I went to grammar school and high school in Lawrence, Kansas. I worked my way through high school by working in a bank. During these days, no one had much money. Every day after high school I went into the bank. In those days the bank’s returned unpaid checks.

And since Lawrence was a college town, there were many checks given to drug stores and eateries for a dollar or two. If the bank marked the check as insufficient funds my job was to take it back to the merchant and get the bank’s money back. So my name was bad news!

I did this work all through high school. During the summer time I was a bookkeeper at the bank In addition to collecting the checks. On any given day there might be ten or 25 checks returned. They were generally from college students who had run out of money.

The bank was located at one end of Main Street, which was about ten blocks long. I started at the bank and went up one side of the street then worked my way back towards the bank along the other side of the street. It took about two or three hours every day.