Merkel Landis
Merkel Landis (1875 - 1960), a lawyer and banker, was a native resident of Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He was the treasurer and president of Carlisle Trust Company in Pennsylvania. During that time he started the Christmas club savings program, now used by many banks nationwide.
Early life
Landis was born at Carlisle on January 5, 1875, to John B. Landis and Barbara Merkel Landis. He grew up and lived his childhood on North College Street. Landis attended the local Carlisle public schools and graduated from Carlisle High School in 1891. He then went to the Dickinson Preparatory School before entering Dickinson College.
Landis started the college in 1892 for a four-year degree of bachelor of philosophy and graduated in 1896. He was 21 years old when he graduated. He then worked at the Carlisle Deposit Bank as a clerk for AbOUT a year. Landis then went back to Dickinson School of Law to get his law degree and passed the Cumberland County Bar exam. He was admitted in 1899.
Christmas Savings Club
In 1901 Landis returned to the Carlisle Bank, which had been renamed Carlisle Trust Company in 1905, to become their treasurer.
One Saturday in December 1909 three men from the local Carlisle shoe factory came to his office with an idea. They asked if they could open a joint account under their names. Landis, as the bank treasurer, set up an account where they were going to collect money from the fellow workers and deposit one cent a week for the first week and continually add a penny to the total amount collected for the next fifty weeks, with the last deposit of 50 cents in December. They then were going to distribute the amount obtained, just before Christmas.
Landis took this idea a step further and published display ads in the local paper that his bank was forming a Christmas Savings Club. Starting in the first week of January 1910 club members were allowed to make weekly deposits of any amount until the week before Christmas. They would get paid three percent interest on their amount saved before being distributed. Landis, treasurer of Carlisle Trust Company, had originated the world's first Christmas Savings Club.
The Christmas Saving Club Landis set into place involved a system of coupons and booklet envelopes. The system was simple and required very little bookkeeping. It was a coupon-sheet system where a Club customer made a deposit of a nickel, dime or quarter and a coupon was torn off a 14-by- 14-inch coupon sheet as a receipt. The customer kept the coupons in a booklet envelope. In December the customer turned in their coupons and received a check. A similar system is still used by banks and thousands of credit unions throughout the United States. The club is often referred to by many banks as The Landis Christmas Savings Club.
A British-born traveling salesman bought the right later to use Landis' idea and sold the concept to other banks throughout the United States. In 1928 he purchased the Savings Club Company initiated by Landis and formed a corporation. The headquarters of the corporation is in New York City. That corporation supplied coupon books and promotional IDeaS to banks nationwide. That same principal has been used from the 1960s and 1970s with deposits of $1, $2, $3, $5, $10, or $20. The Club membership then ends in November and checks are mailed from the local bank to the depositors for Christmas shopping. The state of New York usually has the most memberships, with Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and California next in line. These four states produce about 50 per cent of all Christmas Club depositors.
Personal life
Landis was associated with the Carlisle Red Cross, the Hamilton Library, Sigma Chi, T.N.E., and editor of Dickinson College yearbook. He played college baseball as a short stop.
Landis was married twice. His first wife was Helen R. Boyd, whom he married on October 12, 1905. After her death in 1932 he then married Mary Kirtley Lamberton in the summer of 1933. He had a son, Joseph Boyd Landis, and a daughter, Katherine Gorden Landis (who's daughter is the children's book writer Lois Lowry, being Landis' granddaughter).
Later life and death
Landis had an ongoing illness in his early eighties. He was 85 years old when he died on September 28, 1960. His remains are interred at Westminster Memorial Gardens in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Trivia
The television game show Jeopardy! posed the question, "Bank president Merkel Landis founded this in Pennsylvania?" The answer: "What is The Christmas Club?"