Renée Comeau loves banking but charity work, opera, cooking, travel - and button collecting! - are passions as well. (photo/lambertphoto.com)

Fifth generation Californian Renée Comeau fondly recalls meeting former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in Monaco. He held her hand and hugged and kissed her, and she has photographic proof. It’s quite a memento for a woman who in the mid-1970s was a Global Marine job planning analyst on “The Jennifer Project” – a top-secret Hughes Glomar Explorer endeavor to recover a sunken Soviet submarine.

Today, Comeau, 57, is senior vice president of San Diego-headquartered California Bank & Trust, responsible for management of the $11 billion institution’s Downtown San Diego office, overseeing its Emerald Plaza and La Jolla branches and managing important private and commercial banking relationships for high-net-worth individuals and business entities.

“I can’t imagine doing anything else with any other people,” she says.

In addition to banking and her clients, Comeau’s passions include community and civic service, her collection of rare antique clothing buttons with specimens dating back to Colonial America, and taking weekly Spanish lessons with her husband, Dr. Terry D. Gulden, with whom she shares delight in opera, cooking, wine and travel.

The La Jolla couple also shares devotion to the Child Abuse Prevention Foundation: Gulden is the president and Comeau on the board. Over her 25-year affiliation with the foundation, Comeau has served on the audit committee, development council, as vice president of finance and as president.

Comeau’s community activities extend to the San Diego Opera, the UCSD Cancer Center Foundation, the Living Oceans Foundation, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the National Charity League and as a mayoral appointee to the city’s Public Facilities Financing Authority. The two-time TWIN Award recipient (1990, 1996) has been equally involved as a member of the Downtown San Diego Partnership, the University Club, the La Jolla Sunrise Rotary and La Jolla Town Council.

And then there are the Spanish lessons so Comeau and Gulden can explore Latin America in linguistic comfort. They’ve toured Chile, Peru, Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, and look forward to visiting Ecuador, but after daughter Stacey’s approaching graduation from Cornell University.

— Robin Maydeck