In those days building and loans or savings and loans as they sometimes were identified, were different than banks. They had been set up in the Depression to find ways of financing home mortgages, but over the years they got progressively larger as the country prospered.

As long as they were not federally chartered, about all they could do was accept deposits in savings accounts or certificates of deposit for fixed terms and lend money on mortgages with reasonable rates of interest.

But as the nation's economy grew, they had more money on their hands.

They started switching to federal charters and expanded their area of loans. A lot of the ways they found were, to say the least, questionable.

Suddenly we were faced with the great savings and loan scandal of the previous Bush administration. The government bailed out the banks, threw a few bad guys in jail (but not enough), closed a good many marginal institutions—all with taxpayers' money, of course—and the building and loan industry became solvent again.

But the little savings and loans had seen the big time. They began to merge just like the big banks. Like big fish eating little fish they gobbled up one another. The rationale was the same that drives all capital companies: by merging one can combine services, reduce costs, cut payrolls, close branches and consolidate so the bottom line which, after all, is what capitalism is all about, continues to grow.

With growing dismay, I've watched that little institution in which I once deposited money being gobbled up by successively larger and larger banks.

One merger after another took place in bewildering succession until one needed a kind of genealogy chart to remember where it all got started. Suffice it to say that Home, Golden West, Citizens, Cal Fed and half a dozen more have all disappeared.

The latest bank to acquire what was once a local institution is a megabank whose president recently got fined for various transgressions having to do with the stock market. The megabank has moved into town preceded by half a dozen men in sincere black three piece suits (and one woman with a sincere black three piece suit of her own) to get the branch where I bank shaped up.

These guys (and the woman) spend a lot of time on the telephone talking to New York. Most of the old tellers are gone. There are a lot of new rules about how to make deposits, write checks, maintain privacy and so on.

The new bank, now a part of the megabank system, is different than the friendly old institution with which we started.

But I guess I have become resigned to it.

It's the way things go when banks merge. Branches close, people get laid off and from a headquarters ever farther from where the customer banks orders come down. In addition, because marketing is everything these days every time a certificate of deposit comes due we get a call from our new banker, telling us about what wonderful opportunities they have for us to make money.

Alas, because the economy has tanked, the megabanks don't have a lot to say when they call about our money. And I'm afraid I am rather curt.

I long for the days when things were more relaxed, when a teller lasted long enough to be identifiable and when the bank didn't call me unless I had overdrawn my account.

Instead I am faced with the prospect that before long my financial world will be ruled by One Big Bank and there will be no others. When that happens, I think I'll withdraw my money, put it in a coffee can and bury it in the backyard.

—Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to The Sun.