At precisely this time of year in 1974, as summer gave way to the early chill of fall, you could have seen the artwork of Bill Blumenau prominently displayed in a public place.
If you’d cared to look up while filling out your deposit slip, that is.
September 30, 1974. Mets win; Yankees, who are only one game out of first, are idle.
October 30, 1974. The Mets and Yankees are on the golf course.
I don’t know how my grandpa connected with the State National Bank of Connecticut, but they were a pretty big deal in his area, back in the day — no two- or three-branch local player.
A 1977 document made available by the Stamford Historical Society indicates that State National had 42 branch offices at the time they displayed my grandfather’s work.
(I can’t guess at which office my grandfather’s paintings were displayed. But I’m betting it was in Stamford, as there is no indication on the calendar that he had to drive anywhere else to hang or pick up the paintings.)
State National, headquartered in Bridgeport, marked its 114th year in business in 1977. It claimed that year to have America’s oldest continually active national bank charter, tracing back to a bank founded in Stamford in 1863.
While State National reached historic milestones in the ’70s, it was also looking toward the future.
In 1973, the bank introduced what it called “the 25-Hour BanKey Banking Center,” a computerized device that allowed customers with personal checking accounts to perform any one of 12 financial transactions at any time in a secure vestibule.
Twenty-eight of these pre-ATMs were in place at the time my grandfather hung his paintings. Perhaps he bemoaned his luck: Just as he’d scored a nice public placement, the number of potential eyeballs on his work was dropping, because fewer people needed to come to the bank during business hours.
(This is very much a 21st-century perspective, of course. I’m guessing only a tiny percentage of State National’s customers in 1974 used the BanKey Banking Center as a regular, meaningful alternative to going into the bank and doing business with a teller. Times hadn’t changed yet.)
State National would go from celebration to resignation in just about five short years. In 1982, the company — then the fifth-largest bank in Connecticut — agreed to an $86 million takeover by the CBT Corporation, owner of the Connecticut Bank and Trust Co., the state’s largest bank.
If some Googling is correct, the merged CBT-State National later fell under the wing of Bank of New England, which went into bankruptcy liquidation in 1991. (An interesting New York Times article from 1990 about the foundering of Connecticut Bank and Trust can be read here.)
According to Wiki, the remaining Bank of New England assets are now mostly part of Bank of America.
Bank of America has several branches in Stamford — including one at 898 Hope St. — so it’s possible that, through all the changes, the bank office where Bill Blumenau hung his paintings might still be serving customers.
One other note: While my grandfather might have landed a nice setting for his work, he was still paying his dues.
On the first calendar entry shown above, if you look closely, you can see “W.C. Class #6” written in the previous week’s calendar entries (on Sept. 24, to be precise).
That would have represented a watercolor class. I find it kinda cool to think that, even as he was getting his work in front of people, he was still trying to learn.
I bet the people who noticed his work at the bank — and there had to have been at least a few — might not have guessed that they could find him there in town once a week, leaning over a canvas, taking notes and trying to get better.
Hope Street 
I’ll bet your grandfather had an account where he was exhibiting. As you found, there was a branch at 898 Hope Street, approximately across the street from the Springdale train station.
While certainly not a wealthy man, especially while he lived on Hope Street, your grandfather liked to spread his money around many banks, especially if it involved a toaster or whatever for opening a new account. I had to figure all this out when he died – there was a hundred here, a thousand there, etc… Hopefully you and I will never know what it’s like to see a run on a bank, prevalent during the depression in the 1930s. I suspect that’s what was behind a lot of the little behaviors of all of your grandparents.
I have no memory of the Springdale train station, although it’s come up a few times in the past.
Would it have been there when I was? Was I ever there?
Was the 24-hour automatic banking center essentially an ATM, only limited to customers of that particular bank?
You mean the “25-Hour” banking center? I haven’t gotten a good view of it but that’s about what it sounds like.
I assume it didn’t *really* work around the clock — if you set up a transfer at 10 pm, it didn’t actually happen until somebody could come in the next morning and verify it. But that’s just my assumption.
The bank at 898 Hope Street was a Fidelity Bank branch. Your grandfather’s paintings most likely hung in the State National branch on Church Street in Glenbrook. Today both are Bank of America. At that time your grandfather prob was a customer at both. Most families were, although 1 or the other would be their primary.
The branches were very local then. Same tellers and same managers for many years. They knew their customers, and the customers knew them. Very, very different from today. I’m not surprised the paintings were displayed. Banks tended to be community orientated. I remember going occasionally to the bank with my dad and he’d always be saying hello and shaking hands with one of the men behind the desks because they knew each other.
Of course these were the final years, once the banks merged and the city’s population exploded all the personal/community touch faded. Customer service nose-dived too.
Springdale train station is still there. Its an extremely busy commuter line into NYC. You would have passed it many times. Until recently it was quite hidden by trees and hardly noticeable unless a train just came in.
Thanks for the memories đŸ™‚
Thank *you*. I always love hearing from people who know the area.
I have this sort of mythical Stamford in my mind and it’s good to have a grounding from people who know the real one.
I made up my mind years ago to do my banking business with small local institutions, and I’ve stuck to that. I’ve never had the kinds of problems with local banks that I’ve had (more than once) with big interstate banks.
Somehow I have no recollection of hearing trains while I was on Hope Street.
I remember hearing street traffic — when we heard a fire truck we would sometimes bundle outside onto the front porch to watch it go by — but not trains.
But, I don’t remember everything.
I believe your mother and I herded you and your brother while quite young onto the train at Springdale station for the short trip to/from New Canaan just to show you what a train ride was. Will check.
And yes, you could hear the train from Hope Street, dependent on other ambient noise and wind direction. I’m guessing the tracks ran less than half a mile away on the Darien side of Hope Street.
During my era the New Canaan train was known as the “turkey killer” and had several serious accidents, one at the Camp Avenue crossing near Hope Street.