(Credit Union) Historic Boston

As this last week was my partner (and fellow history nerd) Allison's February break from teaching, we decided it'd be fun to take a short trip to Boston from our home in northern Vermont. Alli is a social studies teacher with a particular passion for photographing old New England cemeteries (some samples of her work in Vermont can be seen here), so our activities were primarily focused around the various sites on the Freedom Trail. The colonial-era buildings and burying grounds were quite interesting, but, fortunately for myself and the readers of this blog, she was kind enough to oblige me in taking some detours to locate a few sites of historical importance to the credit union movement.

My quest was initially inspired by the knowledge that a plaque honoring Edward Filene was located somewhere on the Boston Common. Since that park was on our itinerary anyway, I found a webpage that provided the plaque's location, and we set out in search of Ed.

Unfortunately, the directions on that page turned out to be a filthy lie; the plaque is nowhere near the intersection of Tremont and Temple Streets. After making a few loops, we stopped into the visitors center, but the woman behind the desk was clueless as to the existence of the memorial. Though it was beginning to feel like a wild goose chase, we decided to circle through the Common one last time.

Victory at Last!

This time, lady luck was on our side, and we stumbled upon the memorial near the intersection of Carver and Boyleston across the street from a piano store and adjacent to the Central Burying Ground. Erected by the Credit Union National Association in 1959 (25 years after the organization's founding at Estes Park, CO in 1934), the monument reads:

Edward A Filene

1860-1937
Author, Scholar, Outstanding Citizen of Boston and Public Benefactor
Acknowledged as the Founder of the Credit Union Movement in the United States
This Tablet Erected by the Credit Union National Association
May 1959

Oral History: Roy Bergengren, Jr.

While recently mucking about on-line, I stumbled upon the transcript of an oral history interview of Roy Bergengren's son, Roy Bergengren, Jr., which had been conducted in 1975. At the time, the younger Bergengren was the recently retired president of a junior college in Florida, and the bulk of the interview focuses on that experience. However, the biographical background information that he lays out in the first few pages provides some intriguing tidbits for credit union historians by offering a quick glimpse at what it was like to be Bergengren's child and outlining his own brief involvement in the organized credit union movement. I've excerpted the passage in which he discusses the latter; if you want to check out the full interview, you can read it on the University of Florida's website.

P: What did you do after [graduating from Dartmouth in 1936].

B: After that, I went to work for my father, who was at that time, head of the Credit Union National Association in Madison Wisconsin. And the National Organization of Credit Unions was just starting, and they had a very small staff, and they needed somebody to edit their little monthly magazine [ed. note: the Credit Union Bridge]. So I started editing a monthly magazine for $15 a week. I kept that for about three years, and I decided that it wasn't the best thing in the world to work for your father, despite my respect and love for him, so I went to work on a newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin... (Page 2)