Posted this pic before. It is my grandaddy serving a couple of young girls at the 1st National Bank of Sault Ste. Marie children’s teller window. My granddaddy was the bank president and I was probably a toddler around this time. Grandaddy was very kind to children but I’ve been told not so much to people not paying their loans.

My dad ended up being the bank president later on so I am the daughter and granddaughter of bankers. Their small-town bank got swallowed up by various holding companies, ending in PNC, which a lot of people might know about?

The main Planet Ann Arbor PNC branch closed recently, which meant that a whole bunch of people had to close out their safe deposit boxes. I’d had to do this a couple of times already, when our neighborhood Maple Village branch closed and when the Sault Ste. Siberia bank branch closed. That was the bank that I grew up in and my late parents had a huge safe deposit box with all kinds of crazy stuff in it. When we went up there, the bank folks couldn’t even open it for a while but they finally managed that and at the end of it all, the current bank branch manager (who happened to live next door to my mother’s house) said, “There are pictures of your dad and granddaddy in the basement. Do you want them?” Of course.

So. Banker’s daughter/granddaughter. Did I grow up rich? We weren’t rich or poor. I was often told (by my mother) that we were poor but we weren’t really. Just that a banking job does not always automatically mean a huge salary. We could afford what we needed but we were also very frugal. We were in a prominent family for whatever that’s worth. I had and still have mixed feelings about that although make no mistake I LOVE my family. They are good people.

As an adult, it kinda cracks me up that… 1) I always loved to do non-profit treasury jobs. Counting and organizing big piles of cash, coins, and checks and taking it all to the bank to deposit was fun fun fun for me. 2) It cracks me up that the adult career that I FELL into (after age 50) was fintech (online banking) systems analyst. I often wonder what my dad and granddaddy would have thought about that. Granddaddy died before computer technology and dad struggled when the bank started adopting it back in the Jurassic Age. So I’ll never know.

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