Keep Bailing

From Pencils to Pagers to Blogs

If you have kids, you’ve heard them giggle, “You didn’t even have cell phones when you were a kid! Did you have electricity?” As I prepared to launch the Keep Bailing blog, I realized how lucky Greg and I are to have modern tools that Greg’s dad, Cal Rynerson, never even dreamed of when he started his bail bond business almost 40 years ago.

Cal Rynerson, became a licensed California bail agent in 1969 and started Rynerson Bail Bonds in 1971 (the same year Roy Tomlinson sent the first email). That was before personal computers, before fax machines, before cell phones, before websites. Cal did business the old fashioned way, with pens, paper, and face-to-face personal interaction. (Imagine that?)

With an office located directly across the street from the Santa Ana jail, he regularly had walk-in customers. He wrote 95% of his bonds for the local jail, often handling 10 or more bonds each day. Ten bonds may not sound like a lot, but each one requires a bail bond interview, paperwork, and a trip to the jail. At the time, the average Southern California bail bond was around $500.

Now, the average bail in So Cal is around $20,000. We’d be lucky to write ten bonds in a week! With the proliferation of internet and the glut of competition, Greg and I need to write bonds all over California. There’s no way we could do business the way Cal did 30 years ago. Read more »