Aug 25 2008
The dirty little old man.
In 1978, I worked at a little ice cream shop, helping customers when they wanted to buy a cone or banana split. It was just a little walk up shop in a small town in central Minnesota and was my first job. First jobs are funny; you get to see people from all walks of life. And one person I saw periodically was the dirty little man who walked all by himself around town.
He never seemed to wear clean cothes, and he was skinny, though not emaciated. His blue jeans and dirty coat arrived to the nose of people on the street before he did. His face was whiskered, cut so that it looked like he took care of it himself without a mirror. I heard later that he lived in a small, unasuming house with an outhouse in the back. I don’t remember his name, but there was no one else like him in town.
Then several years later, he died, and since he had no heirs, the representative for the state went into his house. Inside the walls, in the mattress, and pretty much anywhere you looked was money. The final number yielded over $1.2 million dollars just lying around, to be picked up as he needed. He died without the comforts of our modern life, floating in money, and never even used it to install an indoor toilet. I wonder about those days when it was forty below zero, and him sitting out there. Did it ever cross his mind to put one in?
Fast forward twenty-five years. That’s how long I lived out of this area. And more than once I brought up the subject of this dirty, little old man to various people who have lived most of their lives in the area. My father, when I recalled the man, nodded his head respectfully. “Yeah, I remember that.” Then he shook his head, and I thought about how frugal my father was. Yet even he could see the sense of a running toilet, or keeping his money in the bank.
Longtime residents who recalled the newspaper article always shake their head when I bring it up. It is beyond comprehension for many of us to simly allow our money to lie around. Theft of fire could have changed this man’s fortune at any time.
My father reminded me of the man’s age. “You see, toots,” he said. “The old codger had lost his money in the bank in the 30’s. Where should he have put his money so it was safe?”
How appropriate then, that we recall this dirty little old man today. Friday night, late, the Feds closed another bank and began going through the process of handing out coverage for only the $100,000 in the insured accounts. This is the ninth bank that has failed this year in this country and there will probably be more. Will these failures lead to a whole new generation of eccentric mattress stuffers?
The Feds are not thinking of this little old man when they make a move on a bank. Instead, they have been operating in a fairly interesting manner. They always wait until Friday night or a Saturday to shut down the bank, then they have a certain amount of time to get a handle on the books. How terrible it must be for the people who know that on Monday morning, they might have only a third, or a fifth of their life savings left.
Five companies contributed to half of the problems that led to the failure of this bank, according to the Associated Press. Imagine being the owner of one of those small businesses, or the shareholder in one of those development firms. Imagine knowing that you were one of the people that cost this institution its downfall. Imagine being the loan officers.
The dirty little old man in the small town where I used to work kept life very simple. Yes, he took risks with his money, foolish risks. But they were just as calculated risks as anyone else took in some of these failed banks or some of the local banks that have not failed. In many respects, we have more in common with that paranoid, frugal little old man that any of us care to admit. I will bet that in a few hours from now, there will be even more people who will have wished they stuffed their matresses with their funds than ever before.
