Savings and groans.

• Position: Savings and loan associations

During the past two decades, little of civic importance has happened in Greensboro without Jim Melvin's involvement -- as a city councilman for two years, as mayor from 1971 to 1981 and as front man for the city's business community. During that time, he helped turn 1st Home Federal into a major savings and loan and himself into an influential thrift-industry leader.

Now -- at least the way he tells it -- he's a victim: "I just don't understand a lot of the things I've seen happen. I'll have to say that the last two years have made me an entirely different person."

His blood boils when he starts talking about the federal government's role in the demise of 1st Home. "We never had visions of grandeur," he says. "We never tried to be all things to all people. We wanted to be a Triad bank and to grow to be about a $2 billion, full-service financial institution."

Instead, two regional banks -- CCB and BB&T -- got 1st Home's $665 million in deposits for pennies on the dollar, and Melvin and his 135 shareholders got burned. Says Scott Reed, senior executive vice president of BB&T: "I'd say they lost most of their money."

Most of them successful Greensboro businessmen, the stockholders had each put up an average of about $240,000, a total of $32.5 million in 1986 when the S&L converted from mutual to stock ownership. They'll possibly get back 10 cents on the dollar over the next few years. Durham-based CCB paid $17.8 million for 1st Home's Guilford County operations, while Wilson-based BB&T invested $6.25 million for the Forsyth County business and a branch in Wake County. 1st Home's $131 million loan portfolio was sold for an undisclosed price to CRI Inc. in Rockville, Md., and its loan-servicing business went to Kislak Mortgage Corp. of Miami Lakes, Fla. No government bailout money is involved.

It has been a painful experience for Melvin. "I'm not a wealthy person," he says. "What money I put in represented some significant portion of my net worth. But I don't want to make too much of that. With investments, some work out and some don't. Nobody hits 100%."

"No, I don't have any criticism of Jim," says one 1st Home stockholder, Vic Nussbaum Jr., president of Southern Foods and Greensboro's present mayor. "There are lots of examples of skulduggery in the thrift business around the country, but not here. If there's anyone to blame, it's the lawmakers up in Washington."

When Congress started deregulating S&Ls in the early '80s, Melvin was sky-high on...