Forty Years of Banking Across Main Street

Across Main Street

The credit union has four desks, a coffee pot, and a basket of plastic pumpkins. Lois Kinney, at the front window, looked up, saw Mother in her church coat at a quarter past three on a Thursday, and put down her pen.

“Dot,” she said. “Honey, what is it?”

“I’d like to join, please. I’m told it’s five dollars.”

“It is.” Lois came around the counter. She did not ask why. A woman who has lived in Bellmont all her life knows exactly what it means when Dorothy Ellison walks across Main Street in her church coat.

Membership is open to anyone who lives, works, or worships in the county. Mother paid her $5 share in two folded ones and signed the card with the pen on the little chain. Then Lois walked us back to Patsy Maddox’s desk.

“A furnace,” Mother said. “$6,400, over three years. I’d like to pay it off early if I can.”

Patsy pulled up the file. It took two minutes. I watched her eyes go down the screen and widen.

“Mrs. Ellison, your score is 802.”

“Is that good?”

“It’s the kind of number I see twice a year.” Patsy turned the monitor a little, as if to be sure. “I could finance a pickup for you on that. No co-signer. Seven and a half percent, thirty-six months, $199 a month, and no penalty if you pay it off early.”

“That sounds fair.”

“It’s the rate on the sign out front, ma’am. It’s not a favor.”

“Now I have to ask,” Patsy said gently. “You’ve got savings. You could cover this yourself. Why borrow?”

Mother straightened.

“Because that is my burying money,” she said. “$11,880. It’s spoken for. A plain pine box, the Methodist ladies’ lunch, and a stone next to Howard’s. I won’t touch it for a heater. I’ll borrow like a person and pay it back like a person.”

While the paperwork printed, Mother looked around that room the way she looks around a church she has not been inside in years.

“I opened my first account when I was seventeen,” she said, to nobody in particular. “The little bank on the square in Marshfield. Egg money. I had twelve dollars, and I carried it in a sock because I was afraid my brothers would find it.”

Patsy stopped typing.

“The man at the window was Mr. Prater. He wrote my name in the passbook in ink. Nobody had ever written my name in anything. He said, ‘Miss Dorothy, you have started something.'”

I had never heard that story. I have lived with that woman for fifty-eight years.

Patsy approved the loan at 3:42. Rollie, who runs Rollie’s Heating and Air out of a garage on Highway 63, said he could be at the house at seven the next morning with the unit on his truck.