When Richard "Dick" W. Evans Jr. wakes up Friday morning, he won't have a job to go to for the first time in almost 60 years.

The chairman and CEO of Cullen/Frost Bankers Inc., who worked his way to the top over a 45-year career starting at Frost Bank, plans to do absolutely nothing -- not just Friday, but for the next six months to a year.

Evans, 69, isn't going to serve on any corporate or charitable boards, travel the globe, hit the links, babysit the grandkids, buy a Florida condo or settle into a rocking chair at his family's Rocksprings ranch. All he plans to do is "decompress."

"Dick Evans needs to better understand himself without Frost Bank," the Uvalde native said in his signature Texas twang that has led Wall Street analysts through 18 1/2 years of earnings calls. "I am going from a position (where) you make a lot of major decisions pretty quickly. April 1, the phone won't ring. Nobody needs Dick Evans. And I think he needs to get used to that."

It's likely going to be a jarring change of pace for the workaholic, who started working as a janitor when he was 10. Since announcing his retirement last summer, he's been pestered with the question of what he's going to do with himself.

"I've got to figure it out," he said. "Ya know, I'm not much good at anything 'cept work."

Evans has led Frost Bank's parent company since Tom Frost, the great-grandson of the bank's founder, retired in 1997. Evans is the sixth CEO in the bank's history and the first without the Frost surname. Under Evans, the Texas bank has expanded from 60 locations to 126 branches, including 25 in the San Antonio area.

The San Antonio institution is now the second-largest commercial bank based in Texas and the 47th largest U.S. bank based on the most recent ranking of assets by SNL Financial. Cullen/Frost had $28.6 billion in assets at the end of last year

Investors clearly like what Evans has done. The company's stock price has outperformed most of its competitors, rising more than 140 percent under his tenure. Its total return, which factors in dividends paid out to shareholders, has climbed more than 300 percent since 1997. By both measures, Frost has outperformed industry averages tracked by the S&P 400 Financials Sector Index, a compilation of mid-sized institutions, and the KBW Bank Index, which tracks 24 of the largest U.S. banks.

Frost Bank -- founded in 1868 -- is viewed as one of the best-managed banks in America, if not the best, said Richard Fisher, the former president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. He gives a lot of the credit to Evans.

"Dick, as CEO, believes in the basic rule of banking, which is know your customers," Fisher said. "I just haven't seen any CEO of a major bank ... who really knew their customer base like he did. He's an old-fashioned banker, which to me is the best kind."

Like his customers, Evans likes to know his employees -- all 4,200 of them. He travels throughout the state each December to personally meet and thank as many as he can. He's quick to lavish praise on his staff and credit them for the bank's success. Executives are equally as enamored with their boss.

"Those of us who have worked shoulder to shoulder with him, we'd all take a bullet for him," said Cliff McCauley, a senior executive vice president with the bank.

A humble start

Evans never wanted to be a banker. He was hired when he was 10 to clean a small office behind the First State Bank of Uvalde for $2 twice a week in 1956. The office was built by Josh Ashby, who had run the bank, and Tully Garner, the son of John Nance Garner, vice president under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It's a job Evans would hold for 10 years.

His father died when Evans was 14, forcing his mother to go back to work to support the pair. But he never thought of himself as poor, saying he had a "very modest" upbringing.

After graduating high school, Evans attended Southwest Texas Junior College in Uvalde before earning an undergraduate degree in business from the University of Texas at Austin. Ashby and Garner covered Evans' tuition. When Evans offered to gradually pay them back, Ashby told him to help others instead.

The newly minted college graduate was clueless about his next step, though.

"I had no idea what the hell I was going to do," Evans said. Ashby asked him if he'd like to be a banker. "I said, guess so," Evans remembered answering.

Ashby suggested Evans try to get a job as a bank examiner and then seek a job at a bank in two or three years.

Evans recalled Ashby telling him, "After you've worked at the bank for 10 years, you will know whether you're going to be a banker." Evans found that thought "a little bit scary."

Nonetheless, Evans took Ashby's advice and worked as a bank examiner for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in Longview, not far from Dallas. Within three years, he was making $1,000 a month, achieving the only financial goal he's ever set for himself. But he wanted to find work at a bank either in San Antonio or in Austin to be closer to his mother and to his soon-to-be in-laws in Rocksprings.

Evans took a big pay cut in 1971 to join San Antonio's Frost Bank, which started him at $550 a month. It proved to be a fortuitous move, given the four other banks he interviewed with later "went broke," he said.

"Tell me that's genius," Evans quipped, calling it the best decision he ever made. "I just ended up at the right place."

It has also made Evans a wealthy man. He was awarded $4.8 million for his work in 2014, the most recent data available, and reported in February that he owns 481,792 shares of Cullen/Frost valued at $27.3 million as of Thursday's closing price of $56.57 a share.

Evans was hired as a commercial loan officer but rose through the ranks to bank president by 1985. He was soon helping to steer the bank through the mid-1980s oil crash and subsequent housing collapse throughout Texas. It was the beginning of the savings-and-loan crisis that would eventually hobble 1,043 thrift banks and cost U.S. taxpayers around $130 billion, and Evans was at the epicenter here in Texas.

Seven of the state's largest banks failed. Frost was the only one that survived without governmental assistance or by being bought by an out-of-state institution. It was a harrowing time. Frost Bank ended up charging off $400 million in loans that went bad during the decade.

"The public just knew we were broke," Evans said in an interview last year.

Evans ascended to chairman and CEO in 1993 at Frost Bank before replacing Tom Frost at the helm of the parent holding company four years later.

The bank's rapid growth has come, in part, from buying smaller rivals. The bank made nine acquisitions during his tenure, the most recent being WNB Bancshares Inc., the Odeassa- parent of Western National Bank, in 2014, which brought Frost Bank into the Permian Basin oil patch for the first time.

"We're only in Texas and we're proud of it," he said.

Under Evans, the company formed Frost Insurance, which offers property and casualty, employee benefits and personal insurance. It also launched Frost Investment Advisers. He also led the bank into the digital age with online banking and remote banking, tools developed internally rather than outsourced.

'The blue book'

Before taking the top job, Evans asked Tom Frost how the bank has survived for so many years. Out of the discussion came what's known at Cullen/Frost as "the blue book" that articulates the "Frost philosophy." Its includes the bank's mission statement of "building long-term relationships based on top quality service, high ethical standards, and safe, sound assets."

The 16-page booklet essentially lays out how the bank does business. Among its core values: It will apply consistently conservative accounting policies; it maintains a "deliberately conservative corporate 'lifestyle;'" and it will not compromise its principles for quarterly earnings.

"He's run the company like the blue book," Brett Rabatin, a senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray, said of Evans. "It's conservative lending, its relationship-oriented, it's doing the right thing, and I think he's built a legacy of a quality bank in the state. It's got tremendous influence and market share."

One of the bigger decisions for the bank under Evans' watch was exiting mortgage lending in 2000. The bank decided home lending had become "more of a commodity than a relationship product," according to the bank's web site. It was a controversial decision at the time that proved prescient when the housing market started showing strains that would later lead to a nationwide collapse, kicking off the U.S. financial crisis in late 2007. Frost had little-to-no direct exposure to the mortgage market.

Evans has always been focused on the bank's long-term performance and on doing the right thing, even if it's an unpopular decision, said securities analyst Brady Gailey, managing director at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods.

"The one thing that Dick Evans did was make sure that the culture stayed in place over the last few decades, where a lot of banks fell victim to ... some of the stupid stuff that was being done out there, and Frost just never did it," Gailey said.

At Evans' direction, the company refused to accept $330 million in government assistance under the Trouble Asset Relief Program in 2008. Healthy banks were facing pressure from Treasury Department officials to take the money, in part, to divert attention away from weak institutions that really needed the assistance. Evans said they ran the numbers and it just didn't make sense for the bank.

"I've got a gun to my head and the federal government owns the gun and they're the ones pointing it at my head," he said. "They implied if you don't take the money, you're no good. We were the first bank to publicly say thanks, but no thanks."

The bank issued a press release on Halloween that year that even seemed to taunt federal officials titled: Cullen/Frost Will Not Apply for Federal Bailout Funds.

'Stupid' regulators

The plain-spoken and outspoken Evans used his platform as one of Texas' most prominent bankers to rail against Washington pols and banking regulators.

"The government is the government and regulators are regulators," he said. "They don't mean to be stupid. They just can't help it. I can say those things because I'm going away."

Guy Bodine, CEO of Vantage Bank Texas, has watched Evans for more than 35 years and described himself as "an unconditional fan."

"Dick Evans is very unadorned, he is very credible and his values have always led that bank in good direction," Bodine said. "When there were issues at the bank, Dick acknowledged those publicly, took most of the heat, (and) didn't try to deflect blame on others."

In 2012, in the wake of increased regulation, Frost Bank swapped its national charter with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency after more than a century for a state charter.

"The perception is banks change because they have a problem with their regulator," Evans said. "We did not have a problem with the OCC. We had only been with them since 1899 when we made the change." Evans said the bank was physically closer to and could communicate better with the Dallas Federal Reserve and Texas Department of Banking.

Asked if there have been any repercussions for being so outspoken, Evans admitted, "I've wondered" before saying no. Its 2014 purchase of WNB Banchares Inc. was held up for months. Ultimately, the Federal Reserve Board gave its blessing but as part of the deal, Cullen/Frost agreed not to engage in any further expansion activities until it enhanced certain compliance programs, including those related to fair lending to minorities and other underserved populations.

"They call it fair lending, which makes me crazy because we are fair in our lending," Evans said.

Besides politicians and regulators, Evans also has been critical of competitors' lending practices, once dubbing them "juvenile delinquents." He derisively refers to the "too big to fail" institutions as "too big to manage."

Mixing traditional banking with investment banking has "scrambled the eggs" and made some of the bigger institutions too complex, he explained.

"If we would go back to separating those things, it would simplify the situation," he said.

Trouble in the oil patch

Evans' departure comes at another turbulent time for the banking industry. The precipitous drop in oil prices has shaken financial institutions. At Cullen/Frost, where loans to oil and gas companies account for more than 15 percent of its loan portfolio, shares tumbled 29 percent in January -- marking its worst start to a year in three decades. The shares have recovered most of those losses since then.

The decision to step down is unrelated to the energy sector's troubles, he said. In fact, Evans said, he informed the Cullen/Frost board of his decision to retire in July 2014 when oil was trading at more than $100 a barrel.

"Let me tell you something. This company's fine. It's really a nonevent," he said of oil prices. "I haven't lost one minute of sleep over this, and I tell you I didn't sleep much in the '80s. This is a lot different. There's no comparison."

Assessing Evans' impact can't be measured by the numbers, said his predecessor, Tom Frost said.

"He followed the values that were given to him," said Frost, 88. "Our philosophy is we will grow and prosper building long-term relationships. Dick's legacy is that he followed the philosophy continuously. Whenever we've had a change in management, we haven't changed any philosophies."

Five-year contract

Evans isn't completely going away. He has signed a five-year contract with five additional one-year options to serve as an adviser to his successor, current Cullen/Frost President Philip Green. Evans added that he will be available to assist bank customers, but made it clear he he will not have any authority. The company is furnishing an office for Evans, not in its downtown headquarters, but in a building near the Alamo Quarry Market.

"I don't think anybody who's been here 45 years and has been CEO almost two decades should be hanging around," Evans explained. "I don't think it's fair to the next team."

Reminded that his predecessor, Tom Frost, has kept an office at the headquarters since his retirement, Evans said that's different.

"Tom's name is on the building," Evans said. "My name isn't."

pdanner@express-news.net

Twitter: @AlamoPD

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