My father was right all along.
Banking isn’t what it used to be.

© David Chartrand

    I never go inside bank lobbies anymore unless I have to. But it wasn’t always that way.

   My father was a banker. My brothers and sisters were bank lobby brats. Now they give me the creeps. The banks, I mean.

   When I step inside a bank now all I see is my father’s face the day he learned they didn’t need him anymore. I’ll call them the Bucks family.

   The Bucks were a prominent banking dynasty that controlled several bank holding companies in our 1950s heartland suburb. Big Daddy Bucks hired young Arthur Chartrand to work in the loan department of one of the Bucks family banks; a long friendship ensued. Daddy Bucks delivered fruit baskets to Arthur’s house at Christmas and even attended the baptisms of several of Arthur’s seven children.

   By the late 1960s, Arthur had worked his way up to president of a Bucks branch, a small neighborhood bank in a small shopping center across the street from a one-story elementary school that had no playground equipment.

   Arthur’s office was not upstairs with a view of woods and water. His desk was in the lobby where customers could see the president standing watch over their money while standing watching over his children who loved to toddle around the lobby and beg Tootsie Rolls off the cashiers. This made the customers feel good about their bank because they felt good about Arthur.
Sometime in the late seventies, Daddy Bucks retired and handed the reins of the Bucks banking empire to his children.

   The Baby Bucks, unlike their father, were not into old-fashioned neighborhood banking, where the Board of Directors counted progress by the number of new checking accounts. They weren’t into fruit baskets and baptisms.

   The Baby Bucks, like the other bright young things taking over the banking business at that time, were interested in “financial services.” Tired of the shallow end of the money pool, they wanted to dip their wingtips into the deep end where you could dive for the really big bucks.

   By the 1980s, banking’s future was big commercial accounts, leveraged investments and bank presidents who moved their offices upstairs with giant oil paintings and a corporate view of the corporate woods. Banking’s past was passbook savings accounts, small retail loan departments that made small retail loans, and presidents who stayed in the lobby to greet customers.

   Arthur was the Spirit of Banking Past and the Baby Bucks had little use for him. They also had little use for the finer points of interpersonal communication. Arthur came to work one day and found a note on his desk.

   This letter was not a commendation for Arthur’s years of service. It explained that his desk was being given to some Brave New Young Buck. It said he could still hang around the lobby and greet customers if he wanted to, but he should stay out of the way.

   Arthur did not want to be in the way, so he said goodbye to the tellers and clerks and cleaned out his desk. The rest is history. The banking business in the eighties and nineties got everything it deserved. Arthur did not.

   The people who own my neighborhood bank nowadays are not from my neighborhood and the president is never in the lobby greeting customers. When I want personal service I try the hardware store. Come to think of it, the hardware stores in my home town aren’t locally owned, either.

   They’re all gone now — old-fashioned banks, the Bucks and the eighties. So is my father. We buried him last year, the day before Father’s Day. The next morning I drove past what was left of his old bank.

   The building now brandishes a menacingly abstract logo that belongs to the multinational financial services conglomerate that bought out the bank that was owned by the Bucks who wrote the letter that was left on the desk that belonged to Arthur Chartrand, who came home one day and told his family he loved them very much but that he didn’t love banking anymore.

   Arthur never again set foot inside a bank. He handled all his money business from the drive-through lane. And I know just how he felt.