Commercial Center Bank Names Blankenhorn to Be Its New CEO

Veteran Orange County banker David T. Blankenhorn has been appointed chief executive and chief operating officer of Commercial Center Bank and its holding company, CCB Bancorp Inc.

Blankenhorn, who has headed the Santa Ana bank’s lending operations since February, replaces E.G. Cunningham, who resigned to pursue other interests in Northern California, where he lives.

Cunningham had been operating the bank from Walnut Creek, where it maintains a small office. But directors wanted the managing officer to be at the headquarters, Blankenhorn said.

The bank, one of Orange County’s largest with $275 million in assets, is owned by the bankrupt estate of Canadian Commercial Bank, a defunct Edmonton, Alberta, institution whose assets are being liquidated by the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse-Canada. The Santa Ana bank is the only major asset left to be sold.

Blankenhorn has been president or chief executive at four banks in the county over the last decade. He was vice chairman and chief executive of CommerceBank in Newport Beach from 1980 to 1983.

He went to troubled Heritage Bank in Anaheim as president and chief executive in August, 1983, after regulators ousted the previous management, but the bank ultimately failed in March 1984.

After a year at the helm of Orange City Bank, which has since been sold, Blankenhorn worked for First Interstate Bank’s Southern California acquisitions team. He returned to community banking in September, 1987, as president and chief executive of then troubled American Interstate Bank in Newport Beach. He left that post last year.