The Bank Run

Frank Kellerman stood outside the Reno National Bank on a Tuesday morning in November 1932 and watched the line grow. It stretched from the front entrance on Virginia Street past the druggist and around the corner toward Commercial Row, maybe sixty people deep and getting longer by the minute. Some of the people in line he recognized. The man who ran the shoe repair on Center Street. A woman who worked at the telephone exchange. A porter from the Riverside Hotel, still wearing his uniform.

Frank had not come to withdraw his money. He had come to see if the rumors were true.

The rumors had been circulating for weeks. George Wingfield’s banks were in trouble. All twelve of them, scattered across the state from Reno to Goldfield to Winnemucca. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation had loaned nearly five million dollars to keep them afloat, but five million was not enough when the deposits were worth more than that and the loans the banks had made were not coming back. The ranchers could not pay. The miners could not pay. The merchants who depended on the ranchers and the miners could not pay either, and so the whole structure was unwinding, one layer at a time, the way a rope unwinds when the weight on it becomes too much.

Frank was thirty-eight years old. His father, Otto, had come to Reno from Milwaukee in 1892 and opened a hardware store on Commercial Row. The store had survived the silver bust and the floods and the fire and the war, and it had survived Prohibition, which had nearly killed it in a way that none of the other calamities had managed, because men who could not drink legally stopped coming downtown as often, and men who did not come downtown did not buy hardware. Otto had died in 1929, three weeks before the stock market collapsed, which was a mercy of timing that Frank thought about often.

Frank ran the store now. It was smaller than it had been in his father’s era. He had let one of the two clerks go in 1930. He did the bookkeeping himself at the kitchen table after dinner. The store’s account was at the Reno National Bank, the same bank where the line was growing.

He had five hundred and twelve dollars in that account. It was not a fortune. It was the margin between continuing to operate and closing the doors. If the bank failed, that margin would vanish, and with it the store that his father had built from nothing and that Frank had maintained through a decade of contracting business and diminishing foot traffic and the slow, grinding pressure of an economy that seemed to be eating itself from the edges inward.

A man in a dark suit came out of the bank’s front door and stood on the steps. Frank recognized him as one of the officers, though he could not remember the name. The man held up both hands and said something that Frank could not hear from across the street, but the effect was visible. The line stopped moving. People looked at each other. A woman near the front put her hand over her mouth.

The bank was closed.

Frank crossed the street and stood at the edge of the crowd. People were talking over each other, the particular sound of collective fear, which is louder than anger and harder to direct. A man in a rancher’s coat was saying that the governor should have done something. A woman was crying without making any effort to stop. An older man stood very still, his hat in his hands, staring at the closed doors with the expression of someone who has just been told a fact that he cannot yet absorb.

Frank walked back to the store. He unlocked the front door and turned the sign from CLOSED to OPEN and stood behind the counter and waited for customers who might or might not come. The store smelled of metal and wood and the particular dry smell of turpentine, which was a smell he had known since he was a child, standing beside his father while Otto counted nails into paper bags.

A man came in around ten o’clock and bought a box of screws. Another came at noon for kerosene. Frank made change from the register and wrote the sales in the ledger and tried not to think about the five hundred and twelve dollars.

He thought about it anyway.

The money was not just money. It was his father’s life translated into a number, the accumulated result of forty years of opening a store at seven in the morning and closing it at six in the evening and doing the work that existed between those hours without complaint. Otto had never spoken about money as though it were an abstraction. Money was nails. Money was turpentine. Money was the rent on the building and the coal for the stove in winter and the wages for the clerks. Money was the ability to continue, and now that ability was locked behind the closed doors of a bank that had been run by a man who owned half the state and who had, apparently, run it into the ground.

In the afternoon, Frank walked to the boarding house where his mother lived. She was seventy-one now, small and quiet, her English still carrying the faint shape of the German she had spoken as a girl. She had heard the news. Everyone had heard the news.

“Your father kept some money in a box,” she said.

“I know,” Frank said. He had found the box after Otto died. Eighty dollars in small bills, tucked into a cigar box in the back of the closet. He had put it in the bank.

His mother looked at him with the particular expression of a woman who had survived enough to know that surviving was not the same as winning.

“The store will be fine,” Frank said.

She did not argue with him. She poured coffee and set it on the table and they sat together in the small kitchen, and the afternoon light came through the window and fell across the linoleum floor, and neither of them said anything more about the bank or the money or the future, because there was nothing more to say that would change what had happened.

Frank walked back to the store and worked until six. He locked the door and walked home along Virginia Street. The Bank Club was open, the lights blazing through the windows. Inside, men were gambling with money they might not have tomorrow. The arch glowed above the intersection. The Biggest Little City in the World.

The store would open again in the morning. Frank would stand behind the counter and sell nails and turpentine and kerosene and whatever else people needed to keep their houses and their lives held together. The bank was closed, but the store was not. His father had understood the difference between money in a bank and work in your hands. Frank was beginning to understand it too.

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