By his own description, Richard D. Driscoll was an unenthusiastic junior high student as a boy in Milton. “I was getting Cs, C-minuses, and once in a while a B if I got lucky,’’ he recalled in 1974, when his conservative suit and banker’s demeanor announced that those days were far in the past.

Deciding a change was in order, Mr. Driscoll’s father sent his teenage son to his alma mater, Boston College High School. “So I went, and it changed my whole life,’’ Mr. Driscoll recalled.

“The Jesuits instilled in me a desire to accomplish whatever was set before me and they did it by demanding it,’’ he added. “They didn’t say, ‘This is what we’d like you to do, and if you do this you’ll be OK.’ They said, ‘This is what you will do.’ ’’

What he did was become one of Boston’s most respected bankers, spending 33 years at the same institution as it evolved from Merchants National Bank to Bank of New England, and rising from management trainee to president and chairman. Mr. Driscoll, who finished his career as president of the Massachusetts Bankers Association, died June 18 of heart ailments and declining health. He was 86 and lived in Brookline.

As a leader in Boston’s banking community, he encouraged lending institutions to help make housing available throughout the city, especially during the 1980s condominium boom when loans were readily available in white areas, while minority neighborhoods drew scant attention. He could be blunt while suggesting that banks, including his own, needed to set aside conventional wisdom about the roles they should play.

“The problem of affordable housing in our community is critical and needs more involvement by everybody, certainly by banks, certainly my own bank,’’ he said at a 1989 forum.

“Everybody involved needs to abandon old ideas about how this idea will be solved,’’ he told the banking leaders, community lending advocates, and city officials at the meeting. “Certainly banks have to stop saying, ‘We’ve never done it this way before’ or ‘Our current policies prevent us from doing that’ or ‘It’s not my problem, let’s give it to the government.’ ’’

Mr. Driscoll spoke out often about the need for innovative action to change historic racial lending patterns, and he became board chairman for the nonprofit Boston Housing Partnership, which worked to reclaim hundreds of apartments that otherwise would have been abandoned. The partnership linked efforts by businesses, neighborhoods, and government agencies to make affordable housing available.

Unlike many in the financial community, Mr. Driscoll took his message beyond the boardroom, attending community meetings in Roxbury and other neighborhoods in the evening or early in the morning before heading to work.

“He was in many ways — and I know this — he was beloved in the banking world,’’ said Jack Connors, a founder of the advertising agency now known as Hill Holliday. “He was just beloved. I mean, people don’t use those words to describe bankers.’’

Mr. Driscoll counted among his customers many of Boston’s biggest companies and most powerful business leaders. And he helped set some of them, including Connors, on their way toward success.

Nearly 50 years ago, Connors and his partners needed a $10,000 loan to keep their fledgling firm afloat. Turned down elsewhere, Connors sought a meeting with Mr. Driscoll, a fellow Boston College graduate. Mr. Driscoll asked to see the company’s pro forma, or business plan, which prompted Connors to ask: “What’s a pro forma?’’

“He rolled his eyes and said, ‘Come back tomorrow and the check will be on the corner of my desk,’ ’’ Connors recalled. “Dick Driscoll made a lot of loans to a lot of people, and he did it by making a judgment about whether they were worthy of that loan. One might say that on that day in 1968, I began to learn the importance of relationships.’’

In 1957, Mr. Driscoll started out at Merchants National Bank as a management trainee and was promoted repeatedly as it became Bank of New England through mergers. He lost his job in 1990 when the bank’s board swept out the top leadership amid heavy losses due to bad real estate loans. The following year, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. seized the bank and placed it in Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation.

“The troubles at Bank of New England have obscured the public-spirited work of Richard Driscoll, who led its Boston operation until he was ousted last week,’’ the Globe said in an editorial a few days after he was dismissed. “Before it became fashionable, Driscoll used his energy and influence to improve the living conditions of people in the poorer neighborhoods of Boston.’’

Mr. Driscoll, the Globe editorial said, was “a banker who knows there is more to life, and to banking, than the bottom line.’’

Richard Dennis Driscoll, who was known to friends as Dick, grew up in Milton, a son of Daniel Driscoll and the former Edith Barry. He graduated from Boston College High School in 1948, received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Boston College four years later, and a master’s in business administration from Harvard Business School in 1954. He served in the Marine Corps before beginning work at what was then Merchants National Bank.

Not long after, he was volunteering on a political campaign when he met RoseMary Shea, who also had graduated from Boston College. They dated for three years and married in 1962.

Over the years, Mr. Driscoll served on more than 20 boards, including for the American Ireland Fund. He also chaired the Greater Boston YMCA board and was president of Goodwill Industries board.

“I don’t know how he did it to be honest, because he had seven kids at home. He was also driving everyone to hockey games,’’ said his son Tim of Winchester, who added that his father surely logged hundreds of thousands of miles chauffeuring his children to sporting events.

A service has been held for Mr. Driscoll, who in addition to his wife and son leaves five other sons, Richard Jr. of Boston, William of Hingham, Paul of Dover, John of Arlington, Va., and James Driscoll of Jupiter, Fla.; a daughter, Molly Santry of Newton; a brother, William of Spain; and 12 grandchildren.

“I don’t think any of us needed to have a hero figure because we had my father, and we always had his example,’’ Tim said.

Mr. Driscoll, he added, “was able still to impart these incredible lessons and bring the family closer together,’’ even as his health failed.

“My father was very loving, wise, and talented,’’ Mr. Driscoll’s son William said in a eulogy at the funeral Mass. “He was a man of few words but knew how to deliver a message. He was an accomplished poet, cartoonist, humorist, and storyteller. Like one of his good poems, in order to appreciate his life fully and find the meaning in it, you need to pick it up again and read it a second or third time.’’

Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.