Donald Thomas, who died Friday at 88, was the mellow-voiced banker who assured a generation of New York savers: “Your Anchor Banker, he understands.”

At that point a female voice – in fact, it was Thomas’s wife, Barbara – chimed in: “Yes, your Anchor Banker, she understands.”

It was an intriguingly transgressive bit of feminism that made the ads memorable and helped make Anchor Bank the third best-known in the New York metropolitan area, a 1987 Crain’s New York Business study showed – even though it was only a fraction of the size of the survey’s leaders, Citibank and Chemical.

Thomas was president of Anchor from the late 1960s, when it was the sleepy Bay Ridge Savings, and oversaw its initial public offering in 1987, for which the bank ran ads offering the general public the chance to become Anchor Bankers.

The home-style production values that made the ads distinctive were somewhat belied by an aggressive business stance that saw Anchor’s assets grow by a factor of 20 during Thomas’s years as president, to about $8 billion, including the assets of 13 troubled thrifts the bank purchased during the mid-1980s. He also oversaw expansion of the bank into Georgia and Florida.

Thomas retired in 1989 after profits failed to meet expectations, causing an insurrection by the banks’ new shareholders.

Thomas was born in Niagara Falls, on the American side, where his father had taken his mother to establish American citizenship for their son. Raised on the Canadian side of the border, Thomas graduated first in his high school class, and the next day went to work at a rural branch of the Royal Bank of Canada,according to his son, Donald Thomas Jr. He later crossed the border to work for the Niagara County Savings Bank, and was eventually drafted into the Army during World War II.

After the war, Thomas returned to Niagara County Savings Bank, where he was made treasurer after graduating college. In 1957, he went to work for Northern Trust Company in Chicago, and in 1966 he was hired by Bay Ridge Savings Bank, where he was groomed for the presidency. It was during this period that the bank changed its name to Anchor, supposedly at the suggestion of the wife of a bank officer who noticed anchors in the leaded glass of company’s boardroom.

The “Anchor Banker” campaign kicked off in 1972, and soon included a catchy jingle ending, “Come into Anchor Savings / We’ll show you the way / To build for tomorrow today,” sung to a tune dreamed up by a bunch of bankers at a convention, Donald Thomas Jr. said. For many years, the ads were produced by a small agency Thomas had worked with in Buffalo, keeping expenses down. He saved money as well by using his wife in the commercials. For 22 years, he paid her $1 annually for her role, a minimal payment considering it had been her idea to appear in commercials.

“So you should never work for your husband,” Ms.Thomas told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “It never pays.”

After his retirement to Georgia, Thomas continued briefly as both chairman and as corporate spokesman, but his spots were soon dropped for a new campaign positioning the bank as “lean and mean.” In 1994, Anchor Bankers ceased to exist entirely after the firm merged with the Dime Savings Bank.

Thomas in recent years nursed an adequate golf game and became enamored of online equities trading, where he pursued the relatively conservative financial strategies of a longtime savings-and-loan man, his son said.

Donald Llewellyn Thomas

Born March 5, 1917, in Niagara Falls, N.Y.; died December 30 at St.Joseph’s Hospital in Atlanta, of heart failure after dialysis; survived by his wife, Barbara, his sons, Donald Llewellyn Thomas Jr. and Rhys Thomas, four grandchildren, and one great-grandson.