By Victor Greto
GEORGETOWN – For a long time, Lynda Messick saw the world in black and white.
Most kids do – perhaps especially radical children of the volatile 1960s who eventually become bank CEOs.
Messick, 57, founded Community Bank of Delaware in Lewes four years ago after a decades-long career in banking.
“This is how you start a bank,” she says. “Get a lot of money from a lot of people and fill out reams of paperwork with regulators.”
She also is an artist who works in an array of media, from glass and fabric to paint and words.
And it’s all colorful.
Call it entering Oz at a later age.
After all, Messick didn’t see her favorite movie, “The Wizard of Oz,” in color until she hit the ripe old age of 32.
Messick’s workshop, set detached behind her and her husband Richard’s sprawling home and near a pond and a dock outside of Georgetown, shows her love of the 1939 MGM Technicolor fantasy through mementos and artifacts.
“Every year she dresses up as the Wicked Witch of the West,” says her best friend, Jean McCool. “She’s got a thing for the ‘Wizard of Oz.’ Green face paint and everything.”
The memorabilia is interrupted by her own stark drawings and colorful paintings. One drawing, of an old man walking by a pond, feels powerfully haunted by a spear-like black tree.
Yet, a small board nearby proclaims, “Pull up your big girl panties and deal with it.”
Her watercolors, squares of stained glass and quilts also decorate her home.
“My goal is to make all the art in here mine,” she says.
But her favorite art remains a passionate black on white – writing.
Messick recently got her first poem, “Waves of Seventeen,” published in The Broadkill Review, an online magazine edited by Milton resident Jamie Brown.
“Frankly, my idea of a bank CEO is not someone who can write that well,” Brown says.
You just can’t get away from that black and white.
But Messick’s inaugural poem changed Brown’s mind. He calls Messick’s first published poem “stunning.”
“It’s not an I-centered poem,” Brown says. “It’s a paean to lost youth, the cycle of life, the flow of generations – it’s all wrapped up in there. The subtext is the ocean, which is eternal. It amazed and delighted me.”
“No longer young or agile, long past the red bikini,” Messick wrote, “just/ A shore-bound woman haunted by a carefree girlish ghost/ Dancing in the breaking waves and calling – / Look at me,/ I’m seventeen, I own this beach./ Look at me.
A child of the 1960s, Lynda Messick (nee Ford) needed some looking after.
Only she didn’t know it.
Like her vision of a black and white Oz, so her understanding of the passions and solutions to the social – and her own personal – crises of the 1960s.
“I wanted to save the world,” she says. “The war was going on, and I didn’t agree with it.”
Nor did she agree with her father, despite his knack for art, a man with an eighth-grade education who worked for the highway department.
“Dad and I just didn’t get along,” she says.
So much so that she ran away from home at 16, after a confrontation with her father, who disapproved of a friendship she had made.
“My friend was Black, and she called, and I told him she was my friend – and it went downhill from there,” she says.
Messick locked herself in her bedroom; her father sat outside the door.
“I feared he’d hit me, so I just left,” she says – out the bedroom window. “I had virtue and right on my side.”
Luckily, she also had a car and $20. She didn’t see her father for another five years.
For a little while, she stayed with her brother and his wife in Little Creek near Dover, and then rented a room from a nearby family.
That turning point occurred after a childhood of discovery growing up in Hartley, reading voraciously, and running wild with three brothers and a sister – and eight years attending the Hartley Public School with the same 25 classmates.
Her older brother Ron taught her to read when she was 4. She recalls walking two miles to the Marydel bookmobile with her little brother Bill who came along to help her lug her “treasury” of volumes home.
Her father drew as a hobby, and got his daughter to do the same. She was good enough to almost get a scholarship to the Philadelphia College of Art, but her portfolio was stolen from the art classroom.
“It knocked me for a loop,” she says. “I had two years of work in that.”
But the college of art wanted graphic artists, and she never imagined she could make a living from it – or even earn accolades for any of her art, until four years ago, when she earned four blue ribbons and an honorable mention at the Delaware State Fair in Harrington.
When she began to attend Dover High School and its 400-student body, racial strife was endemic, she says.
“I hated it,” she says, so much so that she signed up to go to Kent County Vocational Technical School (now Kent Polytech) to become a cosmetologist.
Cosmetology didn’t work out, but she discovered a knack for managing.
Messick joined the Vocational Industrial Club of America, and became a national officer.
“It was life changing,” she says. “I was shy and I was put in social situations, and advisers pushed me into public speaking.”
Yet some things hadn’t changed. Stubbornness – independence? – for one.
Messick turned down a full needs-based scholarship to the University of Delaware because the school would not allow her to have a car as a freshman.
“Having lived on my own for years, there was no way I was giving up my lifeline, my car,” she says.
Instead, she attended the UD parallel program in Georgetown for nearly two years, got a job on the nightshift at Playtex in Dover, then attended Delaware State University for a year and a half. She became a sociology major.
She interrupted her education to marry Wayne Starkey, and moved to Philadelphia to become a housewife.
There, she furthered her personal education: “I emptied the libraries,” she says; three were within walking distance.
Two years later, the couple bought a farm just outside of Milford, complete with horses. They needed money, so a friend of Messick’s told her that a bank, WSFS, was looking for a part-time teller.
It turned into a full-time job by 1974. When she got pregnant in 1977, “The manager took it like a personal affront that I was pregnant,” she says.
Messick gave birth to her only daughter, Samantha, in 1978.
When she returned to work, she became a “floater,” until a friend at the bank started the First National Bank of Georgetown.
Beginning as head teller, she also took loan applications and opened new accounts. She was the bank’s president in charge of 12 branches and $300 million when she left in 2005 to start her own bank.
In between, she separated from her husband in 1980, and married Richard in 1986. Her son, Will, was born in 1988.
It’s her art that has taken over her “free time” – what’s left after working 60-hour weeks.
She makes stained glass to give to friends, including her best friend, Jean McCool, an architect. They met in 1995.
“We moved in next door to them in Georgetown,” McCool says. “I met her little boy first. Same age as our daughter, he came over with a butterfly net and wanted to know if the daughter wanted to catch butterflies with him. We’ve been friends ever since.”
McCool designed Messick’s Lewes Bank, and her husband built it.
She also owns some of Messick’s artwork.
“I’ve got a watercolor of grapes that she gave me six or seven years ago,” McCool says. “And a stained glass panel she did, with purples, greens and golds, my favorite colors.”
The couples do a lot together, and it’s a friendship that overcame a career move.
“When we were seriously looking at moving to Texas, one of the main reasons we didn’t is because of them,” McCool says. “Good friends are hard to find.”
Messick also has expanded her artistry into writing – and not just poetry.
“I’ve always written for work,” Messick says. “I’ve always liked it because I want to see if I can put words together to tell a story.”
She has written drafts of two novels, both of which take place during the 1960s and early 1970s.
One deals with racial tensions outside the Dover Playtex factory, where she had worked part-time when she was making her way through college.
The other is the story of a little girl who lost her mother and then befriends a black woman who had lost her family.
Her themes, of course, reflect the most important years of her life.
As for her father, whenever she saw him later in life, they never talked about “the incident,” she says.
Nor did they get close. An alcoholic, he died of liver disease in 1978.
“The last time I saw him I took my daughter with me,” she says. “She was four weeks old.”
Nothing needed to be said.
“He held her.”