[ back ]
The summer I caused a financial crisis
(by Ed Flynn - July 23, 2008)
It was the summer of 1940, vacation time between my junior and senior years at
Dumont
High School . I was 17 and, like just about every boy in those days when the Great Depression still held the nation in its grip, I had a summer job.
It wasn’t the first one, of course. The year before that I had worked as a helper on a Dugan’s truck delivering bread and cake to people’s doorsteps and the one before that as a errand boy at Mr. Kliese’s print shop and before that I had just done odd chores around the neighborhood like mowing lawns.
But there was something different about that summer job in 1940. It was what I considered my first “real” job. It was as a messenger at the Chemical Bank in
New York City and it meant I had to commute to the city every day just like the grownups. It paid $18 a week and while that may not seem like much today it seemed like a lot to me back then, particularly when you could get a breakfast consisting of a glass of orange juice, a cup of coffee and a donut for a dime at Nedick’s.
The Chemical Bank’s headquarters was downtown at 165 Broadway and the most enjoyable part of my job was getting there, taking the
West
Shore railroad from Bergenfield to Weehawken where I caught the ferry to Cortland Street down a busy
Hudson River cluttered with luxury liners and freighters destined for far-away places I never thought I would get to see.
The fun part of the job involved dashing around the city from one bank to another and I got to know the intricacies of the subway system and the names of streets like Jane and Hestor and Maiden Lane that only true New Yorkers know where to find. What I didn’t like was that I had no idea what I was really doing. No one ever told us what we were carrying in those brief cases strapped to our wrist and I could only assume that, whatever it was, it was vital to the smooth function of the world’s financial system. If they had, maybe the financial crisis I was accused of causing one day in late August would never have happened.
Actually, I didn’t find out about the incident until the morning after. My last trip the afternoon before, as it was every day, had been to a number of Chemical branches around
Manhattan where I picked up the contents of a special outbox and rushed them back to the home office. It was a simple enough assignment but when I reported to work the next morning I was informed by the Boss Messenger that I had left the closing statement for the Rockefeller Center branch behind in that outbox. As a result, a vice president had to be summoned back into the city from
Westchester
County to retrieve it and personally bring it to headquarters so the books could be balanced for the day. As for me, I was to report “upstairs” to another of the bank’s many vice presidents for what I assumed would be my formal firing.
“Well young man,” that vice president said from behind his intimidating mahogany desk after he had gone through a lengthy discourse on just how much inconvenience my “carelessness” had caused, “what do you have to say for yourself?”
I thought about saying – what I honestly thought was true – that I had taken everything from that outbox so I didn’t really think the statement had even been there. It was someone else’s fault for being late putting it there. And I also thought of saying that if anyone had explained what it was we were doing I would have known what the statement looked like and made sure it was there.
But, since the summer was almost over anyway and I didn’t really care if I got fired, I simply said I was sorry if my carelessness had caused other people a lot of trouble.
“Damn it,“ the vice president said, “that’s what I like to hear. A young man who instead of a lot of excuses owns up to his mistake and apologizes for it.”
Not only didn’t he fire me, he gave me his card and told me to come back and see him when I finished college. Of course I didn’t. For one thing World War II sort of got in the way and, besides, I really wanted to be a newspaperman.
But I did learn a lesson that summer: if you do something wrong, or even if you don’t and others think you did, the best thing is to admit it and apologize. It’s advice I’ve followed my entire life. Well, almost always.
[ back ]
