Town Discovers It Can’t Bank on Its Only Bank

In this tiny, insular coastal community of Victorian-era clapboard homes and strawberry fields, old ways die hard.

Pescaderans still lower to half-staff the oversized American flag flapping from a flagpole at the town’s entrance whenever one among them dies. Their restaurant of choice is Duarte’s, where four generations of the Duarte family have dished up green chile soup and homemade pies since 1934.

And for 70 years, the Bank of America, standing foursquare and solid on Pescadero’s main street, has been their bank.

In this town of 500, it has been their only bank. Generations of farm workers, landowners, merchants and homemakers have stored their treasures in its safety deposit boxes. They’ve paid their bills with their bank checks and fulfilled their dreams with money they’ve saved there. They’ve made payrolls, bought money orders and traveler’s checks, stopped in for change.

So when the town learned last month that Bank of America had decided that its Pescadero branch was obsolete and would be closed come July, the news hit like a bomb.

How, people wondered, can we manage without a bank?

“It’s kind of scary,” said Norman Benedetti, a third-generation Pescaderan and owner of Norm’s Market, where staples are sold along with the Benedetti family’s pasta sauces and homemade artichoke-and-garlic bread.

“The bank is a prime reason people have come into town from the surrounding areas. If they go out of town to do their banking, they’ll go out of town to do their shopping,” Benedetti said.

So upset were townsfolk about the impending closure that they wrote their congressman and every state and federal official they could think of. The politicians were sympathetic, but no one was much help, townsfolk say.

The fact is, in today’s world of mega-banks and electronic banking, the Pescadero branch has been an anomaly for years.

Even after an ATM was cut into the facade a few years back and shaded with a cheery red awning, many Pescaderans continued to do their banking inside the stately, ochre building.

They loved the short waiting lines, the antique safety-deposit boxes passed from fathers to daughters, the high ceilings and the burnished wood counter tops.

Most of all, they loved the tellers who called them by their first names, who helped them balance their checkbooks, who even drove to the homes of elderly shut-ins once a week to help them with their banking.

“Nine out of 10 people who walk through that front door, we know them by their first name,” said bank teller Patty Sarabia, a third-generation Pescaderan.

The bank is such a friendly place, said Joe Muzzi, a fourth-generation resident of the town, “that sometimes you just stop in to say hello.”

Muzzi’s father marched him in to open his first account when he was just a toddler. Now he runs Muzzi’s, the family’s grocery store, and relies on the bank for family and business financial matters.

Its history aside, the branch, in corporate terms, has long been “low volume,” said Harvey Radin, a Bank of America spokesman.

Radin seems slightly mystified by the outcry over the closure. He insists that Bank of America is merely catering to its customers’ preferences, which surveys indicate are for ATMs, online banking and telebanking.

“For a long, long time we could only deliver our services through branches,” Radin said. “People were limited to using the bank between the hours of 10 and 3.”

But with automated banking, he said, customers can bank 24 hours a day--from their homes, at ATMs, over their home computers.

Radin says shutting down the Pescadero branch is part of a “fine-tuning” process at Bank of America, one that will lead to the consolidation--the bank doesn’t use the word “closing”--of 120 branches in California this year.

Radin said none of the other consolidations will leave a town without a bank.

Outraged Pescaderans are hard-pressed to see the loss of their branch as fine-tuning. They use words like “abandonment” and “betrayal.”

“This is the only bank west of the mountain, between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz,” said Meredith Reynolds, who is head of Pescadero’s Municipal Advisory Council. “It is 16 miles to Half Moon Bay and 35 miles to Santa Cruz.”

Tucked into a valley between the coastal mountains on one side and the ocean on the other, Pescadero is a farming and ranching community. Most residents don’t commute any farther than the fields or the greenhouses they see from their front steps.

The town has its own elementary school and high school, high-steepled churches, two meeting halls, and a tiny commercial district. Pescaderans take pride in their self-sufficiency.

Essential services are strung along Stage Road, the main commercial street. Besides the bank, there is a thrift shop, a post office, a gas station, Duarte’s, a taqueria, an auto repair shop and two grocery stores.

“We try,” said Reynolds, “not to go out of Pescadero. We’ve got those basic things that you can get by on.”

Weeks can go by, Reynolds and other Pescaderans say, without their needing to leave town. That will change, they complain, once Pescadero becomes bankless.

“I think it’s foolish from Bank of America’s standpoint. I think it’s terrible for us,” said Gaston Periat, 74, who has banked in town since he moved to the area in the 1960s.

Once farm workers are forced to travel to Half Moon Bay or Santa Cruz to cash their paychecks, Periat said, those towns and not Pescadero will see their money.

“The merchants here will be hit hard,” he said.

In addition to Pescadero proper, the branch also serves a surrounding farming, ranching and logging community of about 5,000 people. Among its largest group of clients are the migrant farm workers who may not have accounts there, but use the bank to cash paychecks and purchase money orders to send back home to families in Mexico.

“Bank of America tells us we can telebank or do online banking,” Reynolds said. “But many of those people not only don’t have a computer, they don’t have a phone. They are not wired to anything.”

Graciela Navarrete agrees.

A bilingual teller at the doomed branch, Navarrete deals with hundreds of Spanish-speaking clients each week.

“It’s going to be hard on them,” she said. “A lot of them don’t have cars. They just stay here in town. People are upset, wondering what they are going to do.”

Bank of America has told the community, Radin said, that it is willing to sell the branch to another, smaller bank at a reasonable price if one steps forward.

Community members say they are searching for a replacement. But they are not appeased by Bank of America’s promises to do what it can to ease the transition if another bank takes over or to help the adjustment to a bankless town.

“Bank of America is asking people to just transfer their accounts to . . . Half Moon Bay,” Periat said. “But people aren’t going to do that . . . because we’re mad.”