Summer School

Students toiling through the steaming heat of the University of North Carolina's arboreal campus last week looked bug-eyed at an odd contingent of incoming summer-schoolers. The newcomers were 233 men and women, working bankers from Virginia and North & South Carolina, come to attend the fourth annual session of the North Carolina Bankers Conference.

No fuzzy-eyed freshmen of a Wall Street bond school, the bankers knew exactly what they were doing. Each had paid $20 for his five-day course in practical banking. Tried out experimentally in 1937 by North Carolina's hefty, progressive bank commissioner, Gurney Pope Hood, the course was so successful that some 20 other States adopted it. During its four-year run the school has taught bankers from some four-fifths of North Carolina's 228 banks (resources: $575,688,000).

From 8:40 a.m. to 4:40 p.m. the aging students sweated through their courses in insurance, investments, public relations, credits, economics, consumer credit, bank operations. On hand to teach them or to lecture evenings was many a big-time banker and economist: Brookings Institution's Dr. Harold Glenn Moulton, American Bankers Association President Robert March Hanes, others. Courses were not highbrow. Down to earth, they told the student bankers (most of them from small towns) how to run better banks, make more money. Sample fact taught: that consumer loans are a good and profitable risk, prejudice against them should cease. Atlanta's big Citizens & Southern National Bank handled 26,000 small loans totaling $7,000,000 last year, wrote off only $5,877. Said C. & S.'s assistant vice president, Lewis F. Gordon: "Consumer lending is bringing back the old relationship which the banker had with the individual in the small town."

Determined to get their $20 worth, the students labored hard and soberly. Sole disrupting note to younger bankers was having to watch still younger Chapel Hill bucks squiring their coeds toward the nearby hills for afternoon strolls.

Back for his fourth summer conference session was Adam Lockhart, cashier of the Bank of Wadesboro in North Carolina's cotton-growing Anson County. Said he "We get angles (at the conference) we never have thought of out in the country. It's hard to keep a small country bank up to date." In full agreement was mountainous (6 ft. 5) Cashier Walter Martin Matthews of the Farmers Bank of Pilot Mountain, N. C., in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. His testimonial to the course: "Last year I got an idea which has saved me a lot of work and expense. ..."

Final session was opened by popular Banker Hanes. His favorite admonishment to would-be-better bankers: "We have got to sell banking services just like we sell cigarets. . . . Patches on your shoes are much cheaper than patches on your trousers."

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