When Elmer ran the show;

              Born in St. Louis, Missouri, author Howard Ma-loney
is a graduate of St. Louis University—B.S.C.
in 1942. After serving in the Army during World
War II Mr. Maloney went into public accounting
with a local firm in St. Louis. He came with TRB&S
in 1948. He is a member of the American Institute
of CPAs, the Missouri Society of CPAs and Delta
Sigma Pi.
When Elmer ran the show
by Howard P. Maloney
St. Louis
THE CREDIT UNION OFFICIAL SQUIRMED UNCOMFORTABLY and with
evident chagrin muttered "Well, we just let Elmer run the whole
show."
Elmer ran the whole show all right—but a few of the featured acts
never appeared in the program. For instance, Elmer had very definite
ideas about who were playing the clowns in his production and most of
his efforts were to prevent his cast from finding out their assignment.
Elmer was pretty successful in this regard, too, since he kept his show
running for approximately five years while he snared some $65,000 of
the members' savings. Elmer was helped a little bit by the aversion
of the membership to spending money unnecessarily for auditing. After
all, the members reasoned, the State Department of Finance auditor
appeared one afternoon a year, "checked things over" for a modest
fee, and gave his annual blessing. Then, too, the Supervisory Committee
did some auditing each year—and after all this is the era of "do-it-your­self."
Elmer had a "magic act" too that helped him get by these
auditing sessions—he could always produce an adding machine tape
that listed all of the members' share and loan accounts (which he kept
in substantial accuracy) but Elmer's magic made the tape show a total
agreeing with ledger controls rather than the total of all amounts shown
SEPTEMBER 1961 11