Carol Bergen retires next Friday.

Fox Point branch manager Carol Bergen had years of banking experience, but didn’t really consider it her career until a chance encounter almost 15 years ago.

“It was divine intervention,” recalls Carol, who retires next Friday, April 27. In late summer 2003, Carol was looking to reenter the workforce after taking some time off. She and her husband, Keith, were heading out of town, and she had a small check to cash from Lord & Taylor. Keith ran into the Fox Point branch, where a teller half-jokingly asked if he was interested in the open branch manager position.

No, Keith said, but his wife had managed a bank before.

“A trip to cash that little check turned into encouragement to apply, and I did — and the rest is history, as they say,” Carol says.

As a teenager, she’d had a summer job at the Federal Reserve Bank in downtown Chicago as a teenager. “I was in the bowels of the Fed, sorting money,” she says. She worked at a savings and loan later, and then at Oak Trust & Savings Bank in Chicago, where she met Keith. “We had four single women working there who all married customers!” When the bank added its first branch, a few blocks away, she went there. Her next stop was First National Bank of Chicago. “I was hired to balance their ATMs,” she says. “They’d just come on the scene, and you had to walk inside them to balance them.”

Carol, center, holding granddaughter Amelia. At left are her son Derek and his wife, Nicole. Keith is behind her, and at right are her son Brett and his girlfriend, Michelle.

Keith’s career took the couple to places like Atlanta and Memphis, and Carol took a break from working to raise their children. When they entered school, she went back to banking part time during school hours.

Joining the Fox Point branch, though, was different from her previous experiences. She has been there for a decade and a half and been branch manager the whole time. “It was never really a career until I came here,” Carol says.

“From the moment I met Carol, I knew she was the perfect fit for Fox Point — not only because she lived in the community, but also because she showed she cared about the community she lived in,” says VP and security/payments manager Lyneen Fischer, who hired Carol. “She has a touch with the customers she has served so diligently over the years. She has inspired trust and developed relationships that go beyond banking. I believe this to be true not only of her customers, but also of her employees and colleagues at North Shore Bank.”

Wrigley the Whoodle.

She notes that she’s received a lot of calls and visits from her clients since announcing her retirement. Many of her longtime clients are older, she says, so she has helped quite a few of them through major life changes, such as the death of a spouse. “It has been an honor and a privilege to be able to help so many during difficult times. It’s made my job more than a job,” Carol says. “I look at it as really helping people.”

Now, though, she has younger blood to give her time to: Her first grandchild, Amelia, was born in December. Retirement will give Carol and Keith more flexibility to visit Amelia in the Chicago area. Last weekend, they also adopted Wrigley, a “Whoodle” puppy — a Wheaton terrier/poodle mix — and closed on a 118-year-old house in Racine that they plan to fix up.

“Take advantage of everything that North Shore Bank has to offer, because there’s just a wealth of knowledge and information out there — and the more you know and learn, the further you go,” says Carol, by way of offering parting advice. She adds: “I always said the most important thing I wanted to be remembered for was being patient and kind, and I hope that I have been throughout my years here.”