|
By Lisa Loy
As I waited at a stoplight on US 158, on that stretch of bypass that straddles the line between the towns of Southern Shores and Kitty Hawk, I realized that in my haste to arrive at an appointment in Elizabeth City on time, I had forgotten to stop at my bank in Kill Devil Hills to make a deposit. Then I remembered, my bank had opened a new branch near Seamark Foods. It was at that moment, as I looked around me, that I noticed for the first time, there were now four banks near that stoplight, all within a hundred yards of each other. I couldn’t help but marvel at the tremendous growth during the 25 years I’ve lived on the Outer Banks. When I moved here, we didn’t have any stoplights on the beach.
But it’s no wonder the beach is home to so many banks. As our community has gained national attention, we’ve attracted many people with money to spend on vacations, money to invest in property; Outer Bankers have worked hard and made money. It made me wonder what it was like to be a banker back in the early days when our beach community was simpler and small.
Once upon a time, in a time before fax machines, drive through windows, and the Internet, there was a bank, and it was called The Bank of Manteo.
Like many frontier towns across America, most general store owners accommodated their patrons, due to the seasonal ebb and flow of income, by allowing them to charge their goods until the crops came in, or as in our case, until their nets were full. So in a sense, store merchants provided the first banking services. Eventually, there was sufficient commerce to support a bank, and in 1905, The Bank of Manteo was registered with the state and open for business. Located initially in the wooden courthouse on what is now Sir Walter Raleigh Street, the bank’s starting capital of $40,000 wouldn’t buy a single piece of property on today’s Outer Banks.
In the book written by Angel Ellis Khoury entitled Manteo, a Roanoke Island Town, she recounts an era before bank accounts were insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Our first bank went to great lengths to uphold confidence in the bank for its patrons.
“According to Mellie Pearce, neither storms or stock market crashes could close The Bank of Manteo,” Khoury wrote. “It was one of the few that did not fail during the Great Depression, and in 1934 W.R. Pearce, head cashier, braved hurricane winds of more than one hundred miles per hour to walk from his house at 407 Devon Street to open the bank.
“The bank, too, believed in customer service. After Vernon Davis was severely injured in a boat race, he became concerned about the upkeep of his little dog, Gimpy, in case something should happen to him. He asked his wife, Lessie, to calculate how much it cost to feed and groom the little dog each year, and then sent Lessie to The Bank of Manteo to open an account. When Lessie asked that a new bank account be opened, the teller explained that she would need a social security number for “Gimpy Davis.” Lessie said she had no idea how to go about that, since Gimpy was a dog. The bank opened an account without one.”
For more than 50 years, The Bank of Manteo remained the lone bank on the Outer Banks. In the sixties it merged with Planters National Bank, based out of Rocky Mount, which moved the bank out to highway 64, on what was then the main corridor through Roanoke Island. Today we know it as RBC Centura.
Ray White of Mann’s Harbor and Arnold Head of Siler City were both employed by Planters Bank. The two met at banking school in Chapel Hill in the late sixties and have been friends ever since. Arnold was eventually transferred to the Outer Banks. They have both retired from Centura, and I met with them recently to talk about old times.
Ray said that when he graduated from East Carolina University with a business degree, he had no idea what he wanted to do when he came home to Mann’s Harbor in 1966 where his family has lived for generations and prospered. He found a job as a teller at the bank.
“Nothing was computerized.” Arnold said. “Back in that time the goal of the bank was to have $66 million in assets by the end of 1966.”
He remembers because he still has some of the old napkins with the Planters logo on them that said “66 in 66.”
“And that was for the whole state,” Ray said. Arnold added that “back then the bank had 15 branches in all of North Carolina. By the time Ray retired in December of 2002, he said. “We were between $250 and $300 million, and that was just for the Outer Banks region.”
“I remember Ray telling one story, this had to be in the late sixties,” Arnold said. “I think he was full time then, but a fellow came in and he said can I help you and it was during the time of day when whoever was opening accounts was out to lunch so Ray was going to help him, and he started pulling that money out of every pocket. It concerned Ray, seeing all that money laying up there like that, so he took him back there to one of the offices and counted it. It was something like $30 thousand and that wasn’t at all unusual.”
Ray concurred, “And it would smell. I remember sometimes, it was so musty and moldy; it was the first time it had seen daylight in decades.”
“It had been buried somewhere,” Arnold added.
During their early years with the bank, Ray and Arnold would do whatever job needed to be done. Like many rural areas, sometimes an employee had to wear more than one hat. Sometimes that meant wearing a black hat.
When Ray had been with the bank less than a year, a fellow from their consumer credit department, Ray thinks his name was Cliff, asked Ray to go to Stumpy Point with him to repossess a car and drive it back.
“I said sure. So I went down there, it was in the wintertime, and it was cold. The man was on the couch and he had cats laying all over him to help him stay warm. He said, ‘I just don’t know how I’m going to make it, I won’t be able to get down to the fish house.’ It was so sad. I said, ‘Cliff, come here. How much does he owe you?’ He told me, and I said, ‘Well look, I’ll make the payment for him.’ I’ve always had a soft heart, so, anyway, he never took me again.”
“Now Arnold can tell you some stories,” Ray hooted. “He’s repossessed cook stoves that had fire burning in them, and a woman had a pot of beans on it. This is serious.”
“Was that in Siler City?” I asked Arnold, and he answered sheepishly, “Yeah”, as Ray and I laughed out loud.
“We were the only bank for a long time,” Ray said. “We were here in Manteo and in Nags Head. He remembers working with Richard Jordan at the first branch at Nags Head. It was located in a flat top brick building on the beach road near the original Gray’s Department Store.
“There was a one room apartment that served as a break room, and the employees of Planters Bank in Rocky Mount could rent it for $5 a day,” Ray said. “We were open on Saturdays, and they’d come down, and we’d have to be real quiet in the bank because they would still be sleeping,” Ray laughed.
“But anyway, a lot of people remember the name Richard Jordan. He was a great piano player. He was an older man, in his sixties when I came here, and he played at The Carolinian and The Sea Ranch. I was a teller and the two of us were the only ones that were there. In the summer time, we were so busy that we’d take the money and rake it off into big old metal trashcans. He’d have one and I’d have one.”
Arnold commented that people were often paid in cash. Credit cards were not widely used in those days, and businesses had huge cash deposits during the summer months. Ray continued the story.
“At the end of the day we would try to band it and we would put it back into the trash cans. He drove a blue Volkswagen, they had their trunk in the front, and we would dump those trashcans full of money in his trunk and drive to Manteo to count it and package it up. Then we’d walk around the corner to the post office and the bus would take it out of here. No armored trucks, no nothing. If you wanted to rob a bank, all you’d have to do was pull the bus over and there was your money.”
Some years later, when the bank built a larger branch in Nags Head on US 158, the bank sold the old brick flat top and it became a private cottage dubbed “Bankrupt.” It was just demolished this year for redevelopment. At the new branch, the night deposits became so huge that the bank hired additional tellers. They were concerned about so much money in view that they enclosed part of the new lobby just for the money counters.
“Well, our biggest challenge was keeping employees. Because we had to have so many employees in the summer, and in the winter, we didn’t anything for them to do. We couldn’t afford to keep X number of tellers at a branch 12 months out of the year so we had to rely on part-time help. We called them summer tellers,” Arnold said.
“Our people in Nags Head,” Ray added, “used to come in at 6 o’clock in the morning. The night bags were so heavy, and there were so many of them on weekends. We had people coming in on Sunday afternoons. It would be so busy during the three summer months, that we just had tellers, everywhere you could see.”
“This is before plastic was in use very much,” Arnold added. “Not everybody had credit cards. Not all merchants took credit cards. In fact, we were one of the first banks to become what they called a credit card merchant, that they could deposit their Master Card and Visa receipts with us, but it wasn’t that prevalent, everybody took cash. And the Nags Head office is a good example.”
“They’d be standing knee-deep in money. We tried to keep that as quiet as possible,” Arnold said.
Ray said, “People would come down here on vacation, and invariably they’d run out of money, and nobody would take checks. We would cash peoples’ checks, up to $100, and we’d charge them 50 cents. Dick Jordan and I, we had a little bucket that we’d throw our 50 cents in, and at the end of the day we’d count it up and put it under extra income, or whatever. But, you’d have to spend some time with the people. Ask them who they were, get their driver’s license number, and etc. We always came out ahead at the end of the season.”
Arnold added, “We continued to do that until ‘91 when we merged with Peoples Bank and became Centura. As long as it was Planters, we cashed the out-of-town checks, and we raised the amount to $500. We had almost no losses.”
“And of course,” Ray added, “That went away when people had credit cards. You can imagine people coming down here on vacation, thinking they’re going to spend $300 – back then $300 was a lot – and they’d run out of money. I mean, they’d absolutely run out of money and had no way to get home.”
“Ray and I can remember when it wasn’t unusual to make a hundred dollar loan,.” Arnold said. He remembered one Christmas in particular.
“I made it a point not to make a loan before Christmas. You might have a tendency to make a mistake. Well, a fellow came in and talked to one of the loan officers and he turned it down. I didn’t know anything about it, and it wasn’t until two or three days later when we were back in the break room. The loan officers would all take a break at the same time and go back and drink a cup of coffee. We were so busy during that time that we didn’t even have a chance to speak with each other, except when we took a break, and that’s how we kept up with what was going on. And that other loan officer said, ‘Well, so and so came in and gave me the saddest story. He had to buy one of his kids a bicycle and he wanted a hundred dollars, and he was just so sorry, I couldn’t lend him the money.’ Right about that time I saw Ray drop his head, and he said, ‘He came to my house last night at 8 o’clock and I gave him a hundred dollars.’”
“He’s got a memory like an elephant,” Ray blushed.
“He probably never got it back,” Arnold said.
“I didn’t,” Ray laughed.
“In the old days you didn’t have to have a financial statement,” Ray said. “ If somebody said they needed money, you knew them. You knew their daddy. You knew what kind of reputation they had. You loaned it to them.”
In the early to mid seventies, the bank opened the first bank on Hatteras Island in Buxton. They rented one half of a building; the other half was a beauty parlor.
“All we had was a teller facility there, so I went down once a week on Tuesdays to offer loan service,” Ray said. “When I got there, I probably didn’t get there until 10 o’clock, there’d be a line, it would be just like when you walk into a dentist’s office. They’d be sitting up against the wall and they’d be waiting for me…And people working there would have cakes cooked for me. I never ate in any restaurant. I always ate in our customers’ homes.”
“There was this one particular time that the bluefish were blitzing the beach, and one of the customers, Curtis Gray, said, ‘Come on Ray.’ I had a coat and tie on, and I had a real long red beard at that time. And so I went out and rolled my pants legs up. I took my coat off, but I didn’t take my tie off and went in bare footed.
“It was the best time of my banking career. People were friendly. I’d eaten in their homes, and I really got close to those people.”
As Arnold Head and Ray White saw their bank through three decades of unprecedented growth, other banks sprang up throughout the area.
In 1969, a branch of The East Carolina Bank headquartered in Engelhard, opened its doors in a trailer on Budleigh Street in Manteo. Angel Khoury wrote that “Andy Griffith was its first depositor – but only after Keith Fearing loaned him a hundred dollars.”
Its first branch manager, Edward C. Greene, remembered for his life-long love of aviation and tremendous sense of humor, passed away in March of this year. The East Carolina Bank is a state chartered, independent, community bank founded in 1919. After it opened its first beach location in Nags Head, other banks followed suit.
First Union, (a predecessor to Wachovia) opened shop on the Bypass at Milepost 10 in what is now the First South Bank building. Jack Crawford relocated to the Outer Banks from Piedmont, North Carolina in the spring of 1985 to work there. When I asked him recently to share some of his memories, he could have easily been sitting at the same table with Ray and Arnold.
“The banking industry has been ever-changing since my career began on April Fool’s Day, 1972,” Jack Crawford said.
He said there were only four banks located on the Bypass in 1985 when he moved here. It was a time when the Bypass really was a bypass for the Beach Road, which is no longer designated a part of US Highway158.
“In the mid 1980’s, the Bypass did not have banks and drug stores on almost every corner. In fact, there was only one stoplight on the entire Outer Banks, located at Eckner Street in Kitty Hawk,” he said.
Like The East Carolina Bank, Jack said to his knowledge, The Bank of Currituck is the only other designated community bank located at the beach. Attracted to this style of banking, he went to work for The Bank of Currituck in 1990 at its first beach location in Corolla. And like Ray White, Jack remembers how remote an area it was then.
“Through the years, I can recall handling the local staff payroll in cash and also transporting large sums in the trunk of my car to the local Post Office for shipment to the Federal Reserve. That accepted practice no longer exists,” Jack said.
Jack described the odd feeling he had carrying as much as $250 thousand to Norris Austin at the Corolla Post Office who would send it certified. It was fine at first he said, but as the area began to grow and there were so many unfamiliar faces, they made some changes.
“During that period there was much less regulatory burden in our business; therefore, less paperwork. Loan note forms were about one-half of one page. That was it!”
“Bank’s have since broadened their basic loan and deposit products and services to include mortgages, insurance and investments,” Jack continued. “Also, with computers, new methods of delivery have been introduced. Faxes have now become e-mail attachments and we must all ask ourselves how did we ever get by without Internet banking with automatic bill pay?”
He described one of the new services quickly taking hold at The Bank of Currituck, called Remote Deposit Capture, which enables business customers to make their deposits online.
The bankers of today embrace computer technology aggressively and belie the conservative image their neckties suggest. The latest evidence of this crossed my computer monitor recently when I saw that a bank in Raleigh was offering music downloads from iTunes as part of a new checking account program designed to attract upwardly mobile, young professionals.
And while Jack has seen banking come so far during his career, he has also found himself right back where he was 20 years ago, at The Marketplace in Southern Shores at a new branch of The Bank of Currituck. It’s right by that stoplight, where I was sitting one day, marveling at the tremendous growth here during the past 25 years.
|
