theLAKER | 13 taxes. I think he would have been a student favorite. I’m sad that I only got, in the grand scheme of things, a little bit of time with him. “I still come up with things every week that I think to myself, ‘Gosh I wish I could talk to him or ask him this question.’ It’s such a loss for us, and he’s left these enormous shoes to fill.” Mom’s footsteps Angela is also humbled by the symbolism of leading a bank in Seneca Falls, home of the Women’s Rights National Park, at a time when S&P Global Market Intelligence reports fewer than 5 percent of CEOs of publicly traded banks are women. Her interest in the financial world began with her mother, Patricia Wirth, who studied accounting first at a community college, then Rochester Institute of Technology. “I remember when I was younger, she would take me into work with her sometimes on the weekends, and I thought, ‘Well, if this was the road that she took to get where she is, then I’ll do the same thing.’” She took an accounting class as a high school junior, then took another at Monroe Community College thanks to a light senior year schedule at Victor Senior High. She enrolled at FLCC in the business administration program and got a job at Subway in Parkway Plaza, down the road from the main campus. Her first class in her first semester was Accounting 102 with Gary Sloan. “He was absolutely incredible. He would, for his morning classes, buy his students doughnuts and then for his afternoon classes, he would buy pizza. I mean this poor guy must have spent so much money on food for his students,” Angela laughed. “He would really interact with the students. He was very engaging, and he would ask what you did or where you worked. He would take that information and fold it into our tests. He would come up with a little scenario and it would be, for example, ‘Angela’s working for X company…’ He personalized it so much, and he was one of those really captivating professors. “FLCC was great because it let me take a lot of my electives in a cost-effective way,” she continued, “so that when I got to RIT, I felt like I really, truly was a third-year student. I was well-prepared to take those more intense classes.” Full circle Angela finished her bachelor’s in accounting at RIT in 2008 and began working for Fairport Savings Bank as a staff accountant. “My career path really became defined in 2012 when the assistant treasurer resigned, and I was given the opportunity to move over into that area of the accounting department. My initial job title was treasury analyst which then progressed into assistant treasurer, treasurer, and finally CFO in 2018.” While at Fairport Savings, she completed her graduate degree at ABA Stonier Graduate School of Banking. After Evans Bancorp bought Fairport Savings’ holding company in 2020, she took the CFO job in Pennsylvania. She and her husband, Justin, thought they might move back to the Finger Lakes someday, not knowing how quickly someday would arrive. Back in the Finger Lakes as the new CFO at Generations Bank in mid-2021, she was among several women on the leadership team. In fact, she replaced a woman who had been chief financial officer for the previous 10 years. “Generations has always wanted to support women – they’re headquartered in Seneca Falls. Making sure that women have a voice not only in our management teams but at the top, at the board level, is very, very important.” As she settles into her role and finds her own voice as a CEO, she takes inspiration from her late mentor. “One of Menzo’s passions was providing affordable housing in his community, and he was heavily involved in Habitat for Humanity of Seneca County,” she said. “As a way to honor him, in December I joined the board to serve as the treasurer. We’re doing the best we can to make sure we’re continuing all the things that were important to him in his memory.” — Lenore Friend Angela and her husband, Justin, have been married for 11 years.
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