But they kept their farms.
And Farmers & Merchants survived.
Every year after that, at Christmas, our porch was covered with gifts. Hams and pies and jars of honey and handmade quilts. From farmers who’d kept their land because George Whitaker wouldn’t call in their loans. Nobody ever signed a card. They didn’t have to.
George died in 2017.
Heart failure. He was seventy-two. He went in his sleep, in our bed, in the yellow house on Elm Street that we almost lost in 1985.
Two years before that, in 2015, something happened that broke his heart.
Small banks were dying. All over the country. The regulations got so complicated and so expensive that little banks like ours couldn’t keep up. We needed compliance officers and computer systems and lawyers. We couldn’t afford them.
George got an offer from Heartland Bancorp. A big regional bank in Des Moines. They wanted to buy Farmers & Merchants.
George didn’t want to sell.
But he was seventy. He was tired. His heart was already starting to go. And if we didn’t sell, the bank would fail within five years. The lawyers said so. The accountants said so.
So George sold. Sixty percent. Heartland Bancorp bought sixty percent of Farmers & Merchants, and we kept forty.
But George was careful.
He made them sign something first.
I remember the night he did it.
He sat at our kitchen table with the merger papers spread out in front of him. Two hundred pages. Lawyers’ language. He read every word. Three times.
Then he called our lawyer, an old friend named Walt Brennan, and talked to him for two hours.
When he hung up, he turned to me.
“Dot,” he said. “I want to put something in the agreement. Something they won’t notice until they need to.”
“What?”
