and early 80s,” Chris said. “They’ve totally loosened up now, but back then you could only have one branch within 15 miles of the original bank, and we already had one in Theodosia. Dad and Granddad talked to the legislature and somehow they put together this law that said you could put in another branch if yours was a third- or fourth-class county with a certain population – and there were only a handful of counties that met that requirement.”

John noted later that, when the Bakersfield branch opened in 1983, the Bank of Gainesville had the most geographically widespread bank-branch system in the state.

Editor's note: This is the conclusion of a two-part tribute. Part one was published in the March 22 edition of the Times. 

Chris Harlin was a frequent visitor to the Bank of Gainesville during his growing-up years, but he didn't work there, as his dad, John Harlin, and his aunt Sherrill Harlin (Hardcastle) had done in high school when they served customers alongside their parents, Hugh Tan and Billye Harlin. Chris spent lots of time with his parents, though. They especially enjoyed traveling together, often to American Bankers Association meetings around the country, with side trips for sightseeing along the way. And they "always had a boat or pontoon on the lake," Chris said. 

He also played Little League Baseball in the summers, with his dad serving as one of the three popular play-by-play announcers. (The others were Rex Johnson and Don Rackley.) As he got older, Chris and John sometimes played golf together, first on the golf course that opened in Theodosia in the 1970s (his parents were investors in the course) and then at other courses around the area.

Throughout his childhood and teenage years, Chris said, "there was never any pressure whatsoever" from his parents to plan on joining his family at the bank when he grew up. His aunt Madge Brown, however, had other thoughts. "She would say, 'You're going to be coming back to run the bank,' and I'd always answer, 'No way,'" Chris said.

"In fact," he added, "in high school I was voted 'most likely to leave Gainesville and never come back.'" He was interested in banking, he said, but thought he would probably end up working and living in some big city. Chris said his dad never expressed disappointment in his plans. "He never mentioned me coming home to work in the bank," he said.

'Dad helped me...take each step' 

After his high school graduation in 1987, Chris attended Rockhurst University and later transferred to what is now Missouri State University in Springfield. During college, he worked part-time at Boatmen's Bank, where his jobs mimicked those his dad and family had performed on the long, monthly-statement nights a half-century earlier in Gainesville. "I did statement-stuffing and envelope licking, and I ran checks through the counter," he said.

In the process, his thinking about his future changed. He began considering coming home to his family's bank. He talked to his dad, who advised him to get another bank job somewhere "then come home," Chris said.  

Following that advice, after he graduated with a degree in marketing and business in December 1991, Chris moved to Jefferson City and worked at what is now Hawthorne Bank. He describes his job there as "a floater – I worked as a teller, a new-account officer, kind of an assistant branch manager, a safe-deposit person. Kind of did it all."

In October 1992, Chris married Missy Workman, who was "OK with coming home," Chris said. "Neither of us liked living in Jeff City."

They settled into their life here. At the bank, "Dad helped me learn and take each step. He was extremely easy to work with and very supportive," he said. "He would point out if something wasn't going right, but I also looked to Pat Funk for guidance, as did the other young officers like Bill Trivitt and Corey Hillhouse.

Chris' mother, Linda Harlin, worked as the marketing director of the bank, and John continued as bank president. So, when Chris officially joined the family business, he worked alongside both his parents, just as John had done when he had joined the bank 40 years earlier. Although retired, Chris’ grandparents, Hugh Tan and Billye Harlin, were also in the bank daily and on the bank board until their deaths. Later, Chris and Missy's daughters Abbi (now Abbi Martin) and Faith worked as summertime bank tellers, following the role of their grandfather John.

More than a hometown bank

In 1995, the Bank of Gainesville bought a bank in Ava, which meant a name change was needed. That's how the Bank of Gainesville became Century Bank of the Ozarks. Chris was sent to Ava three or four days a week to oversee the operations there.

As time passed, Chris took on additional duties, including head of operations. John didn't follow his own dad's way of making Chris bank president by standing in the lobby one day and announcing the promotion to everyone. "We gradually transitioned," Chris said. "In January 1999, I was president, and Dad was still CEO and chairman of the board. Then, in 2000, he retired. And once he did it, he truly stepped away from a supervisory role, and I took the CEO title too. He stayed on as chairman of the board."

During this time, John and Chris, along with Norm Hannaford and Pat Funk, "formed a group that acquired the Bank of Plato," Chris said. That led to the acquisition or opening of Legacy Bank and Trust in Plato, Sparta, Mountain Grove, Rogersville and Springfield. Legacy Bank and Trust is currently expanding into Tulsa and the Dallas/Fort Worth area.

  With bank branching regulations loosened, Century Bank now operates a branch in Mountain Home, Arkansas, and a loan office in Fayetteville, Arkansas (managed by Abbi's husband Alex Martin).  

A distinct MBA  honor

The Harlins have always been active members in the Missouri Bankers Association, which represents small banks in rural communities as well as massive banks with statewide facilities. In that group, they hold a distinct honor that spans four generations.

"There's a picture that hangs in the Missouri Bankers Association building in Jefferson City that shows a meeting held in, I think, the pre-1920s. My great-granddad [Johnny Harlin] and my great-great-uncle Tan Harlin [Johnny's brother] are in that picture," Chris said. 

Although Johnny is memorialized in the MBA headquarters, he never held the honor that the next three generations of Harlins were voted into.

"The story is that the small banks and the big banks were arguing about some of the bank-branching rules. The little banks didn't want a big banker to be the chair, and big bankers didn't want one of the little ones to have it. They couldn't agree on anyone," Chris said. "But they could all agree that H. T. Harlin would be fine. Granddad hadn't even gone to the convention that year. They called him in the middle of the night and said, "You need to get up here. You're the new chairman."

H.T.'s son John was elected to the chairmanship in 1994, and John's son Chris held the post in 2012. The Harlins are the only family in the history of the Missouri Bankers Association that has had three generations serving as chairman. And the picture on the headquarters wall shows that Johnny Harlin, H.T.'s dad, was closely involved in the organization, although he was never chairman. "He was busy with other stuff, serving in the legislature and other things," Chris said.

Only one other state – Texas – can boast of three generations of a single family holding the state bankers association chairmanship. Ironically, that family is from the same small town, Jacksonville, where Billye Key Harlin's family lived in Texas. Some like to think the two families might be distantly connected, but no one knows for sure.

Community leader and supporter

John had a wide variety of interests in addition to banking. He and Chris enjoyed duck and pheasant hunting trips, sometimes with other bank employees and sometimes just the two of them. In 2015, they traveled to South Dakota to pheasant hunt. "He loved that," Chris said. "He was a good shot, and he loved seeing the dogs work."

They played golf together locally and in area tournaments, including those sponsored by Missouri Bankers Association. They were in the gallery to watch the Masters Golf Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, several years. They even got to play on the famous course on a number of occasions, Chris said.

John loved it when Linda, as a birthday gift, arranged for him to go to the St. Louis Cardinal Legends Camp in Florida, where participants got to spend time visiting and even playing ball with retired baseball greats. Chris, who attended with John the second time he went, remembers that later that year he took John to a game in St. Louis where they happened to run into Baseball Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith, one of the pros at the camp. John said, “Ozzie!” and to everyone’s surprise, Ozzie answered, “John!” and they had a big hug.

Another great interest for John was anything his granddaughters did. John and Linda, known to Abbi and Faith as Pappy and Nanny, were usually in the audience anytime and anywhere one or both of the girls was playing or performing. 

John was thrilled when the family bought and restored the three-story Harlin House on Harlin Drive that John's grandparents had built in 1912 and where Hugh Tan was born. The house had stayed in the family until around 1946, when it was sold to Frank and Jesse Johnson, who converted it into a boardinghouse. It had changed hands several times after that, and by 2001, when Chris and Missy bought it, it had fallen into sad disrepair. 

They restored it, and Missy converted the first floor into a very popular lunchtime restaurant, the Old Harlin House Cafe, where John enjoyed dining almost every weekday. "He loved to give tours of the entire house, including the upstairs and attic, to anyone who wanted one," Chris said.

He was a longtime member of the Gainesville Cemetery Board and also gave tours there whenever the opportunity arose. "He would point to the old headstones and tell you who they were and who they were related to and where those relatives were buried," said fellow board member Mike Breeding. "It was amazing to hear him tell all the people's stories."

John was also an early and steadfast supporter of the Ozark County Historium, and he often stopped by there to visit with the volunteer on duty, especially on Thursdays as he walked back to the bank after lunch at the Lions Club.

"It might have been for 10 minutes, or it might have been for two hours, but each time John came in, he brightened the place and brought smiles to our faces," said Historium volunteer Janet Taber. "He was a masterful storyteller, and we were blessed to hear his tales ... stories of growing up in Gainesville at a time when children were allowed the run of the town and all the interesting places surrounding it. The hills, creeks, caves, bluffs -- he and his friends explored them all and had such wonderful, colorful adventures doing so. No one was better at helping you 'see' what he was talking about; no one could better describe how someone looked, sounded or acted."

John was also a lifelong member of the First Christian Church in Gainesville, which his family helped establish in the late 1800s. He was a 57-year member of the Lions Club, which he had served as president, and he also served in and supported a long list of other community groups and activities that were listed in his obituary in the March 22 edition of the Times.

The long good-bye

John underwent lung surgery in September 2016, but only a couple of weeks later he still managed to ride with Linda in a convertible and wave to the crowds as they served as Hootin an Hollarin parade marshals. Although the surgery was successful, John moved and interacted with others at a slower pace afterward, and it was soon evident that something else was wrong.

"At first it was that he couldn't remember names," Linda said. "Then it got worse, and he would get confused."

Medical tests ruled out other possibilities until the only thing left was Alzheimer's. 

"He never had a question about it. He didn't complain, and he didn't ask, 'Why me?'" Linda said.   

Slowly, the man who could talk to anyone about almost anything, that man who was loved and respected by so many friends, family, county residents and bank customers, disappeared into the fog of Alzheimer's disease. Linda remained devoted to him, keeping him close to her at home and on any brief outings they might undertake. 

"For a long time, he could fake it pretty well," one friend said. "He would still smile that smile and listen to the conversation. But gradually, we lost him."

Finally, several months ago, the two of them became virtually housebound, with Linda leaving John only briefly when a caregiver was there.

The end came early Wednesday morning, March 15. Word spread quickly, accompanied by sadness and a sense of loss wherever it was shared. "A good man" had died, but he will not soon be forgotten. 

"He worked every day on behalf of Ozark County and its people," Chris said. "He truly put the community first."