Trading in Youth for a Ladder Rung
After accepting my first management roll as Assistant Branch Manager of a community bank, I began taking banking more seriously. I was making pretty good money and seemed to enjoy the work. I decided I was going to make every effort to continue growing my career with the desire to make more and more money. I was doing sales calls where I visited many of the businesses in this little town and I sent letters to the businesses that I couldn’t visit. I talked to everyone I could about the bank. The bank even used my picture on a newspaper advertisement and a post card advertisement that was mailed to everyone in two zip codes. I was getting in pretty deep but I was enjoying it. Plus I was motivated to make more money, learn more things, and see where this would take me.
One day my Branch President called me into her office. She was a very nice but sometimes a stern woman. She reminded me of some teacher I had had back in junior high or high school. I had a lot of respect for her and hoped to learn from her so that I could be a Branch President some day. We talked for a few minutes about how we were trying to become part of the community and that we needed to become more active. I agreed and was eager to succeed in this new role.
This branch was brand new in a small community located near Durango, CO. The small community was an old ranching community whose big annual event involved running sheep down main street. It was a community full of older people and it was pretty close knit but I was determined to become a success.
My boss said, “The only service organization in town is the Lions Club, and I’d like to see you attend one of their meetings and maybe join their club”.
I didn’t really now much about the Lions Club but I was up for anything so I said, “No problem when do they meet”.
The next morning she poked her head into my office and said, “I got a call back from the president of the Lions Club. He said you could come to their meeting on Thursday night.”
I replied, “No problem”.
Then she started to laugh and said, “He asked what you looked like so he could greet you and I started to say that you were young and he laughed and said ‘he would be the other young guy there’”.
I didn’t understand why she was laughing until I got to the meeting. Here I was a 28 year old punk who was pretty free spirited and enjoyed being young at heart. I walked up to the old grayish white building that had cracks in the plaster and nothing but weeds growing in the flower beds. I slowly walked up the wheel chair ramp and through the door into a room that reminded me of some time long ago.
The hall was an old building with scratched and dusty wood floors. The wood paneled walls were covered by felt banners symbolizing some achievement of yesteryear and black and white pictures of past presidents. Even the most recent years looked like someone had played a practical joke and photo shopped 70’s clothing and cop mustaches on these poor people. I made my way over to the kitchen where a smiling lady my grandmother’s age gladly dished up some slop that looked like something you would pick up at a truck stop.
I turned and scanned the crowd trying to figure out where I was going to sit. It looked like I had wandered into the ‘Sunny Acres Retirement Home’. Everyone in the room was 60 years old or older. I smiled at a group of Blue Haired beauties and stumbled over an old man’s cane that was lying beside him on the ground. I settled into a spot. Introduced myself then listened to a conversation about which members wouldn’t be here tonight because they were in or out of the hospital.
Don’t get me wrong. The Lions Club does a lot of great things for the community and I do believe it is important to be involved in your community, but a 28 year old with new ideas and beliefs has no business in a small town Lions Club.
After joining the club I tried my best to enjoy it and have fun. I also showed up early to set up tables and stayed late to help out. I didn’t want to see any of these old people hurt themselves. Within a few weeks of joining I was invited to my first funeral in years. It was clear that I had given up my desire to be young and free and traded it in for a membership at the old folk’s home.
Is this who I wanted to be? Is this the future I wanted? Definitely not, but for some reason I continued with it in the short term thinking that it would help my career. It was just one more rung in the ladder and for some reason, I was climbing. The Lion’s Club was just the first of many events that should have been wake up calls.