St. Pete sisters started a bank in 1935 that shattered the glass ceiling

In 1935 three sisters, Cornelia, Elsie, and Ilonka Somp, founded the St. Petersburg Federal Savings and Loan Association in a small rented office on the corner of 4th Street and Central Avenue. By 1941, St. Petersburg Federal had grown enough to build an attractive Art Deco building at 556 Central Avenue.

Social mores at the time of the bank’s founding dictated that the real brains behind the operation, Cornelia Somp, would only hold the position of secretary on the Board of Directors. Still, everyone knew who was really running the show. The bank quickly became famous for being managed by and for women. A 1949 cartoon, in the style of a Ripley’s Believe it or Not comic, singled out the oddity of a bank run by women. The cartoon ran in newspapers across the country.

During the city’s post-World War II boom, St. Petersburg Federal Savings and Loan financed more single-family homes than any other bank in the city and became the seventh-largest bank in the state. In 1954 they expanded again, building a striking Mid-Century Modern building designed by prominent architect William Harvard at 33 6th Street South (which also remains standing.)

The bank was fully staffed by women for 34 years, hiring its first male bank teller in 1969, which they promoted in the newspaper with a tongue-in-cheek advertisement noting that it was time for “equality for men.”

The bank was an incubator for successful St. Petersburg women, and in 1975 Jean Giles Wittner took the helm, having worked her way up from bank switchboard operator. Wittner broke many barriers in the city, in addition to being the first female bank president, she was the first President of the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce and the first woman on the Board of Directors for Florida Power. St. Petersburg Federal changed its name to Centerbanc before it was sold in 1987.

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