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EVERYBODY’S DANISH – Chapter ‘My private banker – bags of money’
By fred | February 27, 2009
EVERYBODY’S DANISH – Uncle Fred’s unfinished book
CHAPTER (My private banker-bags of money)
For three weeks during the Holidays the money flowed in, bags and bags of the stuff! During the day whenever the small cash registrar we had was so stuffed it would not close, Dad grabbed handfuls of checks and cash and stuffed it in a paper sack, then tossed it on a shelf under the registrar. There was no time to count the stuff, just call the next customer number and keep working. Everyone worked so hard with only enough space behind the counters for five clerks and hundreds of customers wanting to be served – it was a jungle from morning till closing.
Late at night the register was finally emptied out, and filled with change to open the next day. The opening money stayed in the store register all night we never even thought about a robbery. We lived right behind the store, and Dad or Mom were in the store, or store kitchen, often till after midnight. All the full paper sacks on the shelf under the registrar were taken into the house.
After several days the brown paper sacks with money and register tapes would build up. Somehow it had to be counted and stuck in the bank. Most of the time my folks were just too tired, spending every second they were not waiting on customers to restock the store or in Mom’s case work in the store kitchen making Danish sausage, Swedish Potato sausage, Danish liver pate, or pork head cheese, and so the job fell to me, just cause there was no one else in the family to do it except Grandma. I had been working in the store from age six or seven, and waiting on customers before ten years of age, so handling money, counting money, giving change to customers as all basic math, it wasn’t something strange.
Counting thousands of dollars, wrapping rolls of coins, listing and depositing stacks of checks will certainly aid in your basic math education, you can count on it! After Mom showed me how to make up a bank deposit slip the job was mine at the tender age of thirteen. I remember my Grandma helping me count the stuff in the beginning, a few days later she would only recheck my counts, but soon that stopped also, she had other things to do, all the house cleaning, meals for the tired overworked family and so on. The big dining room table was my desk. Stacks of different denomination bills, customer’s checks, and worst of all the darn coins had to be counted by hand at least twice then wrapped.
The only time I can ever remember being really pissed off at my boyhood pal, our cat Kitty was one day he decided to help. I had just finished stacking hundreds of dollar bills in neat stacks – like the bank wants. They want all bills facing up, face up. I had stacks of twenties, tens, fives, ones counted and neatly stacked lying all over the large dinning room table – we are talking thousands of dollars. The bills were ready for me to put rubber bands around them, do a re count and bag it. For some reason just then Kitty decides I was spending far too much time paying attention to all that stuff on the table, and not enough attention to him. He took a giant leap from the floor to the table, landing on all fours in the middle of my neatly stacked money. In less than a split second Kitty had money flying all over the dinning room floor and table.
I will say this for Kitty, he was not dumb, the reaction he got was not what he anticipated, that was the first and last time he ever came near his young buddy Fred while he was counting money. He may peek around the door from the kitchen or a bedroom, but he never again bothered me when I was counting money, nor did he ever even step a foot into the dining room when I was counting money. You gotta figure he had learned that business is business and fun is fun and that all that smelly paper money on the dining room table was business, not fun.
Our bank was a sleepy little corner edition of Bank of America about five blocks away. The first trip to that bank is embedded in my mind. There I was a young thirteen year old ready to bike and peddle off, Dad had given me instructions to not fool around, just bike straight to the bank and hand the teller the money. That first trip I had several days Christmas business receipts, it was over twelve thousand dollars in my big paper sack. In those days you could buy a house for about $12,000 so it was a huge amount of money. Dad insisted on a big paper sack because Dad said it would look natural, just a growing kid with a big lunch bag peddling his bike.
I remember the first time I got to the bank. I waited in line until it was my turn to hand the bank teller the sack. In those days they had bars across the top of the teller’s cages and only a small area to hand over your deposit or receive funds. The damn bag just couldn’t be pushed through so I had to open the sack and take out stack after stack of bills. I was pushing them under the bars as fast as I could. I remember the look on her face as I pushed the stacks of money, checks, and coins toward her, trying to get them to her. This young kid pushing all that money was more than she could handle, she freaked out, turned and ran out the back of her cage and up to the half a sleep bank manager.
A frantic whispered conversation ensued, and he ran to her cage, all the money was still in my bag or on the bank counter. To tell the truth I was scared because I figured I had done something wrong. I remember some of the other bank customers waiting in line, laughing like they had never seen anything so funny. Maybe it was, but to the banker, the teller, and a very young lad it was serious business. He phoned my father, very upset that a child was sent to his bank with this huge amount of money.
I think I can still remember hearing Dad’s booming voice second hand – the poor bank manager had to hold the phone away from his ear. Andy, my Dad, probably trying to wait on three customers as once, the store packed with customers, and still having to answer the phone was in no mood for a long conversation. ‘What’s the matter, don’t you want the money? He’s my son, I don’t have time to stop and go the bank! We can’t keep it here! Do I have to get another bank?”
The bank manager got the message, he gently put down the phone and asked me to wait in his office while he helped the teller count and bank the deposit. When he came back to his office he asked who had made up the deposit and when I told him I did – he looked at me kind of funny. “How old are you?” he asked. I told him quite proudly that I was thirteen. He laughed and said, “If I ever wanted to get into banking he certainly would hire me as a teller as the deposit was perfect to the penny. He handed me the stamped deposit slip for over $12,000.00.
We made a deal. He gave me his card, and every time, before I left home for my now famous bicycle trips to the bank I would call him or his assistant on the phone and say “I’m leaving”. I guess, thinking back on it that I should have said who I was, but I never remember saying who I was, they knew!
In front of the bank watching down the street for the little boy with the big paper sack was my own private banker. We never left that bank. This continued every Holiday season until I was old enough to drive a car to the bank. Thinking back now, my parents had to be nuts to entrust a young thirteen year old with all that money, not that I would steal it, but if robbed other than yelling at the top of my lungs, I would not have been much good protecting it. It was never a big deal to me – it was just another job Dad & Mom did not have the time to do themselves.
In school I always got straight A’s in basic math, adding, subtracting, multiplying, fractions, percentages were duck soup. Did that all day in the store, working weekends in the store, when the holidays were over Mom or Dad kept handing me the sacks of the day’s receipts, it was my job, I had earned my stripes counting the big thousands of dollar days, counting and banking a few hundred bucks a day during the rest of the year took no time at all.
In high school when they started teaching, geometry, trig and all that jazz – all that weird math stuff is where I did not bring home all A’s. Weird math – I could never figure out I would use it in life. Hey, I was right, I was a businessman all my life, as business man I never used that stuff, but used basic math constantly, Mom and Dad taught me that, got that at our store daily.
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