While Harrison is recuperating, we are re-running some of our favorite columns. This one appeared in March of last year.
I’ve been let go by my bank. It’s been my bank ever since the very early ’60s, when I opened our account at the branch in Eagledale Plaza. We still have the same names we had back then, though lately my bank has been changing its name as often as Liz Taylor ever did.
Indiana National Bank is what it was back then. There was a merger and then my bank was a national bank from Detroit. There was another merger and then my bank was a national bank from Chicago. Now there’s been yet another merger and my bank has become a national bank from Columbus — the one in Ohio, not the one in Indiana.
But it doesn’t matter. Whatever it’s named, it’s no longer my bank. The people who run that bank under whatever name it uses now have sold the rights to me and my money to a national bank from Memphis — the one in Tennessee, not the one in Egypt. It’s called Union Planters Bank. All I can think of is peanuts, though I suspect that’s not the origin of the “Planters” in the name. I also suspect organized labor isn’t the reason why they put “Union” in the name. Whatever ... this bank is a stranger to me.
The form letter I got from my old bank, known hereinafter as The National Bank of Somewhere Else, says it has traded away my branch and everyone in it to the Union Planters Bank, which is yet another national bank from somewhere else. But what they say in the letter isn’t really true. For more than 30 years, I’ve been shuffling my money in and out of the old Indiana National branch at Illinois and Westfield, which The National Bank of Somewhere Else has kept.
As far as I know, I’ve never been in any of the branches that have been traded to Union Planters. All those branches are far away from where I live and work. The National Bank of Somewhere Else remains close to where I live and work, but I’m no longer welcomed there, even when I bring money. These are confusing times.
My banking friends suggest our bank records are likely kept under the name of the branch where I opened my account, so when the National Bank of Somewhere Else sold Union Planters the rights to that branch, my account got included in the transaction. I feel like one of those Players To Be Named Later in a baseball trade.
What I don’t understand is that the old Indiana National branch where I opened my account has been gone since LBJ was in the White House. Since my original branch had vanished into microfilm long ago, and since I’d been using the branch at Westfield and Illinois ever since Nixon, I had just assumed ...
But I guess it’s a little like getting invited to supper at home with the local gentry in a town with old money. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve lived there. If you weren’t born there, then you’ll never live there long enough. They’d be whispering, “That Harrison fellow — he’s from Massachusetts, you know.” And then I’d eat my supper at home, alone.
I suppose that’s how it was when The National Bank of Somewhere Else was sorting through the accounts, picking the Depositors To Be Named Later in the transaction with Union Planters. I imagine they were whispering, “That Harrison fellow — oh, he’s been coming to the Illinois and Westfield branch for like 30 years, acting just like he’s always been in the neighborhood, but he’s really an Eagledale fellow and I say let’s give him up to Union Planters.”
My wife is taking this much harder than I do.
She has plastic cards from The National Bank of Wherever that let her use ATMs, which I believe is the acronym for Automatic Trouble Machine, and to charge her purchases directly to her checking account.
I try to keep away from the cutting edge of those financial technologies because I don’t really trust which way they will cut. While a human teller might put $402 in my account when I had only deposited $204, it would take a virtual teller to put $2,000,000.04 into an account of some ordinary person who just left $204 at the bank. And it would take a bank of the name-changing sort to charge interest on the $2,000,000.04 while it was where it shouldn’t have been, even though that was where the bank put it. And they would put that on your credit report and they would leave it there forever.
Whenever I read about people who get unexpected millions put in their accounts, I worry that if I used an ATM card to get a quick $50 in walking around money, I might find I had put $50,000,000 on my credit card at an 18.9 APR, which I believe is the acronym for All People Removed, which I understand is the ultimate goal of the national banks that change their names often. I will not mention any of those names, though one of them would be The National Bank of Somewhere Else if I was in a mentioning mood.
My wife has been grumpy about banks, lately. She has been trying to change the bank that handles the payroll account for the office where she works. I tell my wife, “You know you can’t change a bank. They are just like leopards, except they are hungrier.” But she keeps trying.
Anyway, she wants to arrange the payroll account so that paychecks may be automatically deposited at banks of the payees’ choosing, even when those are not the bank that the payer has chosen for itself. This looks to me like an easy thing, there being only three people on the payroll at the office where my wife works. However, this transaction has already taken several months of Laurie’s attention. The nice woman at the bank has told her cheerfully that sometimes it takes her bank an entire year to get it all done. I would tell my wife, “Welcome to the service economy,” but I believe she would hurt me if I did.
So, Laurie is wondering now if she should do as she’s told by The National Bank of Somewhere Else and go quietly to Planters Union Bank, or pick a new bank which probably will be just like her old bank, though with a different name that doesn’t mean anything. There was once a Merchants National Bank in Indianapolis that began as a bank for merchants. I suppose Planters Union Bank was once a bank for planters. There’s a People’s Bank left in Indianapolis. I wonder if it’s still for people.
There have been a couple of hours between those words and these words. I was intending to finish this column by looking back in anger at all that we’ve lost in our city — Indiana National Bank, WFBM, American Fletcher National Bank, the TeePee, the Claypool, Hook’s, Wasson’s, Block’s, the Jim Gerrard Show, Gary Todd doing the Indiana Spacers with Coach Fingers Jabbish on WIBC ...
But I was nagged by curiosity to drive across town to see what had become of our old bank, the Indiana National branch in Eagledale Plaza. So, I stopped typing, collected Laurie and we went to look.
We discovered there is a People’s branch now in residence at our old INB branch. I wondered if my old records had been left there when Indiana National gave up on the neighborhood, and I wondered if People’s still had them, waiting for someone from Planters Union to come get them. But it was Sunday and the banks are closed on Sundays, so I don’t know.
We drove away from Eagledale Plaza, turning west on 30th Street, driving past Georgetown and through the old National Home neighborhoods of Eagledale. We drove west some more on 34th Street, driving past Moeller, turning our way toward Regency Court. That’s where we lived when there was an Indiana National Bank at Eagledale Plaza. That’s also where we lived when Anne, our youngest child, was born on an Easter Sunday back when Kennedy was in the White House. Our house has been kept well by the families that followed us.
We planted two trees when it was our house. One was an oak tree from a nursery, already tall when we set it down in our empty backyard. The other was a redbud, a branchless whip of a tree that I brought home from the Sears in Eagledale Plaza on a Saturday morning in an old April.
The oak is now a grown-up tree, tall and wide in a backyard that’s got a lot of trees that took root after we pulled up our own. The redbud has taken an ancient look, with gnarls and stumps where old branches have been broken by storms and time and climbing kids. Our trees have grown old and thick and so have I. Laurie and I were happy to see our trees again and happy to recollect the good times we shared in our old house.
So, now I’ll look back on the history I share with this city and write instead that some things get better with the years, like trees, and some things get worse, like banks. If you’re lucky when you grow old, you will have more trees than banks in your memories.
hullmann@nuvo.net
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