Career in banking was brief (03/18/2009)

My career in banking was brief, eventful, and humbling.

In the summer of 1967, after my first year in college, I landed a summer job as a teller at Peoples Bank, now MainSource, in Portland.

My spot was the teller cage farthest from the door, the one likely to attract the fewest customers, probably on the theory that I was less likely to do much damage in that location.

But in those days - long before computers and not that far removed from the ledger books that Bob Cratchit scribbled in for Ebenezer Scrooge - tellers were not just tellers. Everyone wore lots of different hats, and if customer traffic was slow, you found other things to do.

The best of those chores, from my point of view, took me out of the building entirely.

Bill Milligan and I would trek out to check floor plans on loans, making sure that every lawnmower in inventory matched up with the ones on the loan paperwork, serial number by serial number. Find one missing, and there was a chance the merchant had "forgotten" to pay off that part of his loan.

My job was to help with the inventory; Bill's was to diplomatically but firmly nudge the merchant to get into the bank to correct any discrepancies.

Repo duty was also part of the summer's chores.

One memorable morning in late summer, Ron Culy, who was then a loan officer at the bank, and I set out to track down a fellow whose car now belonged to the bank.

We headed out in a downtrodden Oldsmobile that had been repossessed in earlier years.

First we stopped by the guy's place of employment, only to find he didn't work there any more. Then we stopped by the mobile home out in the country where the guy lived, only to find he wasn't home.

Somehow Ron got a tip that the guy was in Dunkirk, applying for work at Indiana Glass.

We caught up with him in the parking lot, and after an awkward moment Ron ended up with the keys to the guy's GTO and I was handed the keys to the Oldsmobile.

Ron told me to take the guy back to the mobile home and that he would meet up with us there.

The drive back to the guy's home was awkward as well. So was the silence while we waited and waited and waited for Ron.

Finally, I decided we needed to go back to Dunkirk to see what was going on.

We found out about half a mile outside the city limits.

The GTO was a charred hulk. Ron was okay, but the car had caught fire. The only good news was that the bank's insurance would cover it. The guy in default on the loan had also let his insurance lapse.

The humbling part came one Friday when Haynes Starbuck, longtime president of Peoples, handed me a couple of Bob Crachit-style ledgers to balance.

When you're not waiting on customers, he told me, tally this set of figures and this set of figures and make sure they balance.

It was back in the day of the mechanical adding machine that required not only punching the numbers but ratcheting an arm for each bit of data entered.

Piece of cake, I thought.

So I punched and cranked the adding machine, then punched and cranked some more. But when I looked at the totals, they didn't balance.

Idiot that I was, I immediately thought I'd found an error in the bank's books. Fortunately, I took the time to double-check. This time, the numbers still didn't balance, but my totals were completely different from the first go around.

There was nothing to do but try again.

So I did, for most of the day, waiting on customers from time to time between my punching and cranking.

Finally, the day was winding down and I was nowhere closer to balancing the ledger.

Haynes wandered over to where I stood, adding machine tape filling the wastebasket at my feet. He'd given me a task that probably should have taken 20 minutes. I'd been working on it for hours.

Let me see your numbers, he said.

He only looked at them for a moment or two then told me I'd made three different mistakes and that one of them involved a 9.

Five minutes later, doing the job himself, he'd balanced the books.

And I went home for the weekend knowing I didn't have what it takes to be a banker.

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