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and wiped them carefully and wiped the tears from his eyes. Then he popped one of the lumps of sugar into his mouth and went on talking, his speech becoming clearer as the sugar dissolved. There were moments during yesterday afternoon so intensely dramatic and so pathetic and heart-rending that the men who were spectators had difficulty themselves in keeping the tears from their eyes. Fifteen or 20 miles out of Chicago, Ed Sylvester saw the first real snow he had seen since he fled from Plainview last year. "Look at that snow," he said excitedly, peering out of the car window. "Say, I’d just like to get out there and run around and play in it – gosh!" And when the Mississippi River was crossed, not many miles from home, he almost broke down and wept. "Gosh!" he said, "there’s the old Mississippi! Say, I’d like to go and pull a pike out from a hole in the ice." Across the state line he sniffed the air. "Smell the air," he said. "That’s Minnesota air. It smells different. It smells clean. My God, Boys!" and a sob choked his voice. "You don’t know what it means to get home again. You don’t know how homesick, I was. You don’t know what it meant to be way down there away from everybody – whishing I could see a face I knew, and wishing I could talk to somebody I could trust. It was terrible." Sylvester’s story – the details he had not before disclosed – came fragmentarily, frequently interrupted by crying spells. The whole trouble started, he said, some 25 years ago, before the Plainview State Bank was in existence. It was Sylvester Brother’s bank, then, and there was a shortage. When the new bank was organized the business of the two institutions was kept separate for a time. Eventually the assets of the Sylvester Brother’s bank were transferred to the Plainview State Bank, to make it appear that the later institution was growing rapidly. "That’s the way Art Kennedy got into the bank, you know," said Sylvester. "He saw we were doing well, and he wrote saying he’d like to get into the business. He came down and we sold him a share in the bank. It was a share formerly owned by a man named Uecker, from whom I had bought his stock. "Well," he continued, "pretty soon after Art got into the bank he discovered the shortage. But he didn’t say anything about it! He could have got out then if he’d wanted to." "I won’t say anything about Art. I suppose I’m guiltier than he is, but let me tell you, I couldn’t have done what I did without Art there. He made it possible for me to do those things. "Art and I were in the whole cheese in the bank. We were the bank. George F., my brother, and Stoltz, didn’t amount to a row of pins. George was incompetent and Stoltz was there to get his $200 a month. Stoltz and George never got along very well together, either. I remember one time they had a fight, right in the back room of the bank and I guess George got scratched up a little." Sylvester didn’t realize what he was doing, and what position he was getting into until a year or so before the bank closed. "Why boys," he said, bursting into tears again, "I can’t hardly realize what I’ve done. My God, I didn’t think I was stealing. I’m sorry, sorry, sorry! I’m sorry for those people that trusted me. They put too much confidence in me, I guess. That was the trouble. They didn’t think I could do any wrong. Why, I didn’t either. It went too easy.
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* SOURCE: Manzow, Ron (compiler), "The Sylvester Family of Plainview, Minnesota - a collection of information taken from the Plainview News, other newspapers, letters, and diaries beginning in 1884": Plainview Area History Center, 40 4th St. S.W., Plainview, MN 55964. Compiled in 2001.
NOTE: from Ron Manzow, December 2001: "Feel free to reproduce the pages for anyone who wants a copy. It was
compiled to be shared... All I ask is that they consider sending a check to the [Plainview Area] History Center to help us out. That
should be enough."
Howder; © 1995-2011 All Rights Reserved. Last Updated February 14, 2011.