Counter checks got job done

The counter check I’m talking about isn’t a move in chess, hockey or football.

It was a simple blank check we all once used to pay our bills.

When you ran out of counter checks, you asked the bank for more. They were free. They came with only the bank’s name and lines for date, check amount and signature — no identification numbers, bar codes, account numbers, names, addresses or phone numbers.

Counter checks were everywhere until the 1960s, including on store counters for customer convenience.

In trade centers such as Brookings, businesses might have counter checks on hand from banks in Elkton, White, Bruce, Sinai, Arlington, Toronto and Volga for use by people with checking accounts in those communities.

The customer selected his or her bank’s counter check, filled it in, scribbled a signature and that was that. You might not have gotten away with writing a counter check from the Bank of Bruce while on vacation in Tallahassee, Florida, or Mule Shoe, Texas, but most local businesses accepted them without questions.

When a business brought its stack of counter checks to the bank for deposit, the only way a bank clerk would know who had signed the check was by guess work and years of experience figuring out just who in the heck had signed it.

In those days before ballpoint pens, counter checks were often written in pencil.

The late Sheldon Cotton of Volga once showed me a counter check written by his grandfather, George O. Cotton, in 1954. The check was for his January Brookings Kiwanis Club dues, plus payment for “buttons” Kiwanians were selling. The check was for $3.80, with $2 of it being the club’s monthly dues.

It was written on a Security National Bank of Brookings check blank. Cotton, a successful Volga businessman, had apparently arrived at the Sawnee Hotel in Brookings (the building is still there at Third Avenue and Fourth Street) for the weekly Kiwanis meeting without enough cash to pay his dues.

Or maybe he wanted to pay by check so he’d have a record for taxes.

With no Volga First National Bank counter checks on hand, he grabbed a Security National Bank of Brookings counter check and used that. The only problem was, he didn’t have an account at the Security National Bank of Brookings.

He just crossed off the word “Security” and penciled in above it “The First,” transforming the Security National Bank check to The First National Bank. Below that he crossed out “Brookings” and penciled in “Volga” above it.

In the late 1960s, the ability for commercial printers to provide magnetic printing changed things in many ways and was the death knell for those ubiquitous counter checks.
Computers came along and drastically changed check writing.

While many of today’s millennials may still write checks for some of life’s necessities, the majority manage their money digitally. If they have a check they want to deposit, they take a picture of it with their phone, and the phone sends the check’s picture to the bank.

Since I’ve mentioned Brookings Kiwanis Club counter check writer George Cotton of Volga, I want to tell you about Dr. Vic Webster, one of Cotton’s fellow Kiwanis Club members.

Vic was head of the SDSU Chemistry Department. Many of you reading this probably remember Dr. Webster.

I barely squeezed through his beginner’s course in 1957, and the only chemistry I can think of now is that salt water chemically speaking is H2O and NaCl.

Vic joined the local Kiwanis club in 1943. In 1997 he was recognized in Kiwanis Club circles nationally for having never missed a weekly Kiwanis meeting for 54 years. That’s 2,808 meetings in a row without a miss.

And I suppose it’s also a whole slew of counter checks along the way.