The Sunday Memory Drawer - You Can Bank On It

 

Boy, I remember these!   It was one of the cool promotions run by the Eastchester Savings Bank in Mount Vernon, New York.  They'd come to your school and show you how to open up your own bank savings account.  A pretty heady and adult thing to do if you were a fourth-grader.

Once armed with my passbook and my deposit slip, I walked proudly down to their First Street branch and entrusted my five dollars to them.  Let the riches begin.  All of a sudden, I was Jed Clampett looking for a consultation with my own personal Milburn Drysdale.  

I would try to make regular contributions to my future.  When birthdays and Christmas came around, I could be even more savings-minded by depositing those five dollar bills I would get from Tante Emma.  And it absolutely thrilled me when the teller would update my account on the passbook.  And, wow, 35 cents interest.  Where's that Aston Martin I can buy?  Well, actually, a put-together model of an Aston Martin purchased at the hobby shop.

I always felt better when I could see my updated money printed in the passbook.  It made the amount tangible.  Rest assured, I wasn't the only one in my house who needed the same assurance.

Grandma.

Interestingly enough,  she had a savings account at the very same place.   So, one of the many errands she would entrust to me including the extremely important updating of the account.   She would give me her passbook and I would go to the bank and ask the teller for an update.  Oh, Grandma hadn't made a new deposit in years.  But she absolutely had to see the new amount in fresh ink on that passbook.

Keep in mind that my grandmother could not read words or write anything except her name.  But, numbers?  She could be a whiz. 

"Hmmm, I only got four dollars and ten cents interest this month.  Last time, it was four dollars and eight cents."

She would be that precise.   A similar drama unfolded every Thursday morning when she did her weekly shopping at the A & P supermarket on Oak Street in Mount Vernon.

"You see this grape jelly?  Last week, it was 69 cents.  This week, it is 71 cents.  Gott in himmel."

The entire grocery store's price grid seemed to reside in my grandmother's left frontal lobe.

"The bologna.  $1.49.  Last Christmas, it was $1.29.  Gott in himmel."

Yes, even God in heaven couldn't keep all the prices straight that my grandmother could recite with the accuracy of Albert Einstein.

Now this amazing knack was all probably a direct by-product of my grandparents living through the Great Depression of 1929.  Every dollar and every dime meant something to them.  And it was doubly important to keep track of every single bit of currency they had to their name.  Even if it was forty years later.

Now, while Grandma kept a good deal of dough in the Eastchester Savings Bank, she probably sported a much more universal distrust of banks.  That's because she preferred to keep her money all over the house.  Or so I discovered when she fell and broke her hip.

As she laid in her bed waiting for the ambulance that would take her to the hospital, Grandma felt a need to share her treasury with us in the event she never made it off the operating table.

For one solid half-hour, my grandmother ticked off with astonishing precision and depth the hiding places for her life savings.

"In my black purse in the bottom drawer of the dresser.  Not the black one with the clasp.  The other one.  Inside.  There's two hundred dollars."

Okay.

"In my coat closet.  On the floor.  There is a green shoe box.  Inside.  There's three hundred and twenty-one dollars."

Not just three hundred.  Not three hundred and twenty.  Exactly three hundred and twenty-one dollars.

"In my make-up powder box.  Lift up the powder puff.  Sixty dollars."

Grandma had about two dozen different spots all around her bedroom doubling as her own personal Fort Knoxes.

It was likely a generational thing.  Except....

Flash forward about fifteen years.  I'm in a similar situation.  Awaiting an ambulance, but, this time, it's taking my father to the hospital.  He asked me to sit down alongside him.

"Just in case...."

What?

"In my closet.  In the brown shoe box.  Four hundred and fifty dollars."

And on and on and on.  Like father, like mother.

So what jogged this into the front of my memory basket?   I was in my hometown and up loomed the very bank building.

Like everything in Mount Vernon, New York, it is vacant.

And gone.

Dinner last night:  Caesar salad at Fanny's Cafe.