Lögberg-Heimskringla - 01.11.2018, Qupperneq 6

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6 • Lögberg-Heimskringla • November 1 2018
My mother became a
credit union manager
quite by accident.
My father had gone to
the local bank to borrow two
hundred dollars to finance his
commercial fishing for the fall
season. The bank turned him
down. The bank manager was
quite straightforward about the
reason. He said it wasn’t his job
to lend out money but, rather, to
collect it so it could be sent to
Toronto to be loaned out by the
banks there.
Although the local manager
was polite, the attitude of the
banking system was right
there in my father’s face, as
we’d say nowadays. There
was the Eastern contempt for
Western Canada, contempt for
small businesses, contempt
for rural people. We were the
suckers standing in front of the
carnival tent with the huckster
carny man giving the pitch to
separate us from our money,
the medicine man standing on
the back of his wagon extolling
the virtues of his medicine
that would cure everything
but, in actuality, would cure
nothing, the immigration
agent taking our money and
disappearing with it, the
companies selling us mouldy
grain and rotten canvas tents.
It was all there.
“A lousy two hundred
dollars,” my father said. He
wanted the two hundred dollars
so he wouldn’t have to borrow
it from a fish company. If he
borrowed money from a fish
company, then he had to sell
them his fish for the coming
fishing season. That meant they
set the prices. He couldn’t sell
to the fish company that was
offering the best price. Dealing
in a perishable product, he was
trapped in a system that was a
remnant of the medieval system
of the indentured servant.
He joined the Credit Union
board. It had, if I remember
correctly, no more than a few
thousand dollars. It was run
from a local home. When the
person taking care of the books
said he couldn’t do it anymore,
my father brought the books
home and asked my mother to
take care of them for two weeks.
That two weeks stretched into
twenty years.
At first, she had office
hours one afternoon a week,
then one day a week, then two
days a week, then the credit
union put a safe into the house.
The number of days increased.
Deposits increased.
Finally, my father said he’d
build a commercial building
and rent out part of it to the
credit union. He was a do-
it-himself kind of guy. He’d
had one business, a laundry,
go bankrupt on him, and he’d
learned to keep costs down.
He bought a corner lot through
which a creek ran. People
said no one could build on
that piece of property. He had
culverts put in. He had a friend
who was an engineer who drew
up the plans. He and my father
bought salvaged steel beams.
They sub-contracted work.
The metal safe in the house
was replaced with a vault in
the new building.
My mother learned on the
job. Good people helped her.
She attended meetings and
conventions. In the early days,
she was the only woman at the
conventions. That was hard.
But what lay behind her
decisions as a manager was
love of community. She’d been
an only child and was often
lonely. When she’d married my
father and moved to Gimli – a
small, rural village supported
by commercial fishing, an
airbase, summer tourists, mixed
farming – she said she was
never lonely again. She was
absorbed first by my father’s
large, extended family, then by
the community itself.
She saw her role – the
credit union’s role – as helping
local people. She never forgot
the bank’s refusal of the two
hundred dollars to my father.
Someone once said to her, you
have all that money and she
replied, it’s not my money. She
did not see the credit union
or her role as a manager as a
way to make herself rich. She
would have dismissed the idea
that “greed is good” as no more
than an attempt by the greedy
to justify their selfish actions.
Greed is only good to those
people who do not love their
community.
She saw herself as a
custodian. Her job was to do
what was best for depositors
while, at the same time, do
what was best for borrowers.
That meant being sure that
people could afford what they
were buying, could make the
payments. It sometimes meant
providing business advice,
particularly for people wanting
to start a local business. Her job
was to help others, not herself.
There were no get rich
quick schemes, no loaning out
as much money as possible to
anyone who applied so that
she could get a commission
or bonus. She worked for her
salary. The profits belonged
to the credit union members.
There were no liar loans. There
was no bundling of crappy
mortgages and selling them off
to unsuspecting businesses or
individuals so that more crappy
loans and mortgages could be
made to increase the size of her
commission.
She was just a credit union
manager in a small town but
she stood and stands head and
shoulders above all the bankers
in North America and Europe
who have been so driven by
greed that they’ve placed
the entire banking system in
jeopardy, all the bankers who
have looted their banks, who
have speculated with their
depositors’ money.
A small town credit
union manager with ethics –
something it nowadays seems
impossible to find among the
wreckage of arcane financial
instruments, of billion dollar
losses, of obscene bonuses paid
with money that should go to
stockholders.
Head and shoulders over
these greedy bankers? She
retired with enough money to
keep her in comfort in a small
town way: a three bedroom
bungalow, an older car, and
money in the bank to cover daily
expenses and to make a trip to
visit her son each Christmas. It
would have been good if she’d
have had a pension for her
twenty years but there were no
pensions in such small places in
those days. She and my father
managed on their savings and
their investments.
Would people have admired
her more if she had ripped off
the credit union by changing the
rules so she got a commission
on loans and then pushed out
as much money as possible,
selling off the mortgages and
starting over and over again?
Some would, I guess. There
are people in our society who
worship Mammon, who believe
that greed is good and, if they
get a chance, are as greedy as
possible, who have no sense
of responsibility to their
family, friends, neighbours, or
community.
Her ceremony at the
Lutheran church after she died
was simple. Three of us spoke
about her life. A friend sang a
hymn. We all joined together in
singing two hymns. Her ashes
were in a pottery urn – beside
it a picture of her when she
first came to Gimli. They were
flanked by two simple vases
with a few flowers.
People came on this
warm Saturday – they came
in spite of it being Canada
Day, in spite of it being the
municipality’s 125 anniversary.
Her grandchildren came
and her great-grandchildren.
We gathered at the graveyard
under a blue prairie sky with
white floating islands of clouds.
The minister said a prayer,
scattered some earth as he said
ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The
undertaker put the urn in a red
velvet bag and placed it in the
hole that had been prepared in
my mother’s mother’s grave.
The graveyard is on the edge
of farmland, at the juncture of
the original pioneer road and
Highway 9. There are glimpses
of Lake Winnipeg to the east.
To the west are the gravel
ridges of pioneer hardship.
The graveyard isn’t old
but it is old enough that my
Icelandic great-grandparents
are buried there. They came to
the shores of Lake Winnipeg
in 1876 with the first Icelandic
settlers. My mother, as Irish as
Irish can be, her parents both
from Northern Ireland, slipped
into this Icelandic, Ukrainian,
German, Polish, Native
community and made it her
own. Her ashes and the bodies
of her parents rest here, a long
way from Ireland, a long way
from the Mountains of Mourne,
but they share their resting
place with the people who were
part of their new Canadian life.
She loved Canada, this
town, and the people in it and,
for a lifetime, she did what she
thought was best for everyone.
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WHAT MY MOTHER ACCOMPLISHED
W.D. Valgardson
Victoria, BC
Greetings from
Gordon J. Reykdal
Honorary Consul of the
Republic of Iceland
Suite #10250 – 176 Street
Edmonton, Alberta
T5S 1L2
Cell: 780.497.1480
E-mail: gjreykdal@gmail.com
Robert T. Kristjanson
125 5th Avenue
Gimli, MB R0C 1B0
Fax: 204-642-7306
Phone: 204-642-5283