Back In The Day

                                                    Back In The Day


     Back in the day, when I was young and quite often foolish, I worked for a bank collecting past due debt from credit card accounts. I traveled all over middle and eastern Tennessee, southern Kentucky and northern Alabama and I did it before there was such things as GPS, map quest and cell phones. In my travels I encountered people of all walks of life and found myself in some rather strange situations from time to time.
     Back in the day, when you got away from the big city the post office had what they called "rural routes" instead of street addresses. Some of these rural routes would be well in excess of a hundred miles long, many of those miles would be on narrow dirt or gravel roads and run a circuitous route leaving the town on one road and returning on another. The only way to find someone living on a rural route was to go to the local post office, for a dollar the post master would give you directions .
     Quite often I was dealing with small town country folk who were nice enough people but they did take a little getting used too. Case in point - one day I was in a small town in Tennessee just above the north western Alabama line, I was looking for a guy who lived on one of the infamous rural routes. I stopped at the local post office and paid the post mistress a dollar for directions to this persons home and this is what I got;

     Post Mistress - "Now honey you just go down hea to the stop sign and turn left then go oh about four or five miles to the big oak"
     Me - "The big oak?" ( I said this with a look of confusion on my face).
     Post Mistress - "Now honey this is the biggest oak tree you have ever seen, you can't miss it, just turn left and go.........".

     So off I go looking for the biggest oak tree I had ever seen and having a 150 year old oak tree in my own back yard I was looking for a monster of a tree. I drove for miles and couldn't find anything that in my mind could be construed as a truly big oak tree so I turned around and went back to the post office.

     Me - "Mam I can't find a big oak tree as you described ".
     Post Mistress - "Oh honey you can't miss it, it's the biggest oak tree you have ever seen".
  
     Small town post offices often were places where the locals would gather to past the time chatting away about the weather, crops, the preacher's sermon or who was doing what to or with whom. It was about this time that an old guy, sitting in the corner listening to our conversation, decided to throw in his two cents worth.

     Old Guy - " Sue do you mean the old oak out by so and so's place"?
     Post Mistress - "Yeah I do".
     Old Guy - "Why they cut that tree down a few months back".

     Now the post mistress turns to me and says - " Now honey once you take a left at the stop sign you just keep going till you get to the big oak stump."
     All I can say is that judging by the stump it must have been one hell of a big oak tree.

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     Another day I was in a little town called Coalmont, Tn., It was about the same size as the aforementioned town which had at that time maybe 200 - 300 hundred people. I was looking for a guy whose name sounded something like Albert  J. Jackson or maybe it was John S. Smiley, it has been a long time ago.
     Any way I stop at the post Office and give the Post Master his dollar and told him I was looking for John Smiley.

     Post Master - "Well sir we have eight John Smileys living here, what is the route he lives on".
     Me- " Route four".
     Post Master - " well that narrows it down a might, there are five that live on route four, does he have a middle initial"?
     Me - "S"
     Post Master - " Well that cuts it down to three".

     To make a long story short, after divulging employers and names of wives it was discovered that the man I was looking for lived three doors down the street.

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     I was sent to work collections in the Florence, Al., I was given an account that had been a problem for sometime. The two previous collectors refused to work the account as the man they called on threatened to shoot them or beat them up. I decided to work the account just so I could say that I tried, it turned out that my results were no different than my predecessors.
     Back then the banks had what they called the "right of offset" meaning that if you owed the bank money and were behind on the payments and you had money in the bank the bank could take your money and apply it to your debt, they would notify you after the fact.
     Getting back to the story, later in the afternoon, after being threatened with bodily injury, I stopped by the bank and was going over the accounts with the manager when this account came up, I described my encounter with the debtor and the stories of my predecessors. The balance on the account was about $2000.00 and it was all past due. The managers secretary overheard our conversation and said the name was familiar so she got to digging around and found out he had a checking account with more than $8000.00 in it. The manager had the secretary make out a cashiers check for me for the entire amount of the debt owed, when I got back to the office a few days later I was treated like a conquering hero.
     When I returned to the bank about a month later I asked if there had been any repercussions from the debtor. The bank secretary said the debtor was in the bank about a week after being sent notice of the withdrawal from his checking account, he never said a word but did deposit money and left. In all other respects he was a good customer.

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     On the other side of the coin, there was this young family who lived in Stevenson, Al.. They were maybe in their early twenties but more likely in their late teens, they lived in an old wooden framed building that used to be a commercial building like a hardware store with a high wooden front porch and tin roof. There was no insulation and the big double door had a padlock for security.
     They owed about $400.00 and all of it was past due, the bank had already written off the account so that no interest would accrue but the young man was insistent that he pay his debt so once a month a collector would stop by and the young man would reach into the bib of the overalls and pull out a ten dollar bill while making polite conversation. While I was writing out a receipt the young man would stand there in bib overalls and well worn work boots and a baseball cap, his wife who looked to be maybe seventeen and very pretty stood shyly in the doorway holding a baby while two young boys less than four years old held tightly to her skirt - she was barefoot and about five months pregnant.
     As far as I know they never missed a payment.

      It never ceased to amaze me that those who had nothing were usually the ones who were most concerned about the money they owed and they always had something to give me, on the other hand I knocked on doors that were answered by maids and if the debtor was there and would talk to me at all he was usually belligerent and I walked away with nothing but an empty promise.


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     One of the biggest challenges of a bill collector was to not get bit by a dog, I was bitten once and thank goodness the dog was old and only had one nub of a tooth left. I did on several occasions have  a run in with dogs.
     This one time I pulled into a long driveway stopping next to the house where a long sidewalk to the front porch met the driveway. I got out of the car and walked about sixty feet down the walk to the front porch and knocked on the front door, after no answer I started writing a note on the back of one of my business cards. As I was writing I heard a sound and looked around to see five Doberman Pincher dogs walking up on the front porch. They seemed to be friendly enough as they sniffed my shoes and pants and they were attentive as I talked to them. It wasn't until I tried to leave that they became a little unruly, now they started barking and blaring their teeth. They surrounded me on all sides and were between me and the car, as I moved they nipped at my pants leg, barked and growled menacingly. All I could do was to keep slowing moving toward the car and when I finally got to the car I made a notation on the file not to come back.

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     I became friends with a banker that was about the same age as me, he worked for a bank in the tri-cities area of eastern Tn., Bud was his name. Bud worked at a bank in Bristol which is a city on the state line with Virginia, the state line ran smack dab down the middle of main street.
     Bud liked to drink and have parties but selling alcohol in Bristol, Tn. was illegal but across the street in Bristol, Virginia was a liquor store. I found out that Bud used to buy the cheaper brands of liquor take them home and pour the booze into empty bottles of the more expensive brands, unless you were a connoisseur, which nobody was after a few drinks, you never knew the whiskey in the Makers Mark bottle was actually Old Crow.
     Bud and I went out to dinner one night and I got to telling him a story about a neighbor I had, I could tell stories back then just as easily as I do now. Now this neighbor was a pain in my butt and I was just getting a lot of frustration off my chest. Bud thought this was the funniest story he ever heard and nearly fell out of his chair from laughing so hard, the people around us were starting to get annoyed. I finished the story and Bud settled down then we parted for the night.
     The next day I met Bud at the bank and he told me he wanted to show me his fathers recording studio, turns out his father was a record producer for gospel groups and had a thriving business. I agreed to go with him that night. I met Buds father and toured the studio and we talked a while, then Buds father told me that Bud had told him the story about my neighbor and they both laughed till they cried. The jest of this get together came to light as the old man told me one of the things he had always wanted to do was to produce a comedy record album and he thought that I could be the next great comedian.
     I turned down the offer of fame and prosperity and now that I am supposedly older and wiser I wonder if maybe this was an opportunity missed, one of the great mistakes of my life. Just think of it, I could have been on the tonight show - as host !
    

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     I enjoyed my time at the bank, I enjoyed the travels and the people I encountered. Life in the seventies was different than today, back then you had a job to do and were given time to perform it without someone standing over you urging you to go faster. Most employees liked their jobs and held the company in high esteem, the company usually took care of it's employees and a life long bond existed between them. Many people retired from the one job they held for thirty plus years and were proud of it. By comparison we didn't make a lot of money but it seemed to go further. Linda and I were happy and had every thing we needed and most things we wanted.
     I can't say when the world turned into a fast paced race to the finish but it did. I guess as you get older it may be harder to see the future when the end is so close, so you tend to look backwards to what you know, to a place where you were happy and wonder where it all went. I can only hope that my sons will one day look back on happier times and reminisce with fond memories of the best days of their lives.