Banking career wasn’t meant to be

Editor’s note: This column is being reprinted from July 25, 2018. Banking was just one of the pursuits Jack attempted, having never planned to be a newspaper man in his hometown. But a four-plus-decade career proved it was the best fit.

You always remember your summer jobs.

The best ones. The worst ones. The craziest ones.

There’s something about the short duration, along with your own youth, that makes them memorable.

One summer gig sticks in my memory, maybe because I just wasn’t suited for it.

The summer of 1967 I worked at what was then Peoples Bank. Since that time, it has been Union Bank and MainSource Bank and now is part of First Financial Bank. (If I’ve missed one of the names, forgive me. It has been hard to keep track.)

Peoples had been founded by my great-grandfather, and my dad was on the board of directors at the time. So at times I felt I was auditioning for a career in the banking business.

I failed the audition, but at any rate, they decided to give me a taste of everything that summer.

I was stationed in the last teller cage, based upon the assumption that I would have less customer contact there and would be less likely to screw things up.

Every morning, it was my chore to go down to the basement and open the night deposit safe, bring the deposits up and record them. On that, I did OK.

On other chores, not so much.

Bank president Haynes Starbuck hated to see tellers idle, so he always added extra tasks to be handled between customers.

One Friday afternoon I was handed a couple of Bob Cratchitt-sized ledgers that looked as if they dated from Ebeneezer Scrooge. I was told to balance the accounts, and I worked mightily at it for hours.

But no matter how hard I tried or how many times I tried, I couldn’t get the books to balance.

Haynes would walk by now and then, seeing the endless spool of adding machine tape accumulating around me, and shake his head.

I never did get the things balanced. At the end of a long and humiliating day, the books were picked up by Haynes, who solved my math and calculator errors within a matter of a few minutes.

I think he knew at that point that I wasn’t suited for life as a banker.

But if he had any doubt it came later that summer when I helped repossess a burned out GTO.

I’m sure I’ve written about this before. (At my age, I’ve written about just about everything before.)

The short version is that the late great Ron Culy and I set out to repo a Pontiac GTO — a very hot car back in 1967 — that was in the possession of a guy who lived between Portland and Dunkirk.

We caught up with him in the parking lot of Indiana Glass Co., where he was trying to get hired. Ron — with regrets and some courtesy and sympathy — took possession of the car.

I took the former owner back to the mobile home he was living in and waited for Ron to show up.

He never did.

The car caught fire on its way out of Dunkirk and burned to a crisp before any firemen could make it to the scene.

The good news, Ron kept telling me on the way back to the bank, was that it was covered by the bank’s insurance. Looking back, I think he was talking to himself more than to me.

After all, he was the one who had to go in and tell Haynes what had happened.

As for me, though I tried a few months working part-time at a bank in Richmond, my financial career never came together.

Sometimes, though, I have to wonder what might have happened if I’d been able to get those books to balance and that GTO had stayed intact.

Maybe there was a career in there somewhere after all.