Was the collapse of Washington Mutual as unremarkable as it seems today?

Five years is not just a convenient round-number anniversary date. It also provides a resting point for perspective on and assessment of events of the recent pastfar enough removed from the actual occurrence to allow the dust to settle and emotions to cool, still fresh enough in memory for people to retrieve their fi rsthand recollections and experiences.

And so we pause to refl ect on one of the landmark events of Seattles recent business history, the financial collapse of one of its largest legacy companies, Washington Mutual, an event with immense repercussions for employees, investors, its industry, the city, the nation …

Umm, Washington Mutual? You remember it. Friend of the family, rodeo grandmas, WaMu, Whoo hoo, Kerry Killinger, big downtown tower with its name on it (two of them, actually), an insatiable thirst for acquisitions, biggest bank failure in American history. That Washington Mutual?

Yeah, that one. One of the remarkable facets of the WaMu saga is how unremarkable, in a literal sense of that term, the disappearance of such a large and supposedly signifi cant company turned out to be. WaMus demise was barely remarked upon nationally at the time, and in most of the histories of the financial sectors role in triggering the Great Recession that have been published, the Seattle-based consumer bank and mortgage lender barely rises to the level of footnote material.

Even locally, WaMu has been erased from the public conversation almost as completely as WaMus name and logo were scrubbed from branches taken over by JPMorgan Chase (although, anachronistically, the WaMu name remains on the theater at the CenturyLink Field Event Center). What Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, Costco and Alaska Airlines are up to, thats what people are talking about. What WaMu was, what might have been, why it wasnt, thats old news. Were looking ahead, not back.

That forward-looking perspective is one reason why the fifth anniversary of WaMus departure from the scene is likely to be a muted event. There are others. WaMus seizure and sale on Sept. 25, 2008, came in the middle of a calamitous time for the financial sector nationally, as companies with much higher profiles than Washington Mutual teetered on the brink.

But it also came at the start of a calamitous time for Washington banking. WaMu was big, but it also was the first entry on a list of failed institutions in the state that would run eventually to a dozen and a half names. There wasnt a lot of time to obsess over WaMu, given the crumbling income statements, balance sheets and loan portfolios of those institutions still around.

Beyond that, WaMu might have had a long history as a locally based independent company, and banking itself is about as old and basic as you get in business. But WaMus emergence as a big coast-to-coast financial institution was relatively recent, and it was something of an outlier in both the community and the industry. Boeing made the region an aerospace hub, Microsoft made it a tech center, but WaMu didnt make Seattle a national center for financial services, its ambitious growth and aspirations notwithstanding.

WaMu had big dreams about how it would reshape its industry, from marketing to branch design to market entry (adding dozens of branches in a new town at once) to providing a one-stop national brand of fi nancial services for consumers. But its infl uence on the industry proved to be nil. The branch designs were undone, marketing cheekiness came off as hubris, the dream of a national banking brand for the middle market went unachieved (locally, anyway, that role has been assumed by a credit union, BECU).

To the extent WaMu is remembered at all, its for failure to execute the basics of its business: risk management, mortgage lending, branch site selection, computer systems. Its not surprising, then, that WaMu even in its hometown generates little discussion, even as a cautionary tale. Its a lot more fun to focus on the success stories than on the disappointments. But those who do study the lessons of the WaMu saga will be reminded once more of the fl eeting nature of business legacies. If a company that big can disappear in just five short years, what are people even around here likely to remember at the 10- year mark?

BILL VIRGIN is founder and owner of Northwest Newsletter Group, which publishes Washington Manufacturing Alert and Pacific Northwest Rail News.