State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company is the largest provider of auto insurance in the U.S., the leading US personal property/casualty insurance company (by premiums), and the leading home insurer. If we lose it, I'm not sure that what we have left will be worth keeping.Learn more about corporations VOTING to rewrite our laws. In the world of stock scams and corporate greed and employees who jump ship at the whiff of a new offer, it is reassuring to know one can still feel that kind of connection to the place where we do our work. And it, large lumbering creature though it has become, still remembers us. I sent it because, to my surprise, I discovered I still care about the company. I didn't send that letter because I worried about my investments. was dying of throat cancer, my father, then retired, put some of his soup through a blender and gave it to Mr. As far as I know, my father never socialized with the upper echelons of the company I remember only once when I was ever in the house of a company vice president. My father was a shy man, ill at ease socially, but if he liked you, you might find on your doorstep one morning produce from his garden or quarts of vegetable-beef soup sealed at the top with a thin layer of fat. They believed that it cared about their future, and they cared, passionately, about its future. Their devotion to the company came not because they did not have the imagination or the power to look elsewhere but because, outside the church, it was the most humane institution in their lives. Most of my parents' friends were State Farm people, and many of their attitudes on political and social issues reflected what they thought might be good for the company. Ed Rust, the president and son of the man who had hired my father, came in on Saturdays and he wanted his mail. I came in on Saturdays primarily because Mr. My first job was in the State Farm mailroom. I remember my feet dangling from my mother's desk as she worked. My first independent act as a child was to take the bus to summer day camp at the company park. She always felt that she had gotten from the company a recognition she could not get from the university. She lasted a semester and then took a job in the bookkeeping department at State Farm.
You were to list three in the order of preference my mother chose mathematics, business and physical education. At that time, you did not choose a major you filled out a form requesting a major, and they gave you the one they thought appropriate. When my mother graduated from high school, she enrolled at Illinois State Normal University.
The first time my uncle went, the dentist removed half the teeth in his mouth a few weeks later he removed the others. Neither she nor her brother saw a dentist until they were teenagers. Three years later, my father was fighting in the Philippines when he returned home, he married my mother, and the company made room for both of them. Rust, the current president's grandfather, found room for him. They were not hiring at the time, but a Mr. His father suggested an old friend from the Masons, George Meherle, who had a small insurance company, one that occupied the second story of a building on Center Street. When he came to Bloomington, Ill., in 1940, he tried drawing ad copy for Livingston's Department Store, but the salary was so low he could barely live on it. He remembered because they were holding hands.Īs a young man, my father wanted to be an artist. He remembered my father's red '68 Bonneville convertible and my father and mother walking into the company's home office, a building that housed a couple of thousand employees. He reassured me that their computer was programmed to catch duplicate ballots. She always felt she had gotten from the company a recognition she could not get from the university.Īfter a couple of weeks, I got a letter back from a vice president of the company, to whom Mr. He'd worked at State Farm for 45 years, my mother for 41 they had devoted their lives to it, and it had repaid them in more than money. When I say "my father's company" I don't mean he owned it or had much say but that it was his in the way his garden was his, by dint of work and love. It was the first time I had written the president of a company I don't believe that stuff about going to the top, but the problem raised seemed serious, and this was my father's company. That was unusual so I wrote the president of the company, Ed Rust Jr., enclosing the extra copy. I have a bit of stock in State Farm Funds, and some months back I received two identical proxies for the same account.
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