CB board chair steps down amid reorganization
Ralph Sommers has retired as chairman of the board of directors of CB Financial Services Inc., the holding company of Community Bank. CB Financial made the announcement Wednesday.
Sommers, chairman for the past 20 years, announced his decision recently at the board’s annual reorganization meeting. He will continue to serve on the board.
The board in turn appointed Mark E. Fox as chairman and Charles R. “Randy” Guthrie as vice chairman. Both have served on the board for a number of years.
Patrick G. O’Brien, president and chief executive officer of the North Franklin Township-based , said in a statement: “It has been an honor to work with Mr. Sommers during his tenure as chairman. The appointments of Mark Fox … and Randy Guthrie … show our board’s continuing commitment to strong leadership.”
Sommers joined Community Bank in 1979 and has been on the board since 1983.
Fox, the principal owner of the Fox Ford dealership in Waynesburg, has been a director since 1998. He also has deep familial ties to the bank.
His maternal great-great-grandfather, Isaac B. Patterson, was among the initial board members of First National Bank of Carmichaels, later renamed Community Bank.
And Fox’s mother, Betty Anne, worked at Community Bank in Carmichaels in the late 1940s and ’50s. She was a teller, then the secretary to Richard L. Baily, Community Bank’s president and board chairman. It was Baily who gave Betty Anne’s husband, Robert, the loan to start Fox Ford.
Guthrie is president of Guthrie, Belczyk and Associates, P.C., an accounting firm in Eighty Four. He has been a board member since 2005.