Slipping Through Your Fingers: The Davis Family's Collapse
Chapter 4 of Shortfall is where everything falls apart. Not just for Walter Davis, but for every building and loan in Colorado Springs. And honestly, for the whole country.
The Depression gets worse
By December 1931, America had been in a depression for two years. Banks were failing. Factories sat idle. People wore clothes that turned to rags. Some ate every other day.
U.S. Steel cut wages by 10 percent. Henry Ford fired 75 percent of his workforce. By 1932, American factories were producing less than they had in 1913. Colorado, which had 181 millionaires in 1929, could count only 29 by 1932.
And President Hoover? He insisted nobody was going hungry. Those men selling apples on street corners? They were there because selling apples was more profitable than their old jobs. That was actually his argument.
Meanwhile, when the Soviet Union advertised 6,000 job openings, 100,000 Americans applied.
The first domino falls
On the night of December 28, 1931, a night watchman found Willis Sims slumped on a bench in the State Bank building with a bullet in his head. Sims was the president of the State Savings Bank and ran the Assurance Savings & Loan. He left no suicide note.
The local papers treated it as a total mystery. His friends were baffled. His wife said he’d seemed in good spirits that evening, reading a magazine after supper before asking her to drive him to work.
But here’s the thing. The papers insisted his suicide had nothing to do with his business. Colorado’s banking commissioner declared the books were clean. Nothing to worry about.
It took six months before the truth came out. Sims had caused the bank a $23,158 loss. His Assurance S&L was insolvent with liabilities of $179,000. He’d been embezzling from depositors, including a retired schoolteacher whose $6,000 he’d taken for his own account. He even stole $100 from his own brother’s brokerage firm.
And the really dark coda? Eight years later, that same brother Robert walked into the woods behind a fancy house in Broadmoor and shot himself.
The next two go down
Ed Sharer was next. When a jury found him guilty of fraud in April 1932, he didn’t stick around for sentencing. He and his wife fled to Raton, New Mexico, then on to Los Angeles. From somewhere on the run, he mailed his resignation letter to the state B&L commissioner.
His Dollar Building and Loan had a $140,000 shortfall. The books were so bad that proper credits and debits hadn’t even been entered. The association might not have had any legal officers at all. Nobody who ran it actually owned any stock in it.
Then came Fred Bentall and his Home Building and Loan. When an angry depositor pulled a gun on him and demanded his money, Bentall called the police. Then he told the press everything was fine. “Our little association was going along nicely,” he said.
It wasn’t. When Bentall was arrested for embezzlement, he confessed to juggling funds for years. The shortfall was $65,000. Then it was $92,000. Then the receiver said it would hit $100,000. Bentall’s response: “It is difficult to understand how that much could slip through your fingers without your receiving something for it.”
That line became the chapter’s title. And it’s kind of perfect.
The human cost
What makes this chapter hit hard isn’t the dollar amounts. It’s the people.
Bentall got 16 to 35 years in prison. His wife, Selma, died a year into his sentence. She was 53.
Ed Sharer’s wife and daughters came back from LA to find their house and furniture had been seized. They had to stay with friends.
Depositors waited in long lines outside the B&L offices and were turned away empty-handed. An elderly retired rail conductor who’d put in $5,000 at 7 percent interest was told he was actually a “stockholder” and couldn’t withdraw. A coal mining engineer who’d loaned $3,000 got the same runaround.
And the local newspapers? They mostly downplayed the whole thing. When the Dollar collapsed, the Gazette buried the story inside the paper. The Denver Post had to put it on the front page because the local press wouldn’t.
Meanwhile, the city is falling apart
Colorado Springs was changing in ways nobody expected. The trolley system was scrapped. Twenty thousand transients passed through in April alone. The Salvation Army served 2,780 meals in a single week. Even Spencer Penrose’s luxury Broadmoor hotel went bankrupt.
A tornado hit the west side of town in June 1932. For residents already watching their savings disappear, it felt like the universe was piling on.
By the end of the chapter, Echols lands on what “shortfall” really means. It’s not just a financial term. It’s a deficit of character. These B&L men were Sunday school teachers, community leaders, lodge brothers. The depositors who trusted them weren’t just losing money. They were losing faith in the people who were supposed to be looking out for them.
And that’s maybe the most painful thing about this whole story.
Book: Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Collapse, and a Hidden History of American Banking by Alice Echols (ISBN: 978-1-62097-304-2)