Friday 22nd January 2010 - The Glasgow Branch

          At breakfast, there is a loud discussion about the status of the Old and New Testaments in the proof of things.  The cook is summoned from the kitchen as final arbiter.  It turns out that he is the pastor of a cowboy church (this is to be taken literally, and has none of the "make it up as you go along" undertones the word "cowboy" might evoke in Britain).  He does rather well, and tries to keep it at the "well it all depends" level without undermining the sweet simplicity of the original premise.

          I've really come to Dresden again to meet a lady who knew Lube Glasgow, but the breakfast floor show has made me late.  So another breakfaster sends me across the square to the barber's shop.  Apparently, in the barber's shop, they know everything and everybody.

          And the barber's shop really is like you imagine such places used to be.  It lacks only a quartet to take it back a century.  (Don't laugh, this is Barber Shop Quartet country.)  There is a wide-ranging discussion on the various Glasgows.  There must have been several different families, all relatively well-known.  But nobody remembers the store, of course, because that goes back more than half-a-century.

 

           When I was looking through the deed books the other day, I spotted an old map on the wall, and tried to use it to figure out where the land concerned was.  As I started looking at it, my eyes suddenly focused on a river carrying the name "Glasgow Br".  This turned out to be a fair distance from where the store was.  It's a branch of Thompson's Creek, so I guess "Br" means "Branch".

          With a liitle bit of time to spare, I decide to go visit it.

          When I finally locate it, I go calling at the nearest house to see if they know its name.  The inhabitant is a super grown-up widow lady of 85.  She thinks the stream is called Thompson's Creek, but she says her house is where the old Glasgow House used to be.  She has a family album, and in it she has a newspaper cut-out picture of the said old Glasgow Family.  She says to say hello to the lady I'm going to meet later.

          The Glasgow Branch is nothing much to write home about (although here I am doing just that).  It has been raining a lot here recently, and most of the ground is wet underfoot, but the Glasgow Branch is barely running at all.

[n0830]

          When I get back to town, my contact is back from lunch.  She is a niece of Lube (I discover this is a single syllable), and remembers him.  He and her daddy got on well.  She thought Lube got rich lending money with land as collateral.  Which is probably how he ended up president of the bank. 

          She didn't think he had a bad reputation.  I suppose lending money against land in the great depression could be either ruthless land-grabbing or enlightened local lender-of-last-resort trying to help people stay solvent in hard times.  Certainly, he sold the store for much less than he bought it for, and gave the buyer a year to pay, without interest.

 

          Later that night, it's a quiet farewell.  Everyone wishes me well on the rest of my trip: and not an in-bred banjo player in sight.