I was working for a bank in the mid to late 1980’s named Citizens & Southern Bank, also known as C&S, a historic Atlanta banking institution long before the popularity of buyouts and mergers made rich folk holding stock millions of dollars via Wall Street trading. I was just out of college, and still had a lot of leftover mischief left in me from my fraternity days. I worked with a lot of nice people and a few blue bloods, doing time at a mid-level management job awaiting a possibility of a transfer or a new job offer from smaller banks. The trend was to get oneself trained at the larger banks via in-house banking schools. If one excelled at his or her job, outside banking schools at major universities were offered and paid for by the big bank, upping the value of ones own stock with the banking classes and combined in-house and outside training. It amounted to a carrot of sorts for a smaller bank to hire you, saving them the cost of grooming you for upper management. It was common practice for smaller banks, offering higher pay to the well-trained young bankers, plucking the lower paid, higher educated men and women from the larger banks. These were bankers who usually brought a good customer base with them when the move was completed.

It was the way things were back in the eighties, when every human soul made money with the possible exception of me and a few other friends I knew and hung out with. It was nice having the great job title like “Vice-President, Lending Specialist”, it sounded mighty cool and you could certainly impress your friends at class reunions with the title even if you were paid like a pauper and required to dress like a king. The image one presented was equally proportionate to the likelihood one might get promoted “Senior Vice-President, Lending Specialist” which meant you got a meager raise and new business cards to hand out to you friends, but only if you gutted it out for a few years. All the dudes I hung out with at the bank were trust fund kids that all graduated from Emory, so money was a non issue for them. They could languish in lower management with a fancy title for years and let attrition do it’s job, replacing bigger salaries with smaller ones meaning firing older, more experienced dudes that held out and stayed put (probably second or third generation Emory Graduates).

I was a hard-working, self-starting, college educated man with a degree in finance and marketing and a psychology minor, and just damn glad to have a job. I immediately became friends with my boss at the time, Arthur, and he was a blue blood. His Dad was a micro-chemist for Monsanto and a real egghead of a guy. He had appeared on numerous UFO shows and even had film of him doing morse code back and forth with a space craft in Pensacola during the time all the sightings were so prominent. His dad was a very smart man and I enjoyed talking to him on the few trips I took to Pensacola to go deep-sea fishing with Arthur. Arthur was kinda ashamed of his Dad, but I liked him, and that was cool with Arthur. On my first visit, Arthur told me “My Dad’s growing corn this year, just so you’ll know”. His Dad was a guy that used fertilizing techniques he designed to maximize corn growth and grew so much corn on a 8 X 8 foot spot of land in his back yard he needed a twelve-foot ladder to pick it all. He gave corn away to all his neighbors and had enough left over to fill his freezer with so much corn that he had to buy another freezer just for their other frozen items. Arthur told me that the previous year, his Dad grew Tomatoes so big you could use them as pumpkins utilizing the same techniques. Arthur’s Mom was also an interesting person. She was all for young folks having as much sex as possible before they would get married. She insisted that young folk try all the spices in the proverbial spice cabinet before one settled on what would later amount to salt or pepper. She was also independently wealthy by her father, a man who was purchasing agent for Coca-Cola for the Southeastern USA.

You might wonder how a man could be made so wealthy by a job such as that. The honest truth was, he wasn’t, she was made wealthy by his job. He had a great job with a great company and all his years of employment meant a great retirement plan. It was what he left behind after he passed that made her rich. He was one of four people who had companies present marketing items to be distributed by Coke as collectables and memorabelia. They would manufacturer maybe four to five prototypes, tops; and he would decide if they wanted to have the item produced for displays and souvenirs ordering the selected items by the thousands. This included the little gold coke bottle key chains to the Coke trucks, from the lunch trays to neon signs and on and on. When these items were presented to him and he rejected them, the manufactures told him to keep the items rather than return them. He had warehouses full of these prototypes, numbering in the thousands and most one off’s and when he retired, he thought nothing of the surplus. Arthur’s Mom, however, realized shortly that she had a gold mine of un-issued Coca-Cola memorabilia on her hands. When her father passed away, he left all of the warehouses of Coke memorabilia to her. Only an idiot wouldn’t know how valuable this stuff was and Arthur’s mom was sharp as a fresh razor blade. She made well over three million dollars selling the “one-off” memorabilia, keeping a solid gold, full-sized 6.5 ounce Coke Bottle replica given to her father when he retired after 55 years of faithful service to “Sweet Georgia Brown”.

Arthur’s Grandfather on his father’s side was banker also. He owned the majority of the shares in the small Pensacola bank he started sixty years ago and in the lean years took stock rather than pay to keep the books in the black. When he sold his stock, or was bought out by a larger bank wanting the exposure his branches gave them, he sold 1.2 million shares of common stock for $54.00 a share. You do the math. When I met my friends grandfather on one of our trips, he had original Norman Rockwell’s and Picasso’s hanging in his living room, and yes that’s plural. His grandfather told me of a time when the bank was not faring so well, but his lone requirement was for the bank to buy him a new set of golf clubs every year, and he wanted his clubs. He said he had sixty sets of clubs sitting in his basement and was prepared to take the oldest thirty sets to the church bazaar to sell to help raise money for the building fund. I asked him if I might peruse the clubs for a set or two, as I had been wanting to take up the sport (if you can really call it a sport) to help in my career at the bank, as many a deal has been sealed on the links. When we went to his basement, I nearly fell over from the pristine sets of golf clubs neatly lined up against the wall. I was happy to buy two full sets of bamboo shafted Robert Jones golf clubs in the original bags, with tees, score cards, and golf balls from Augusta National, home of the Masters. I bought three sets total. The first time I went to play golf with a huge potential client I had been working on for two plus years, I invited some serious higher-ups to play with us, as it meant millions of dollars in deposits for the bank. My potential customer was an avid golfer and I knew that. When I whipped out my Bobby Jones bamboo shafted clubs and vintage Augusta National golf balls to play, the guy begged me not to play with the clubs and even rented a new set of clubs for me to play with, so as not to ruin the full set of very expensive antique clubs I held that day. We played golf and negotiated rates that day, while I noticed him staring longingly at the vintage set of rare golf clubs in my cart. When the negotiations got tight and looked like they might fall through, I told him I’d agree to sell him the rare clubs if that would seal the deal, which it did. I got more for those clubs than I made in two months at the bank and kept the sleeve of three unopened balls, the score cards and golf glove. In later years I sold the vintage golf balls and accessories, all at one time, for more than I sold the set of clubs for. I kept the other set of Bamboo clubs, virtually unused, and sold them later to a well-known professional golfer, via word of mouth, through a Golfer friend on the PGA I attended college with. The third set of golf clubs I purchased from Arthur’s grandfather, a set of pristine Ben Hogan’s that I still own, will spend the rest of their days in cool dry storage.

Arthur and I had become very good friends as the few years we worked together passed. We got to where we would play practical jokes on each other and I must say he won the contest in the most brilliant of ways. I’d do stuff like bump him with my car when he was driving down the road or jack up the rear wheels of his car with my floor jack, just high enough that when he got in it and tried to drive away, the back tires would spin and make noises like his car was burning rubber.  He was always a good sport about it. We’d go to car shows together and I’d tell him to climb in the front seats of the classic cars, telling him the owners wouldn’t mind. He’d get bitched out and threatened by the car owners when he did, thinking the cars were for sale. He got me back in the only way a banker could get you best, and that was in the wallet.

If you were an employee of the bank, your number one requirement was to keep your financial business in perfect order. That meant credit excellent, no overdraft checks, all bills paid as agreed. Not doing so could get you fired if it was repeated and not corrected. On one occasion, Arthur set me up and I fell for his trick hook, line and sinker. As an employee, if you wrote a check and the funds were insufficient, the bank would automatically pay the deficient check and send you a notice via the mail and interoffice mail to correct the deficiency immediately. For example, if you wrote a thirty dollar check and you only had fifteen dollars on deposit, an “advice” would come to you stating “A check was presented for thirty dollars, and was “PAID”, please deposit fifteen dollars plus five dollars insufficient Funds fee to cover this check. One advice was mailed to you home and one was mailed to your work via interoffice mail via the “proof” department.

It was Christmas time when Arthur would get his revenge. I had a secretary and a processor, and it was tradition to get them a “White Elephant gift” for our office Christmas party. They were two exceptionally hard-working ladies and in combination made me look better than I really deserved. They didn’t make a lot of money for the responsibilities they had heaped upon them, so I would be generous as I could, sometimes giving them bonuses out of my pocket as a sign of goodwill. These ladies were the best at what they did and were also prime targets for other smaller banks to pluck for good help. I jokingly wrote them both checks for One Million Dollars each at Christmas time, signed them and gave it to them as a joke. We all got a good laugh out of that and I just forgot about it. And that was my folly.

Arthur asked the two ladies to let him have the two separate checks and he called a friend of his in the proof department and laid his trap. About Wednesday of the following week, I got two separate notices in the mail. I recognized them as standard bank issued, much dreaded, insufficient funds notices and was somewhat alarmed by their presence in my mailbox. When I opened the notices, the first one said:

A check was presented on your account today for $1,000,000.00, and was “PAID”. Please deposit $998,375.63 to cover this deficiency, plus $5.00 for the insufficient funds fee as soon as possible.

 

The second notice was more ominous than the first, it read:

 

A check was presented on your account today for $1,000,000.00 and was “PAID”. Your account is currently overdrawn by $998,375.63 plus a $5.00 insufficient funds fee. Please make a deposit as soon as possible for $1,998,385.63 which includes two insufficient funds fees totalling $10.00 dollars.

 

There was also a note saying that a copy of this insufficient check advice(s) was being sent to my “big boss” meaning upper management was going to see it and I’d more than likely be hunting a job on the following Monday, if not sooner. I started sweating like a pig in a poke and wondered what in the hell the two ladies (I considered two stupid bitches by then) were thinking depositing the two joke checks into their accounts. I saw my entire career flash before my eyes and didn’t sleep a wink that night dreading going in to work the next day. When I cleared the door, my two employees said “Happy New Year!” like they had just won the lottery. I was at a  total loss for words when a few hours later, Arthur stuck his head in the door and said “Got you, you son of a bitch!” and busted out laughing like I’d never seen before.

I think I crapped my pants in relief when I unclenched. I knew I’d never be able to top that one anytime soon. He said I came through the door that morning whiter than a sheet at a KKK rally, looking like I was sicker than hell. I guess the reality that comes from getting body slammed by a considerably more expensive education had just revealed itself to me in spades. I realized “Treachery” was not a class offered for matriculation at my particular College. I reminded myself to watch that dude from that day forward and knew confidently that: A) Arthur was going places, and, B) I could learn a lot from him.

I was going to have to up my game.