The Ford River?
In the movie George tells the stubborn guy to sign the withdrawal slip and in sixty days he can pick up his money. The boilerplate portion of any contract; the “fine print” always favors the institution. The thing is with George Bailey you never have to worry about the letter of the law - if George says it is okay, then it is okay. But as Chronos says above, there is a full on panic and people really did lose every thing during that time and jump out of tall buildings. My grandparents on both sides suffered greatly and lost much of what they had build since being in the country.
Also, the B&L was a value company, not a growth company. They actually owned the structures they built until the mortgages were paid off. They also owned the tractors that graded the lots, the trowels that laid the block and most of the tools used to build the homes. They owned the ‘paper’, the mortgages which were an financial asset but they also owned the land and the homes which are real assets.
By-the-way, fifty cents on the dollar was VERY generous at the time*. When you are losing everything five cents on the dollar is better than a poke in the eye! That is the trouble with a run on an institution. If a part of the economy suffers cash flow – then they try to collect all that is owed them, and then those places which paid the first place are short cash (and the first place still is a bit short of cash) and it always gets worse the bigger it gets and of course everyone hoards whatever cash they have (like the recent toilet paper hoarding for example).
That is how Bart Simpson can cause untold misery above in the link in this thread because a “panic” means just that. There is a fight or flight response triggered and things go from bad to worse quickly.
*Somewhere in this house I have five (5) One Thousand Dollar ($1,000.00) Certificates of Stock for a defunct company in my grandparent’s home town in North Western Pennsylvania. When I asked my grandmother’s banker about it she laughed. Apparently everyone in town bought into this company that did receive some United States Patents and was a viable company during the 1920-1941 period (I thought it sounded like a Ponzi scheme). It became defunct during the war I was told. After my Gran went into a nursing home, I received a notice that an investor had bought up all the debt for thee cents on the dollar and was hoping to sell the patents to modern companies and repay at five cents on the dollar. (Keeping a small sum for his trouble.) I never heard another word about it, but that was in the 1990’s or early 2000’s so the instruments of equity were at least sixty years old by then.
Excellent example!! I had forgotten that.
That seemed odd to have in such a small town.
What does?
It seemed odd that such a small town had an indoor swimming pool in the high school and even more, one that was underneath the gym floor. In reality, the pool was at Beverly Hills High School.
Yes, Sam was willing to send whatever funds were needed, but as far as we know, he didnt have to. However, his support and that of the war hero did improve moral.
It kind of makes sense back east where pools at institutions are always indoors. Saves the cost of a whole new building in exchange for the cost of a movable floor. Growing up in the sunbelt, I could not even imagine an enclosed pool. But apparently where there is a hard freeze you must fully drain an outdoor pool or the freezing water will destroy the pool structure within a few seasons.
The town in Pennsylvania where my parents grew up had four high schools but only one football stadium, and they apparently had an indoor pool with a high dive.
Well, I’m sure George read about it, probably in one of them thar mag-a-zeens, like Nat Geo, or Harper’s, and saw it was a good idea for the limited funds available in BF. Now kids can have a place to learn to swim. And contract polio. Think of all those lives that would be better if George had never been born!
I don’t think that’s the case. I’ve never had a pool myself, but many friends and neighbors have, and they’ve never drained it for the season. Our local swim club pool also was not drained for winter.
I think it’s more the case that you can’t use it in the winter if it’s outside.
You are 100% correct. But without the guarantee from Sam we would have had to wait for Eustace to add up all the contributions and the toast from Harry gave the whole affair an aura of festivity rather than just barely avoiding disaster.
I am not sure where you are, but in the late nineties I lived in Columbus Ohio for two Winters. Most who had a pool had an above ground one that was taken down every spring and stored. One neighbor had an outdoor “built-in” pool that did not need to be drained but it had a vinyl liner like an above ground pool and several inches of gel type fill between the water and the structure of the pool. And in central Ohio I was told, water only froze an inch or two deep. In my parent’s home town every bit of water froze solid (like a foot or more thick) every year. I am not sure what technology existed in the 1950’s when they attended school there, but my sister somewhat famously asked them once if things there were still so old back there that they were still in black and white.
According to my parents the pool was never used in winter anyway – they only heated the building enough to keep the water from freezing. They had also mentioned that when someone laid block for a basement in the Spring and it Wintered over exposed to the elements, the builder had to either fill it with water and back fill it or keep all the water pumped out over the winter so it did not cause cracks when freeze and thaw occurred. They were neither one structural nor civil engineers, but I never questioned their reasoning until now.
This will be my 43rd winter in Ohio.
I was referring to in-ground pools, like the one in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Though googling a bit, it seems as though , while they do need to be winterized, above ground pools shouldn’t be drained or taken down either.
My Koi pond rarely freezes more than an inch or two thick.
I’m confused. If you lose an envelope full of cash, you will be short on your accounts, therefore losing cash is illegal, no? What if he put “Cash Uncle Billy Lost–$8,000” in his books? Surely that won’t make it better. And the reason why it wouldn’t make it better is because the powers that be would not believe that Uncle Billy lost it, but they would believe that George had been dipping into the till, giving money to Violet and so forth. And they would think that because Potter is pushing it, and it just makes sense that $8,000 (in 1945 money, and my inflation calculator says $115,657.33 today) will not just disappear. Is that not correct?
As an aside, when I was a kid, I always felt bad for Uncle Billy when George called him an old fool, but today, I can’t imagine someone waltzing around with $115k and joking and otherwise not being careful.
The Newsroom lady says George Bailey is like the local bank with saving and checking accounts. A building and loan is not that at all. It is a cooperative that sells shares, it then uses the shareholder’s money to make investments. Exactly the same as a mutual fund or hedge fund, except that the building and loan only invests in residential real estate for members which it also develops. If it makes money then its shareholders get a dividend, just like anyone who invests in the stock market. A bank has customers that it promises a certain amount of interest, it does not matter if the bank makes money the customer just gets the interest.
Except that in the movie, people clearly have accounts, and are trying to withdraw cash from them, and the B&L seems to have cash tills and routinely handle this sort of transaction, just not in the quantity seen in the “bank run” scene. If I were a shareholder in a real “building and loan”, could I just show up in their lobby and demand to cash out my shares at full value on the spot?
Regardless of how a “building and loan” in the real world 1929 would have operated, Bailey’s Building and Loan in It’s a Wonderful Life is pretty clearly seems to me to be a banking institution of some sort.
I’m a bit vague on all the details, but I do know that if George suddenly HAS the money, then he didn’t steal it. In other words “Steal 9 thousand dollars that we were going to deposit in the bank? Preposterous. Here it is, right here in this bag. I’m just a little behind on getting it across the street”.
Unless the examiner / cop / whatever saw the massive collection activity, he’s got no grounds to say the money was ever missing. Hence, no reason to arrest George.
Yes, he still could do so, he has a warrant to do so, but it would go before a judge who would say “warrant for theft? of what? There’s nothing missing! DISMISSED!”.
Oh, and yeah, from the linked definition of B&Ls, George’s place really didn’t meet that definition - it clearly functioned more as a savings and loan instead.
I think that there may well have been more financial institutions in Bedford Falls. It’s just that, aside from the B&L, Potter owned all of them. As well as a significant stake in pretty much every other business in town. Remember the scene where Potter is offering George a job, and points out that between the two of them, they’d saved the city? George saved the B&L; Potter saved everything else. And Potter’s version of “saved” certainly involved terms very favorable to Potter.
And the likely expulsion of anyone unAmerican by his lights, which included anyone who liked garlic.
This thread inspired me to watch it tonight. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the whole movie before. There are a few scenes that are overacted by today’s standards but overall it really holds up well. It even treats the characters who aren’t white males respectfully.