The loan officer at First National was twenty-six years old. He’d never been on a farm. He looked at my father’s work clothes and his chapped red hands and his old Chevy truck parked outside.
And he said no.
My father came home and sat at the kitchen table and didn’t say anything for an hour.
George was there. We’d come for Sunday dinner.
He watched my father sit there. Then he got up and went outside and stood in the barnyard for a long time, looking at the cows.
When he came back in, he said, “Dot. We’re going to start a bank.”
Everybody thought he was crazy.
We were twenty-one and twenty-three years old. We had eleven hundred dollars in savings. We lived in a three-room apartment over the hardware store.
But George had a plan. He’d been thinking about it for years. He went to every farmer in the county. Every shopkeeper. Every widow with a little nest egg in a coffee can.
