From Passbooks and Lollipops to Banking on Kitchen Countertops

“Dad!” our daughter, Lilly, yelled down the back stairs recently, “Did you deposit my check into my bank account?” 

“I’ll do it now!” Francis bellowed back from our kitchen island. Lumbering to standing with a dramatic groan, he plodded to the countertop where we keep our mail. 

Our family’s mail system consists of separating daily mail into piles: each of our five family members, periodicals, and junk mail. In our unspoken marriage contract, my husband, Francis, has always been the one to manage bills and banking for the family, so the vast majority of our mail gets plopped into a wooden box on the countertop designated for him. 

I go wall-eyed at the mere mention of mathematical calculations, so my mail tends to be somewhat non-essential — mostly solicitations from charity organizations, grocery store fliers, and the odd magazine. Although two of our three young adult children have flown the coop, we still get mail for them all occasionally, which we sort and tuck into kitchen cubbies originally built for wine bottles. 

Francis reached into Lilly’s cubby and plucked out the paycheck she receives every two weeks from her job as a hospital student nurse. Positioning Lilly’s check on the countertop, he took his cell phone out of his gym shorts and held it in the air above the check. With a digital “SNAP!” sound effect, the bank deposit to Navy Federal Credit Union was complete. 

Modern technology is simply mind-boggling, but especially for those of us born before the Digital Age. It seems so much of today’s world operates like magic in a vague, invisible ether. There’s online banking, cloud computing, robo-investing, machine-learning algorithms, artificial intelligence, voice banking, digital signage, block chain, PayPal, Venmo, Bitcoin, and cybersecurity for data breaches. None of these items are physical. Rather, they exist in that preternatural space only accessed by humans through computers and smartphones.

Although I embrace modern conveniences, they are often difficult to fathom, because I grew up in a time when transactions were grounded in concrete equipment and tangible processes I could see, hear and touch. 

I clearly recall sitting unbelted in the passenger’s seat of my mother’s humongous sedan as she pulled into Savings & Trust Bank in my hometown. The teller behind the bank drive-up window was occupied with another customer, so Mom drove carefully into the second lane and jammed the naugahyde handle of the angled stainless steel gear shifter into park.

Digging into her pocketbook — usually packed to the gills with her glasses case, a bottle of Jergen’s lotion, a hairbrush, Wrigley’s gum, crumpled tissues, a powder compact, various lipsticks, pens with chewed caps, and prior to 1977, a pack of Taryton 100s — my mother pulled out her long wallet and unfastened the side containing her checkbook. 

While snapping gum in her back teeth, Mom carefully filled out a slip for three checks she was depositing, then wrote a check from her own checkbook to “Cash” for $100 and endorsed all the checks in her perfect first-grade-teacher cursive. Just outside the driver’s door was a brick column with a metal mounted box on it. Mom took a perforated envelope from a slot on the box and placed her papers inside. Next, she pulled a plastic cylinder out of the box. Opening the tube, she put her papers inside along with her bank passbook, a small faux-leather booklet with a running tab of Mom’s deposits and withdrawals. 

Placing the tube back into the box — “THWUMP!” — it disappeared. Inside the drive up window, we could see the teller open the tube and take out Mom’s papers. The bank teller gave us a wave and a smile, before returning the tube. Once we heard it clunk back into the box, Mom opened the tube to find her updated passbook, an envelope of crisp twenty dollar bills, and a bright orange lollipop for me. 

As a kid, I thought that vacuum tube was the epitome of modern banking technology. 

Lilly, who has never written a check or filled out a bank deposit slip, called “Thanks Dad!” on her way out the door to meet friends at the beach. I envied Lilly’s carefree lifestyle, free of banking errands. But at the same time, I felt lucky to have received all those lollipops.