We've got a few bucks (alas, nothing to write home about) in the Columbia mutual funds, and in that capacity we've been getting notices lately telling us that most of those funds are in the process of being sold. Bank of America, which has owned them for a few years, is shipping them off to an outfit known as Ameriprise. B of A (slogan: "We've got the City of Portland by the grass roots") is keeping only the Columbia money market fund, which it's renaming after B of A.

Knocking the Columbia name off the money market fund brings an end to an era that saw its heyday nearly 30 years ago, when inflation was running rampant and interest rates were sky-high. When we went to sign up for our first mortgage in 1981, the interest rates being charged for a 30-year home loan were in the neighborhood of 16%. The prime rate that year was higher than 20%. Smaller financial institutions -- there were a whole cohort of them operating in the format of "savings and loan associations" -- couldn't survive in that environment. They were collecting tiny rates of interest on home loans that they had made years before, but when they needed cash, they had to pay much higher rates. And the rates they were offering depositors weren't anywhere the prime, and that didn't exactly bring moms and pops rushing in to park their money there. It was a downward spiral.

Meanwhile, here in Portland, a guy named Jerry Inskeep and his partner Jim Rippey had a small group of mutual funds, named Columbia Management, including a money market fund named Columbia Daily Income Company, which was paying double-digit rates of interest. Founded in the 1970's, it was one of the first money market mutual funds in the country. The minimum investment wasn't all that large, and so schoolteachers, secretaries, salespeople, firefighters, and other everyday Joes and Janes pulled lots of their nest eggs out of the banks and S&Ls and turned them over to CDIC. It was all the rage for several years, until the money markets finally calmed down and rates gradually came back down to earth.

The Columbia brand kept expanding, branching into an ever-larger group of mutual funds, which was eventually sold for $460 million to an East Coast outfit named Fleet in 1997. B of A took them over in 2004. Until now, the funds all retained the Columbia brand, and in fact Fleet renamed many of its own funds after Columbia as well.

Inskeep and Rippey retired, made men many times over, and have given much back as philanthropists. Inskeep died last summer, but apparently Rippey's still alive and kicking, giving gazillions to the U of O.

Ah, the 16% mortgage. Those were the days, kids.