Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 12, 1993 TAG: 9308120279
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It was just a block from home, so Mary and Roy Key popped over and opened an account that winter day in 1971 when the new bank went into business.
Mary's 88 now, and Roy's 90, and they still walk - slowly now - to the Dominion/First Union branch on Ninth Street Southeast. So do the elderly folks who rent apartments next door.
Old people in Southeast and others without cars are worried sick the branch will close, as bank officials say it may. Other banks are a mile away. That might as well be 100 miles for people who do all their business on foot, often leaning on a cane.
"I don't know what we'd do," Mary Key said Wednesday as she and Roy walked by with plastic bags of groceries from the Ninth Street Galaxy supermarket.
Hazel Padgett listens to the anxieties from behind the counter of the nearby Salvation Army Thrift Store.
"I've never seen such an upset over a bank," she said. "It's really pitiful. I've seen a lot of tears over it."
Ethel Hurd, 63, walks in with her widow's pension check from the Veterans Administration. She and other customers speak of branch staffers like they're kin.
"I just love them all," said Ruby Musgrove, 76.
"They'll do anything in the world to help you," said Elizabeth Christian, 72, driven to the bank Wednesday by her insurance agent.
Byron Yost, area president for the bank, was proud of those kinds of comments at a community meeting Tuesday night. "It certainly made me feel that we had been doing our job very well."
Under federal regulations, banks must keep some presence in low-income areas like Southeast, so that's a consideration being weighed. But so are economics.
Deposits at the branch hover around $20 million - a heady figure to the layperson. But, Yost said, "It's on the low end of branch size."
People aren't doing major borrowing there.
"The loan volume is fairly low," he said. "Many of those folks have their homes paid for. Many are elderly. Many are not in a period of their lives where they are incurring debt."
David Chopski, pharmacist and owner of Wonder Drug Southeast Pharmacy, fears who might fill the void if the bank leaves.
"I don't want to see a check-cashing place come in here," he said. Such companies charge fees to cash checks - "10 bucks a whack," he conjectured. It's money that residents and Southeast businesses sorely need.
Chopski is an officer of Southeast Action Forum, which began as a Neighborhood Watch about 15 years ago and is trying to keep a bank in Southeast. The organization already has approached small banks about moving in if Dominion/First Union leaves.
So far, Southeast has managed to keep most of its major retail shops. "Services-wise, we do pretty good," Chopski said. "You want copies made? We got a printing shop."
But he documents Southeast's demographic changes with each day's newspaper.
"Every time you check the obituaries," he said, "you see our people."
In the old days, Southeast was home to blue-collar workers at the railroad or at Southeast's big employer, American Viscose. The rayon plant shut down in 1958.
"They were hard-working people. They were civic-minded," Chopski said. "You can't replace those people."
Pat Dillard, director of the Presbyterian Center, a social service agency in Southeast, said as people die, many of their homes are being rented out. Some are turning shabby, and Southeast's population is increasingly transient.
"They move in, they move out," she said. "They're lower income."
Even so, she said, the bank should stay.
"Businesses need to put back into the community, even though their profit margin might be minimal," she said. "Having that kind of concern for community would be a big boost to a bank - or any business's - image.
"So," she said, "I'm hoping they will change their mind."
by CNB