Nancy Kline
AUTHOR

My Bank Died

A Very Particular Grief

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“Your bank? You’re sad about your bank?”

I failed to convince my friend. I tried. But we changed the subject. Probably just as well. And I understand. Who cares about their bank? Really cares? As in cries when it disappears. Banks are evil. Blah Blah.

Not mine. Not the Sandy Spring Bank. Not the 1968 version of it. Or even the 1970s or1980s versions. And as far as I am concerned even the later versions – branches spreading out from its original colonnaded self in a tiny Quaker village where I lived and had my first job and my first real adventures of the heart and mind – were small. They were family.

Probably, though, I have for forty years been in premeditated, wilful denial about my bank’s contemporary self. The fact is, it’s big. It’s all over the place. It made nine acquisitions. And has 53 branches.

But once it didn’t.

And even now, when you go to my branch, the first one, you can easily, not just wistfully, experience it as small and run by the first Quaker families of the 1860s, farmers helping each other after the Civil War. You can. Sure, there is a massive Safeway and a twelve-pump Exxon looming. Yes, it now looks out onto a four-lane road with a left-turn lane. But its sculpted white wood and brick, modestly elegant self is still there. And when you walk in, it still has coffee and cream ready for you, and carpeted floors, and glass that gives you immediate sight of the smiling tellers and the desks of the account directors. My director is a dream. So it is easy to forget that it is worth 1.6 billion dollars.

Was. It was bought for that a few months ago. Bought. Killed.

I knew it was dead, not just acquired, when the sign changed. The for-ages understated white, charcoal and harvest-honey six-foot sign, gracing the lawn, had vanished. In its place was a frantic, 25-foot blue and green, in-your-face, good-bye-tasteful, hello-garish, vertical thrust.

I hope you never have to see it. That sign could never touch your heart. Not mine, anyway. Mine is closed for repairs.

I realise that this (for me) monumental change only unearths the reality I have been refusing to face: it is a bank. Not a being. Not even the deep Quaker values and independent soul of the original, not one of the ghosts of the first Stablers’ local ties and quiet traditional family leadership show up.

Vulgarity rules now.

I comfort myself with the words of Hunter Hollar, president of Sandy Spring Bank from 1994 to 2009. In business language he said, when supporting the independence of the bank, what my love language could not:

The original bank’s independence “has to do with perpetuating a corporate personality and a way of doing business that I think is getting increasingly rare -- taking care of employees, taking care of customers, being close to our communities. There are just so few of those kinds of organizations in any industry, but certainly banking, and when you connect that with our Quaker heritage and longtime existence here, it is just very important.”

The bank’s modern history “carried a thriftiness, a conservatism, a neighbor-helping-neighbor kind of environment to the institution that still lives.”

And in its 150 years of independence it shone. Even in 1990 it won “Best Bank to Work For” and just before its death in 2024, it won “Best Financial Institution.” 

But that independence died.

So I grieve. And I will, until my heart no longer breaks. Until I can look past the sign and open the still-white wooden doors and have a tiny, elegant cup of coffee before seeing my still-dreamy account officer.

I only hope he will not be wearing the new blue and green sweat shirt or three-piece suit required by this look-at-me brazen buyer.

Goodbye, Sandy Spring Bank.

Thank you.

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