Dear Bank of Prairie Village Community~
As we enter the Holiday Season, we know we all have our family’s own traditions and customs.
One long standing tradition has been uniting the family to watch a Christmas Movie together.
Each family has its own “favorite” Christmas movie.
I believe my brother and sister may have watched the original TV debut showings of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, The Charlie Brown Christmas, and Alvin and the Chipmunks Christmas—complete with their own famous chipmunk song (This Alvin and his hoola hoop).
Perhaps the quintessential Christmas Movie for me has always been It’s a Wonderful Life starring Jimmy Stewart as small-town banker George Bailey (1946).
My Dad first made me watch It’s a Wonderful Life on Christmas Break from College. It has been an annual familiar comfort ever since.
Perhaps I am partial to the movie It’s a Wonderful Life as it demonstrates the various roles and outside impact a small community-oriented banker can have on a town or city.
Outside the movie itself, I have always been focused on the main actor, Jimmy Stewart. In addition to playing the idealist banker, George Baily in It’s a Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart plays an idealist Senator in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. (1939 - Another movie where I feel a kinship with the protagonist, who is trying to keep his ideals in the shark-infested Capitol Hill self-dealing and special-interest waters).
What fascinates me with Jimmy Stewart is that despite being an academy award winning actor, Stewart appears to me to be the same strongly focused great role model off the stage as he is on the stage.
He attended Princeton and planned to take over the family hardware store prior to becoming involved in acting. In WWII, he commanded a B-24 Bomber formation flying against Germany.
I only learned of Jimmy Stewart military bravery and leadership under fire, when reading an obscure biography of a hardnosed bomber pilot who flew under Stewart’s command in the same squadron. He credits Col. Stewart’s calmness under leadership for leading his badly shot up formation back to base.
The irony to me is that in In a Wonderful Life, George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) does not see how all his little actions in life added up to have such a big and positive impact on so many people. It takes an angel, Clarance, to show him what an impact his seemingly uneventful life has had on the community and its many inhabitants.
As Jimmy Stewart never discussed his WWII Combat Leadership role, I wonder if he ever fully understood how many pilots, navigators, bombardiers, engineers, waist, turret, and tail gunners in Jimmy Stewart’s squadron believe he is the reason they survived the war.
(In one pilot’s diary, he said the US Army Air Corps hated Jimmy Stewart leading Combat Bombing Missions over Germany. At the time the squadron’s bomb crews had a less than a 20 percent survival rate. The Army Air Corps assumed Stewart would be killed in action which would be bad publicity to the Air Corps. Thus, the Air Corps did not want Stewart to fly dangerous assignments.
The pilots in the squadron on the other hand, wanted Col. Jimmy Stewart to lead the most missions as he kept the bomber formation tight and well-navigated ~ which increased the odds of their getting home alive).
Perhaps, the power of the message from It’s a Wonderful Life is that Jimmy Stewart is the real-life persona of George Bailey the small-town banker and protagonist of the movie.
Whether it is the real-life Jimmy Stewart or the fiction George Bailey, let’s remember going into this Holiday season, as demonstrated in It’s A Wonderful Life, our smallest actions, words of encouragement, or comments of good cheer, can have outsized positive impacts both on our friends, our acquittances ~ and our community.
Yours in sharing the message and mission of George Bailey’s It’s a Wonderful Life Bank and Bankers for this wonderful season. Thank you and of course, all our Holiday Best~
~ Dan Bolen
