The Bank

Lowry State Bank circa 1955 with Lee's Barber Shop to the north

You might think a staid old small town bank would be an unlikely source of high drama and tragedy, but ... you would be wrong.

Lowry State Bank was first organized in 1899 but wasn’t officially chartered until December 26, 1907.  Andrew Jacobson was the Bank’s first president. He served in that position until January 1926 when Iver M Engebretson succeeded him. Iver was a pillar of the community.

From the 1908 Minnesota Who's Who:

ENGEBRETSON, Iver Martin, banking; born at Ben Wade, Minn., March 11, 1877; son of Pedor and Anna (Ronning) Engebretson; educated in district schools of Pope Co., Minn., and state high schools of Glenwood, Alexandria and St. Cloud. Unmarried. Began in banking business Oct., 1899 and is cashier of Bank of Lowry; director and treasurer Lowry Telephone Co.; director Lowry Hardware, Furniture and Machine Co., Northwestern Mortgage Security Co. of Fargo. Was first Sgt. Co. M, 13th Minn. Vol. Inf., Spanish-American war and in the Philippines; treasurer village of Lowry; ex-president village council. Member Norwegian Lutheran Synod, M. W. A., Court of Honor. Address: Lowry, Minn. 
[Editor note: Iver married Sarah Jane Andrew in 1910]

Lowry State Bank survived the depression era when bank closings were the rule rather than the exception with conservative management, but, in 1932, was willing to take over the accounts of the failed Farmers & Merchant's Bank down the street. F &M later became Hank Bosek's Grocery. Hank slept in the old vault. Iver M served as bank president from 1926 until his death in 1957. His brother Herman then assumed the presidency. Herman had been a bank employee since 1920.

The cautious approaches continued well past the depression days. As an example, in 1952 my father was seeking a home loan. Our family had owned a business in Lowry since 1916. Dad was 7 years working for the family business after having served 4 years in the Pacific during WWII and was the son of a stockholder in the bank. Not good enough.  Poor risk.  Loan application denied. (The VA finally acceded to loan him $13,000 at an outrageous interest rate - 2% I think.)

As a 10 year-old, I had my very own LSB savings account complete with a little brown leather-covered passbook showing deposits and withdrawals - and the pennies of accrued interest. The money I received for my birthday went into this account - after the Sunday School tithe of course.  I always went to Maggie McIver's teller window. I'm afraid I blew my allowance on baseball cards.

When I was to get my new 24” Schwinn from the hardware store, my parents, to teach me character, had me go to the bank by myself and withdraw the $39 from my savings account - out of the $50 or so balance - and take the hard cash over to the hardware to pay Martin. (He might have given me a break on the price.) Not sure I learned the intended lesson. Seemed like a fabulous use of the money to me. And of course, the bank called my home to verify before they handed over that wad to a kid.

In the late 50's the bank was the scene of tragedy. The Engbretsons had sold controlling interest in the bank to Stanley Billey and his son Arthur. In late June, 1959, Margaret McIver, a 50 year bank employee, arrived at the bank to find both Stanley and Arthur dead from gunshot wounds. Initially, thought to be a robbery gone bad, it soon became apparent that it was a family dispute gone horribly wrong and the deaths were ruled murder/suicide. I was 12 years old and I recall sitting on my bicycle looking through the glass block windows to see the bodies, one on the floor the other in an office chair. This was simply unfathomable in a small town - or anywhere else for that matter. Ghoulish of me. Maggie McIver retired shortly thereafter.

Shortly thereafter the Billey estate sold their controlling interest to John Pardun of Rochester. Less than 2 months after assuming control of the bank, the FBI arrested Mr. Pardun for embezzlement from the Rochester Bank, and found indications of similar behavior at the Lowry bank.

Cliff Mork - center

Jinxed. Who would be willing to operate such a bank? Happily a fellow from Morris came along, Clifford E. Mork, who took over the bank and brought much needed calm. Cliff ably ran the bank for 26 years until his retirement in 1987, when Chuck Thompson became President. When Chuck retired in 2000, Cliff Mork's son Robert became President.

The bank is still a Lowry cornerstone.





Copyright © 2018 Dave Hoplin  

Don't Stop Giving

But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth. 
I John 3:17-18

"We who have much should be willing to share. It is not for the poor, but for ourselves that we might become less narrow, less frightened, less lonely, less self-centered." David Foster Wallace

The earth is warming. That is a fact. You can argue why, but average temperature data is indisputable.  At the same time, we are becoming a colder nation, but not in the temperature sense. The recently passed tax reform bill is a case in point. I don't care for April 15th any more than the next guy. But a tax cut which primarily benefits the richest of us and results in a predicted increase of $1.5 trillion to the deficit smacks of payoff and contempt for fiscal integrity. Where is the fiscal conservative concern for our children and grandchildren? 

Tax policy affects individual behavior. Consider the long December lines at courthouses with people pre-paying their 2018 property tax to avoid forfeiting the deduction which is capped as of 2018.  But for me, the most unsettling aspect of this bill is the projected impact on charitable giving. Yes, we should be giving out of the goodness of our hearts and not to get a tax deduction. But the fact of the matter is, 13% of all charitable giving occurs in the last 3 days of the year.  Most folks are not all that altruistic - the poor have more empathy (see the widow's mite Luke 21: 1-4).  A wise man I once knew said - ".. them's what's gots, keeps". 

Your church, food shelf, college, United Way, Red Cross, Feed My Starving Children, LSS, DAV, [fill in the blank]... all anticipate a fall-off in giving. I realize that the charitable deduction was not eliminated in the 2018 bill, but the increase in the standard deduction means many more people will not itemize deductions and along with that goes an incentive for charitable giving, affecting, I suspect,  these 13% last minute donations.

So, I beseech you. Don't reduce giving to your favorite charities. If you can, increase it a little. They need you now more than ever.

And you, dear individual filer, come a pittance.  " ...according to a new analysis by the Tax Policy Center, middle-income taxpayers would pay about $900 less than under current law, about 1.6 percent of after-tax income, while the lowest income households would get an even more modest tax cut compared to current law.  By contrast, the highest-income one percent of households , who will make about $733,000 and up, would get an average  tax cut of roughly $50,000 or 3.4 percent of their after-tax income. Those in the top 0.1 percent, who will make $3.4 million or more next year, would get an average tax cut of about $190,000, or 2.7 percent of their after-tax income." Don't you love percentages? They always yield a nicer result if the base is big.  

A mortgage against my grandchildren for $75/mo return,  I find unacceptable. But then if you live in a high tax state - you know who you are - or if you have a not-really-all-that-large family ($4K personal exemptions gone; if you you pay state tax; if you own a home; ($10,000 cap on deductions of state, local, real estate tax payments) you may not like the look of your 2018 1040.  

Furthermore, the tax reform bill gives corporations a huge windfall (35% rate down to 21%) with the rationale that the benefits will "trickle down". Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway netted a $29 billion windfall. US stock exchange listed corporations care first and foremost about their stock price, so windfalls are commonly used to buy back their own stock and thus boost the share price - which benefits ... stockholders and those employees who receive stock grants. (And of course Wall Street itself. If you have an IRA, you'll probably do pretty well for awhile.) I've worked for large corporations and while many do token philanthropy, it is mainly for the PR "image" or "marketing" reasons. I guess we should be thankful for any corporate largesse, but corporations really are not people, and their interests are self-serving. Individuals are the principle source of charitable giving (72%) with corporations (5%). (If you want a deep dive into the impact of the tax bill on corporate America, see the Wharton School's analyses, industry by industry - short story $1.2 trillion in tax savings.)

Windfall corporate profits may indeed be used to expand the enterprise - but in this day and age, not usually in the way you might think. For large corporations, expansion is more often through "M&A", mergers and acquisitions. These mergers do not usually result in increased employment but often result in reductions due to eliminating duplicated functions. So I am skeptical that "trickle down economics" will provide much benefit to workers - rather the trickle will get about as far down as the boardroom. It's been tried before. It would be a nice outcome if this would drive a wage increase for the worker-bees, but this has not been the trend even as the unemployment rate is nearing 4% and corporations are awash in cash ($1.8 trillion according to Moody's). They could easily have improved workers lot without this windfall if they had wanted to. Some companies quickly tried to gain good will by announcing pay raises or bonuses. Walmart raised minimum wages to $11/hour which means if you work full-time, you can gross upwards of $20,000/year. Dozens of companies offered $1000 bonuses - a one time expense - pardon my cynicism.

The bill does provide tax benefits targeted for small-business in the form of pass through income rules that treat business income as if it were wages and allowing a 20% deduction off the top. A good plan might be to turn yourself into a small business - an LLC, or sole proprietorship.

Copyright © 2018 Dave Hoplin

P.S.  By the way, don't forget to file your 2017 return today.

The Red Brick School

A hundred years ago, the educational experiences of one generation very much mirrored the previous. Not so now.

My mother grew up on an Iowa farm and each fall, the school-age children were held out of school for a couple weeks to help with corn picking. This was done by hand, the only tool being a glove with a hook on the palm to assist in the husking. Each cob was snapped from the stalk, husked and thrown into a wagon with a high side to block overthrows. Hard, brutal work, generally under a blazing sun, done largely by school kids. My mother had no fond memories of this annual school vacation. Completely outside my experience.

On the other hand, my father attended the very same school I did for grades 1-8. And that 1920's school vs. the 1950's school was not that dissimilar. Perhaps the subject matter leaned more toward the classics in the 20's and most of the teachers were men, while in the 50's the teachers were exclusively women. The playground equipment of the 50's was better.




District 30 was a four-room school, 8 grades, 2 grades per room. There was no kindergarten. This is outside the comprehension of anyone not of retirement age. (Even more incomprehensible - my wife attended a 1-room country school in first grade). The red brick school housed grades 1-2 and 3-4 on the first level, 5-6 and 7-8 on the second. Bathrooms, furnace room and some storage areas were in the basement. A wide stairway with a well worn banister led to the second level. A terrifying fire escape went out a door on the south wall of the 2nd story 7th-8th classroom and down the west side of the building. I dreaded fire drills. A small room on the 2nd floor between the two classrooms served as the "library", with maybe 6 shelves of books, one shelf a set of encyclopedias. The most memorable part of this trove were a set of blue bound biographies of famous Americans, from the presidents to sports heroes to Revolutionary War notables - Francis Marion - The Swamp Fox, Kit Carson, Wilbur & Orville Wright, Jim Thorpe, ...  I read them all and every other book on those shelves.


My walk to school also little differed from my father's. Out the back door, across the alley, past Gust & Tina Nelson's garage and down their drive and into the school. 3 minutes tops. Of course all the "country" kids had to ride the bus, faithfully and safely driven by Lionel MacIver.

I remember all of my grade school teachers. The who is clear, but the when is a bit fuzzy. Apologies for my memory issues.

My first grade teacher was Mrs. Anderson. She had a broken leg and she was pregnant.  Not sure if I realized the pregnant part. Since there was no kindergarten, we had to be eased into this all-day school thing. Each first grader brought a woven rug to school to lay on during our 15 minute afternoon "nap" - a break for Mrs. Anderson I suspect. And each morning there was a "milk break" for which we paid 5¢/week for that daily 1/2 pt container of white milk. Chocolate milk options were after my time.

Mrs. Lachelt took over for Mrs. Anderson's maternity leave - I think.  (This is hearsay, as I cannot verify it, but I believe in her early years of teaching she had to keep the fact of her marriage a secret as only "single ladies" could be hired as teachers.)

In second grade - might have been 3rd - the influx of the baby boomer generation had caused an overflow condition. There were too many kids enrolled to contain 2 classes in one room. So a storage room in the basement, next to the bathrooms & the coal chute and butting against the furnace room was converted into a classroom. Mrs. Bagne was the teacher down in that dungeon-like, hot, no egress, non-OSHA style room.  I think there was one hinged basement window - and no egress except up the stairs to the back door. (Anyone remember that hole-in the-wall classroom?)

Third & Fourth grade Mrs. Vincent. Fifth & Sixth grade Mrs. Squire. Mrs. Schmeckpepper filled in at some point in those years, I think for Mrs. Squire maternity leave. Seventh and eighth grades Mrs. Skoglund. I remember she drove from Kensington. And the star substitute teacher that every kid was happy to see - Mrs. Starr. (She read to us from books like "The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle".)

In 8th grade, because the option was available to send Lowry kids to the big school in Glenwood (or Starbuck), there were only 3 of us left to fill the 8th grade class. My father decried the disloyalty of the locals who consented to have their children bussed away. But 3 people in your class - really? Limited social opportunities unless you were willing to fraternize with 7th graders.

We actually looked forward to lunch. In general, school lunch reputations rank right there with congress. The Lowry School lunch building was a separate white-sided structure just west of the back entrance to the school. It had a long serving counter separating the room into kitchen & eating area.  You had to sprint the 30 foot open air gap from the back door to the lunchroom door. Lunch was 20¢/day, $1/week.

But this school lunch was not the stuff of most lunch programs. The difference was Olga. Olga Dingwall was the cook and a great one. She worked magic with those USDA supplies. Home made bread & buns. None of that store-bought paste. The older grades rotated kids into "lunch duty" responsibilities, helping out before, during and after the noon meal  ...  an hour's release from class! For me, hopefully art class.

There was a janitor but darned if I can remember who it was. Anyone remember.

There was no PE instructor. We created our own exercise program out on the playground. No music or art teacher either. All teachers were expected to be able to play the piano and for art we had our box of 8 crayons to create a Memorial Day poster. Science labs dealt with things like mixing vinegar and baking soda or snuffing out a match in an oatmeal box with a small hole in the lid and banging on the bottom to produce air currents, a.k.a. smoke signals. But we were superbly drilled on readin'-ritin' & rithmetic. And spelling tests every week. Teachers were our spell-check.

Not exactly Groton. But the numerous Lowry School grads I know have represented themselves in the world pretty well.

Lowry grads - I am hoping some of you "Lowry Group Oldtimers" will add some of your memories of the red-brick District 30. I'd appreciate it if you would at least add a comment naming your teachers, either before or after my time.

Copyright © 2018 Dave Hoplin