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 kind of embarrassed by 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 collectibles and memorabilia 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”.
More on Wednesday!
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