Frisbie: Arlington Heights bankers exhibited a personal touch

When the Daily Herald recently ran an Associated Press story about nuns asking Goldman Sachs executives how they could, in conscience, make 300 times as much money as the typical worker, I thought of how banks operated in Arlington Heights when we first came here. They were as helpful as could be.

The nuns' concern, of course, was that huge amounts paid to CEOs diminish the amount of revenue the nuns get from Goldman Sachs in returns on their investments in the company. The nuns need the money to take care of themselves and older nuns. They expect bankers to help them do that.

To extrapolate from banking the culture in Arlington Heights when we came to town to banking with the likes of Goldman Sachs now is breathtaking.

In 1954, in stores all over Arlington Heights, you could find blank checkbooks for the convenience of anyone who wanted to make out a check for a purchase. My husband remembers that you could even write in the name of the bank.

One of my first experiences with the system was buying a maple dresser at Joe Schneller's Furniture Store. I hadn't meant to buy anything that day so I had no check of my own and used one provided. Everyone was so nice about it that they roused my suspicions. As I say, I was new to town.

After brooding about it for several hours when I got home, I called the bank to stop payment on the check.

The bank clerk laughed at me. I was the hick from the city. No one was more reputable than Joe Schneller.

You'd think I would have been prepared for the Arlington Heights bank culture. I could remember Frank Cannon, a chief bank teller in the similar small town I knew as a child, calling my mother to say, “Evelyn, you are overdrawn. Shall I take something out of your savings account?”

It was only later that I began to hear Arlington Heights stories from people like Steve Csanadi.

“My father would give me a note to take down to the bank,” he told me. “I was just a kid. Whatever my father needed, twenty dollars, thirty, they just gave it to me and sent me home.”

When the Arlington Heights State Bank closed in 1931, and the (former) People's Bank a year later, local people were devastated. I remember Herman Redeker, lying in Americana Nursing Home with a bad toe, telling me how he lost everything with his bank's closure, and even had to initiate a “friendly divorce” with his wife.

But I also remember stories, vague in my head, of lenders who carried their clients during the Depression. To my mind, they had retained the open-mindedness exemplified by blank checkbooks on store counters. They looked out for people. They would probably have even looked out for old nuns.