sane grain

I opened my first bank account at 14 at Farmers & Merchants State Bank. $41 in quarters from mowing lawns, carried in a Folgers can. The teller, Linda, counted every one by hand and gave me a sucker and a passbook. Nobody asked for two forms of ID. She knew my mom. When I was 19 and broke, a loan officer named Gary in a short-sleeve dress shirt and a tie from 1987 gave me $3,200 for a truck. No credit score worth mentioning. He just asked who my grandpa was, nodded, and said "he paid his feed bill on time for forty years." That was the underwriting. There were over 14,000 banks in America in 1984. Today there are fewer than 4,500. Every year a few hundred more get swallowed. The acquirer flies in a guy with a lanyard who says nothing will change. Then the passbooks go. Then Linda goes. Then the lobby cookies. Then the drive-thru tube. Then the branch closes, the vault gets sold for scrap, and the building becomes a Dollar General or a vape shop with a Wi-Fi password taped to the register. And one day, not that far off, the last one will close. Somewhere in Kansas a man will try to borrow money against a combine and get routed to a chatbot in Charlotte. Here's the part Wall Street hasn't figured out. Some of these little banks still trade below book value. Clean loan books. Sleepy boards. Deposits that haven't moved since the Carter administration because Doris doesn't trust apps. They're the last real cigar butts left. Ugly, boring, forgotten, and full of value nobody's looking at. So I buy them. Not because they'll make me rich overnight. Because every share is a vote for a version of capitalism that once knew my name, my mom's name, and my grandpa's feed bill. The big banks want you to believe this is progress. Go tell that to Gary.