Currie State Bank will be honoring 50-year employee, Dorothy Jensen, during an Open House on Friday, June 7, 1-3 p.m. The public is cordially invited to attend. Sandwiches and refreshments will be served.
Jensen marked 50 years at Currie State Bank on April 21st of this year. She started as one of three tellers working out of the same cash drawer! “What a nightmare! We didn’t have a ten-key adding machine, computer, e-mail, copier or coin counter,” Jensen shared.
Jensen, who was born and raised in Currie, left the area following her high school graduation, to attend Mankato Business School for six months. She then lived in the cities and worked at Northwest Airlines as an accountant for three years.
Jensen then returned to Currie and married her husband, Wayne, in August of 1965.
The couple then became parents to Douglas and Kathy.
As a farming family, 1969 brought some very hard times. “We didn’t get all of the crops harvested in the fall of 1968 because of the weather and then in the spring of 1969, it was a year much like this, and we flooded and couldn’t get crops planted,” Jensen shared.
She recalled how she came to be employed at Currie State Bank. “My husband had gone to the bank to talk with our banker and discovered they had a job opening. The banker told him to tell me to come in and visit with him. Unlike today, I wasn’t required to fill out an application. We just sat and visited. After my interview, the banker asked me to start on Monday,” Jensen said. “I was totally unprepared for that because I didn’t have any daycare in place and the children were one and one-half and two and one-half. But, I started on Monday, as one of three tellers at Currie State Bank.
The bank had been established on February 1, 1931, and by 1969 had a very strong customers base.
Jensen and the other two tellers worked out of one drawer. “If that drawer didn’t balance at close, everybody was like ‘I didn’t do it!’” she shared. “In those days we had to do all of the work manually. There were no proof machines. There was no ten-key machine. What we had were three spindles – basically a base with a nail-like spike – on which we placed the deposit slips, transactions and the remittances. Everybody used counter checks and there were no account numbers. Your name was your identification. It’s unreal all of the changes that have happened over the 50 years.”
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