1975 Summer: Hartford

One magic summer. Continue reading

By the spring of 1975 both Sue and I missed our friends back in Connecticut. From Michigan I got in touch with someone, probably Scott Otermat, at the Hartford to see if I could obtain employment there for the summer. The Individual Pensions Department was happy to have me back, and they paid me pretty well.

Sue also contacted her last employer in Hartford, the Little Aetna, and she was also able to obtain a temporary position with them.

The second semester at U-M ended in late April. Sue was between jobs. So, early in May we loaded up both cars with our clothes and other necessities, and we also brought Puca in his cage. I don’t remember anything about the trip. We certainly drove through Ohio and Pennsylvania. We did not encounter any memorable difficulties.

The area has changed a lot since 1975, but I think that we stayed somewhere in the above vicinity. Our building was on the west side of Wethersfield Ave.

We did not sublet our apartment in Plymouth. I don’t think that we even discussed it. Even paying two rents, we calculated that we would do a lot better economically than if we had remained in Plymouth and sat on our thumbs.

We probably stayed at least one night in the Hartford area before we found a furnished apartment. Sue’s family might have put us up. I don’t remember that we made any other arrangements. We found a very convenient place on Wethersfield Avenue in the south end of Hartford. There were quite a few apartment buildings there. Ours had a parking lot in the back.

Work: Sue did not talk much about her work at the Little Aetna before we left Connecticut, and I don’t remember her talking about it much during the summer of 1975 either.

I was welcomed back to the twenty-first floor by many smiling faces. I was assigned a desk right in the middle of the Individual Pensions department and provided with a teletype terminal right on my desk. It differed from the two in the computer room in two ways: 1) Its off-line storage device was film tape cassettes rather than paper tape. It could read and write much faster; 2) It was quiet enough that it did not disturb nearby employees. The ones in the computer room were very noisy.

I undertook some programming projects on the HP 3000, but I don’t remember any details. I had had no association with computers in the eight months that I had been gone, but it did not take me long to feel comfortable again. I was only twenty-seven years old; my memory still worked.

The big project for the summer involved Paul Gewirtz, who was by then a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries, Scott Otermat, me, and a few people from the Data Processing Department. Our department wanted DP to do a project on the mainframe. I am not certain, but we may have wanted them to replace the very flawed system that was still being used to produce the annual reports for the policyholders.It is described here.

Scott, Paul, and I met a few times before we talked to the people from DP. We had our needs already outlined on paper including the formulas for the calculations. We had laid out what data the entry screens had to collect. We gathered samples of the output from Carolyn DesRochers’s area.

I have been in a hundred or more such meetings. In subsequent years I was on the other side of the table. That is, people were explaining to me what they wanted the computing system to do for them. Only one or two of those requests were as well documented as ours was at the first meeting.

DP assigned two people to our project, one female and one male. The woman had some experience. It was, I think, the first project for the guy. In the first meeting we did not get as far as showing them the materials that we assembled. We first had to explain to them what individual pensions were and how they were handled at the Hartford. The only thing that the committee agreed upon at the end of our first meeting, which lasted for a couple of hours, was that we needed more meetings.

After that we met weekly, I think on Tuesdays. The three of us continued to do almost all of the talking. After five or six weeks of this, the DP lady informed us that we needed to do a presentation for one of the vice-presidents to evaluate the project. We were happy to hear this. Although we were disgusted by all the time that we had already put into the project, it seemed as if it was beginning to roll.

The DP lady assigned aspects of the presentation to each of us. I don’t remember who played which role. We even had a rehearsal. The meeting attended by veep was not that memorable either. We gave out little talks. The DP guy asked a couple of questions. We all shook hands and went back to work.

A few days later Paul or Scott heard from the DP lady that the presentation had been favorably received. She also said that we would meet the next Tuesday to begin the next stage. She wanted all three of us to attend. Paul, for one, did not see why his presence was still required, but he came anyway.

That meeting was a real eye-opener for all three of us. The DP woman announced that we needed to put together information to justify that our project was worthy of a feasibility study that would be conducted by a different group of people from the DP department. The three of us from pensions were gobsmacked. We told her that we thought that our committee had been doing a feasibility study. That was why our documentation was so detailed. If we were not assessing the feasibility, what had we been doing? Furthermore, if the VP was not assessing the feasibility of our request, what was he doing?

She said that the VP from the DP department was impressed with what we had done. It was an easy decision for him to proceed with the project. She may have understood how little this praise meant to us, but she insisted that the next step was definitely to request a feasibility study and make a separate presentation. We had to be prepared to meet the department’s standards for such a request. After some more venting of our frustration we scheduled another meeting.

Paul, Scott, and I met the next day. Paul had just one question for me: “Could you write this code?”

The line printer could at least handle wide paper.

I said that the coding would not be that difficult. However, if we used the HP 3000, the data entry on teletypes (as opposed to mainframe terminals or coding sheets keyed in elsewhere) would be kludgy, and I had no access to a printer capable of producing the output.

At the next meeting Paul swept aside the agenda provided by the female DP employee and said that he wanted to consider another approach. He wanted to know if it were possible for a few people from our department to be given a portion of the disk and whatever other resources were needed to produce the required output. He emphasized, “Data processing would not need to do any of the system design or programming. We just need access to the machine and a programming language that we can use.”

This was, of course, out of the question. She would not even ask her bosses if that was a possible approach. We needed to go through the established protocols. That ended the meeting.

When he got back to Individual Pensions Paul called one of the officers in the DP department and informed him that our department was dropping the request. I don’t know if anything was ever done about this.

Sports: If there was a Mean Reserves softball team in 1975, I don’t remember whether I played or not. I do remember playing in a few practices. My kneecap felt fine. I may have lost a step on the basepaths, but there was no pain. The biggest problem was that I seemed to have lost my league-leading swing. I felt as if I was swinging the same. I could still direct the ball to right field, but I could no longer consistently hit line drives. I found this very frustrating.

I also remember one practice softball game in which, for whatever reason, I was playing shortstop without a glove. Someone hit a line drive over my head and to my left. I leapt toward it and extended my bare left hand. I stopped its flight long enough that I was able to catch it with both hands before it hit the ground. It was a spectacular play.

I also remember that I was playing left field once when there was a man on third with one out. The batter hit a fly down the third base line. I caught the ball on the run and immediately threw it toward the catcher as hard as I possibly could. As I had anticipated, the man on third tagged up and tested my rag arm. The ball reached the catcher in time, but something went wrong. I don’t remember what.

So, my Hartford softball career ended with my perfect record of never having thrown out a runner intact.

There in four.

John Sigler and Jim Cochran continued their golf partnership. One week I substituted for Jim in the Men’s League. I was matched up against a guy whom I had narrowly defeated in a very tough match the year before. I had to give him one stroke this time, which was not at all reflective of our abilities in 1975. He was at the top of his game, and I had played little or no golf since breaking my kneecap a year earlier.

The first hole was a medium-length par four. My opponent hit a nice drive and a good iron shot. He had a long putt for a birdie. Meanwhile I was spraying the ball from the rough on one side of the fairway to the other. After four miserable shots my ball was on the fringe perhaps a foot from the green. I decided to putt, and I stroked the most memorable shot of my entire golf career. The ball rolled and rolled and then dove into the hole.

This fluky shot seemed to ruin my opponent’s composure. He three-putted, which meant that we halved the hole. Thereafter, he played better than I did, but only by a little. I lost a couple of holes badly, but, even though I had to give a stroke, I also won a couple of holes on which he made mistakes. We ended up tying the match. John won his match, and we won the team match to earn 2.5 out of three points.

I played a few rounds of golf on weekends with John and Norm Newfield, but I don’t think that I played very well. I remember thinking that my athletic prowess, such as it was, reached its zenith the day that I broke my kneecap during the previous summer.

G&T or AC?

Other: I have few other distinct memories of the summer. I remember cooling off with gin and tonics. The apartment did not have air conditioning. I knew no one in Connecticut who had air conditioning until years later.

Jim Hawke and I became good friends that summer. We ate lunch together most days. Occasionally we went out to a nearby restaurant.

There were two negative and bizarre notes. One morning I placed my wallet in the inside coat pocket of my brown corduroy jacket. I walked out to Greenie, parked as always in the apartment’s lot. I opened the car door, took off my jacket, and tossed it on the passenger seat.

When I arrived at the Hartford I seized my jacket and, before I even put it on, I noticed that the wallet was missing. I searched the car and found nothing. I immediately drove back to the apartment. It only took about ten minutes. I searched the parking lot and retraced my steps to the apartment. I never found it.

My hair was much shorter.

There was not much money in it, and I did not have any credit cards. I had to replace my driver’s license, of course, but the biggest loss was my green military ID card. On it was the only extant picture of me with the ultra-short military Class A haircut. Sue said that I looked like a convict in that picture.

One evening while I was driving from work to the apartment my back began to itch. It soon became almost more than I could bear. Then I began to feel feverish and weak. It was, thank goodness, only a short drive.

There are at least 125 species of wolf spiders in the United States.

Once inside I peeled off my coat and shirt and looked at my back in the bathroom mirror. Apparently a spider or an insect of some sort had somehow gotten in my shirt. There were a dozen or so bites. I searched through my clothing, but I did not encounter my assailant.

I took a shower, lay down, and immediately fell asleep. I awoke an hour or so later, and I felt better. By the next day I was fine.

1972-1974 Connecticut: The People

Friends, memorable acquaintances, and relatives. Continue reading

I met a large number of people working at The Hartford. Here is an alphabetical list of the ones that I remember. At the end are a few people whom I remember only by first name. If no department is mentioned, the person worked in Life Actuarial. If no specific responsibility is mentioned, it is safe to assume that the individual was an actuary or actuarial student.

  • The only think that I remember about Larry Abbott is that he always came to work without a suit coat. He kept a sports coat near his desk to wear to meetings in other departments. I think that he worked in Group Actuarial.
  • I did not know Pat Adams very well. I remember criticizing her pitiful sneeze in the study room. I also remember that she took—and passed actuarial exams two at a time.
  • Lou Aiello was a clerk in Life Actuarial. He might have worked for Alan Gibb. He batted .500 (1 for 2) for the Mean Reserves, and his hit was the most legendary in the history of the team.
  • At some point I sat near Barb Bednarz. I think that it might have been when I came back for the summer of 1975. I remember talking to her about Monty Python and explicating my theory that a human being trained from birth to run on all fours could win Olympic medals.
  • Paul Campbell arrived after I did. He was a Variable Annuity actuary. He played once or twice for the Mean Reserves softball team.
  • Jim Cochran came to Hartford in 1973. He and his wife Ann were close friends. They taught me a subset of the rules to Sheepshead. Jim played on both Mean Reserves teams and took my place on the golf team. He was the outsider in the 345 Club carpool. I keep in touch with him via email. Some people called him “Crow”. I think it had something to do with the original spelling
  • Tom Corcoran has been my close friend for over forty-eight years. Having grown up in the Boston area, in the seventies he still pronounced his last name in almost exactly the same way that Jim Cochran pronounced his. Tom, who participated in nearly every aspect of my life at the Hartford, married Patti Lewonczyk on 1/07/77.
  • Sue Comparetto worked as a clerk for nearly every insurance company in Hartford. We got married on 12/08/12, when it finally made sense for tax purposes. She took the photos for the Mean Reserves softball album.
  • Carolyn DesRochers was a supervisor in the Individual Pensions Department. I worked with her while attempting to determine the source of the problems with the annual reports for the policyholders. She was married to Chris.
  • Chris DesRochers1 started, I think, a year before I did. I succeeded him in the role of preparing a monthly report for Jan Pollnow. He was married to Carolyn. I think that I helped them move.
  • Paul Engstrom played both years for the Mean Reserves softball team, but I don’t have any clear memories of him.
  • Wayne Foster ran the payday pool. He had been a communications specialist in Vietnam. He was awarded a Bronze Star for completing an international phone call.
  • Don Francis was the #2 man in the Life Actuarial Department. He played softball with us a few times, but I did not know him very well.
  • Tom Garabedian worked in the Group Actuarial Department. He was one of the best players in both basketball and softball.
  • Paul Gewirtz was the senior actuary in the Individual Pensions area. I think that he became a fellow of the Society of Actuaries while I was at the Hartford. He made a memorable contribution to the lore of the Mean Reserves softball team.
  • Alan Gibb was a supervisor in Life Actuarial. I did not have much interaction with him.
  • My only contact with Bob Goode, a top executive, was a very nerve-wracking phone call during my short period working for Mike Winterfield.
  • I am not sure where Les Gubkin worked. He somehow found out about the Mean Reserves and joined the softball team in 1973.
  • Jim Hawke began working at the Hartford in 1973. We soon became close friends, and we still stay in contact by email. He played a little softball for the team, but he is most famous for the picnic with Ethan, Sue, and me on Bunyan Mountain. He also took over my bedroom in the 345 Club and my spot in the carpool.
  • I remember Jim Housholder, but the only conversation that I recall clearly was when he explained about a new product he was working on—a whole life policy with a death-exclusion rider.
  • Kevin Kirk worked in Individual Pensions. He and his wife came over to have supper and watch The Wizard of Oz with Sue and me in East Hartford. Kevin played on both the basketball and softball teams.
  • Donna Kolakowski was one of the youngest clerks. She attended some of our events. I went to lunch with her and Jim Hawke a few times.
  • Jim Kreidler once called me a jock, one of the greatest compliments that I ever received. He wimped out in the epic tennis match of 8/18/73. He went to England to work there.
  • Patti Lewonczyk2 was a supervisor in Individual Pensions. We worked together on proposals. She married Tom Corcoran. They went on vacations with Sue and me in the twenty-first century.
  • Frank Lord3 played on the softball team. He might have also played basketball, but his best sport was tennis. He was the first person that I knew who drove a BMW. I saw him in 1988 at the Mark Twain House when I won the story contest.
  • I think that Mel Majocha worked at the Hartford somewhere. She went out with Tom Herget. I went to her parent’s house for a cookout once. I will never forget how she said goodbye to me.
  • Dave McDonald was Secretary (boss) of the Individual Pensions Department. He asked me to investigate the problem producing the annual statements for customers.
  • Gail Mertan went out with Tom Garabedian. I don’t know where (or if) she worked.
  • Marsha Monico went out with Tom Herget. I don’t know where (or if) she worked.
  • Bill Mustard played golf with John Sigler, Norm Newfield, and me. I think that he worked in IT at the Hartford.
  • Norm Newfield was a tremendous athlete. He worked in Human Resources. He played on a flag football team in New Britain, and he participated in my football pool. He was part of our foursome in golf and an opponent in the golf league.
  • Scott Otermat4 was my supervisor in the Individual Pensions Department. His favorite author was Ayn Rand. He had a dog named Cinders. I helped him move to Bristol. He liked to work on his MG. His full name was actually Scott C. Otermat, Jr. I tried to get him to promise to name his first-born Scott C. Otermat The Third so that his initials would be the same as his first name.
  • Damon Panels lived across the street from the tower building. He occasionally gave a soirée in his apartment. Sue and I went to see him years later in Bloomfield, CT.
  • Tony Piccerillo was a recent graduate of Trinity College who worked in Individual Pensions.
  • Jan Pollnow hired me. He was a star play on both athletic teams. He was my last boss before I moved to Plymouth.
  • Russ Pollnow was Jan’s brother. I don’t know where he worked but he played on the 1974 softball team.
  • Parker Prine worked with Norm Newfield in Human Rellations. He played in the football pool and won one week. Tom Herget accused me of making him up and keeping the winnings for myself.
  • Ann Randazzo was Don Sondergeld’s secretary and the unofficial office manager of the Life Actuarial Department.
  • I don’t know where Keith Reynolds worked. He played softball and went to bars with us.
  • Bob Riley was a supervisor in Life Actuarial. He was Sue’s boss and a first baseman on the 1974 team.
  • I don’t know where Charlie Robinson worked. He played on the softball team.
  • David Rowe was an exchange student from England who worked as an actuary in Life Actuarial. The four bases on a softball diamond confounded him. Traffic on roundabouts in England goes clockwise.
  • Gerry Schwartz, an employee of the Operations Research Department, had the dubious honor of managing the HP-3000 computer system.
  • John Sigler was my golf and tennis partner. He also played on all of the Mean Reserves teams.
  • Fred Smith played on the basketball teams. He was famous for being able to read paper tapes.
  • Don Sondergeld was VP and Actuary (big cheese). He never berated me publicly for insulting his wife. In 2021 he is still an active member of the Hartford Bridge Club.
  • Mike Swiecicki5 left the Hartford before I did. I remember him as being a phenomenal player at games that required hand-eye coordination.
  • Laurie Weisbrot (a guy) worked in Group Actuarial. When he passed the tenth exam he purchase a vanity plate: LRW-FSA.
  • Mike Wheeler played on the softball team both years.
  • Jo White was a senior clerk. She played a lot of golf, mostly at the Buena Vista Golf Course in West Hartford.
  • Ron Wittenwyler played third base on our softball team in 1973. His wife Jane came to some games.
  • First names only:
    • Bill: Norm Newfield’s partner in the golf league;
    • Jackie: Sue’s landlady in Rockville;
    • Lisa: who worked for Don Francis;
    • Paula: a clerk who worked for Patti Lewonczyk and whom I made cry;
    • Ray: a supervisor in Individual Pensions;
    • Ron: who married Jackie.
    • Tad: a clerk who worked for Alan Gibb.

Sue Comparetto had a million friends. I have undoubtedly forgotten more than I remember. Here are a few that I met during this two-year period.

  • Marlene Boulerice was with Gary Gudinkas at the time. Sue went to high school with her.
  • Diane DeFreitas was Sue’s roommate in East Haddam.
  • Gary Gudinkas was a short guy who was with Marlene. Sue knew him from high school.
  • Karen Peterson worked at Travelers Equity Sales with Sue and went on the trip to Alaska with her.
  • Diane Robinson6 worked at Travelers Equity Sales with Sue and went on the trip to Alaska with her. We visited Diane a few times at her home in Vermont.
  • Pat and Stan Slatt had a very large python and a boa constrictor.
  • Bob and Susan Thompson had a dachshund and a very old Plymouth.
  • Sue knew Evelyn Umgelter from high school.

It took me years to sort out Sue’s relatives on her mother’s side. I’m only listing first names. Except for Effy, their last name in 1972-74 was Locke. Almost all of them lived within a mile or two of Sue’s childhood home on North Maple in Enfield. Sue was older than all of her cousins and siblings, and I was older than she was. So, I am pretty sure that all of the people of Sue’s generation were living at home during this period.

  • Bob was the only one of Effy’s brother who left Enfield. He moved to western Michigan and worked as an engineer. Sue and I visited his family in the nineties.
  • Carol7 was Bob’s wife.
  • Charlie8 was Effy’s brother. He was an electrician who did work for Sue’s Father. He lived within a couple of miles.
  • Chet9 was also Effy’s brother. He was buried in his military uniform. He lived within a couple of miles.
  • Effy Slanetz10 was Sue’s mother.
  • Elsie11 was Chet’s wife.
  • Gene12 was Charlie’s wife.
  • Glenn was a son of Ted and Judy and therefore Sue’s first cousin. He lived a few miles away in a new house
  • Jimmy was a son of Ted and Judy and therefore Sue’s first cousin.
  • Judy was Ted’s wife. They lived across the street from the Slanetz home.
  • Molly13 was Sue’s Grandmother and Effy’s mother. She lived in a room attached to Ted and Judy’s house. She loved to play bingo.
  • Paul was Chet’s son. a grave-digger, and Sue’s first cousin.
  • Patti14 and Cathy were Charlie’s daughters and therefore Sue’s first cousins. I did not know them very well.
  • Susie was Ted and Judy’s daughter and Sue’s first cousin.
  • Ted was Effy’s youngest brother and therefore Sue’s uncle.
  • Timmy was Chet’s son and Sue’s first cousin.

In contrast, I am not sure that I met any of Sue’s uncles, aunts, and cousins on her father’s (Slanetz) side during this period. I got to meet a lot of them at a Slanetz family reunion that was held years later at Sue’s family house.

  • Art15 was Sue’s dad. He farmed when Sue was little. When I knew him, he had a corporation with several irons in the fire—construction, trash, water, and who knows what else.
  • Betty was Sue’s youngest sister.
  • Don was Sue’s only brother.
  • Karen was Sue’s younger sister. She was older than Betty and Don.
  • Margaret16 Davis was Art’s sister. She had three children.
    • Mark was the brains of the family. I saw him once in Houston, and he has visited our house occasionally.
    • Robby still lives in Enfield in 2021.
    • I met Diane only briefly. I think that she in South Carolina in 2021.

  1. Chris DesRochers died in 2013. His obituary can be read here.
  2. Patti and Tom Corcoran married while I was coaching debate in Michigan in the late seventies. They had two children, Brian and Casey, who in 2021 both live in Burlington, VT, with their respective families. Patti died in 2011. My tribute to her can be read here.
  3. Frank Lord died on July 3, 2020. His obituary is here.
  4. Scott Otermat left the Hartford in 1980. He died in 2016. His obituary is here.
  5. Mike Swiecicki left the Hartford before I did. He died in 2015 after a twenty-five year career as an actuary with CAL PERS. His obituary is here.
  6. Diane Robinson died in 2009
  7. Carol Locke died in 2018. Her obituary is here.
  8. Charlie Locke died in 2017. His obituary is here.
  9. Chet Locke died in 2004. His obituary is here.
  10. Elsie Locke died in 2018.
  11. Effy Slanetz died in 2002. Her obituary is here.
  12. Gene Locke died in 2018.
  13. I think that Molly Locke died in 1990.
  14. Patti Locke Caswell died in 2019. Her obituary is here.
  15. Art Slanetz died in 2017. His obituary is here.
  16. Margaret Davis died in 2010. Her obituary is here.

1972-1974 Connecticut: Working at Hartford Life

My short career at Hartford Life. Continue reading

The Hartford has two adjacent buildings. I worked in the tower.

Needless to say, I spent the first half of my first working day at the Hartford1 filling out forms. Then I was told that I would be working in the Group Department. My supervisor for the afternoon was the woman who kept score at basketball games. However, the next day I was reassigned to the twenty-first floor, the home of Life Actuarial, Individual Pensions, and Special Risk Underwriting.

The insurance world had advanced somewhat while I was in the Army. The hordes of clerks with huge Fridens on their desks were still there, but there were a few electronic calculators as well. In 1972 electronic calculators required electricity, and cost as much as the Fridens, about $1,000 each, roughly half the price of my car, Greenie! The companies took strong measures to keep them from being stolen.


Mike Winterfield
Mike Winterfield

My specific assignment was to assist Mike Winterfield,2 an actuary who had joined the Hartford when his old company (in St. Louis, I think), which specialized in variable annuities3, was purchased by ITT and folded into the Hartford. He had a vacation planned, but first he needed to submit a business plan for the VA product to his bosses at the Hartford.

My recollection is that ITT required a return on investment (ROI) of 15 percent for all of its subsidiaries. So, the algorithms that Mike developed for the business plan fixed the return ratio at .15 and juggled the other assumptions to make it work. There were no spreadsheet programs available yet in 1972.4 To evaluate the assumptions Mike designed an accountant’s worksheet with about eleven columns and I don’t know how many rows, probably one for each year. I only helped worked on this for a few weeks; I don’t remember many details. He would change one or two assumptions, I make all through the calculations to determine how much capital infusion the infant product needed to reach the desired rate of return.

These columnar worksheets were ubiquitous at insurance companies in the early seventies.

Someone else would check my work and put little red dots beside each number that had been verified. This approach, of course, meant that all of the clerical work in the department had to be done twice, but when programs were written to replace the accountant’s sheets, nothing replaced the red dots.

Finally, after many iterations everything seemed to be in order. The plan was submitted, and Mike went on vacation. A day or two later I had the dubious distinction of being quizzed tin a three-way phone call about the plan. The interrogators were Don Sondergeld,5 Vice President and Actuary, and Bob Goode, a high muckety-muck of the Hartford. They asked me several questions that stumped me. I disclosed what I did know, which was limited to how each cell on the worksheet was calculated. I am pretty sure that this information was not what they were looking for. Before I hung up I had to wipe off about a quarter cup of perspiration from the receiver for the telephone, which I shared with Sue Comparetto,6 the only clerk with an electronic calculator.

I have always had an aversion to phones. My VA experiences did not help.

The only other duty that I remember from my time in the VA area was calculating proposals for salesmen. They told us how much money prospects wanted to invest and when they wanted to receive the annuities. I, of course, had no clue what the market would do in the interim. So, we made an assumption of a specific interest rate, perhaps 6 percent. The sales agents would occasionally call to complain that a competitor’s proposal assumed a higher return that yielded a higher annuity amount or lower premium. I tried to explain that any company could in theory use any interest rate, but the Hartford’s policy was to use the same rate on all proposals. The salesmen often heard the first part, but not the second. They would try to pressure me into giving them a better quote. I never gave in, but once again the phone got drenched with sweat.

Hartford's insurance companies had hundreds of these.
Hartford’s insurance companies had hundreds of these.

For some reason I kept getting moved around. My recollection is that in my first six weeks or so at the Hartford, I sat in five or six different grey steel desks. All of the actuarial students were rotated from one area to another, but nobody moved as much as I did.

My next stop was in the Individual Pensions Department. The name was a little misleading. The purchasers of the product were small businesses, not individuals. For some of the prospective customers it worked out better to buy individual policies for each eligible employee than one group policy.

My first assignment there was to take over maintenance of the program that was used to calculate proposals for the pension plans. An actuary named Fred Smith had been doing this, but the bosses had more important assignments for him. The Hartford offered several varieties of them from single-premium fixed interest to variable annuities. The proposal program could use any interest rate to generate the premiums for a fixed-benefit plan or the benefits for a fixed-cost plan.

TT

This program ran on a computer that was located not at the Hartford but at Kaman Aerospace. The Hartford had its own computers, of course, but their use was jealously guarded by the Data Processing Department. Many actuaries were quite capable of doing the programming, but it was very difficult to get access to the mainframes. So, the Actuarial Department rented time from two different companies. Kaman had an HP 2000A; Tymshare had a DEC PDP-10. Kaman was cheaper, but Tymshare had more features. We used interpreted BASIC on both systems.

Each punched row on the tape contained one byte (character) of information. Fred Smith could read these tapes!

We gained access to the remote systems using a teletype machine connected to a phone line. Our data was stored on paper tape. I think that we stored the programs on the remote hard drive, but I might be mistaken. The teletype had the ability to take information from the keyboard and/or the tape reader. Output was printed on an 8.5″ continuous roll in 10-pitch Courier at a breathtaking ten characters per second. The unit also including a tape-punching device. Because it made a lot of noise when printing or punching, the teletype was isolated in a very small room, maybe 4′ x 8′.

Later a second unit was added. It did not have a tape device, but it printed at thirty characters per second using a round disk. It was not a “daisy wheel”; the disk was metallic and was perpendicular to the page. People came from every floor and from the Hartford’s other building just to watch that baby hum. To many it seemed magical that it could print so quickly and accurately.

Pamphlet

The pension proposal program was in good shape when Fred turned it over to me. There was an up-to-date listing, and Fred had inserted a lot of comments. I had to learn BASIC, but a thin handbook of the commands was available. BASIC was similar enough to MAD, the only language that I had ever coded in, that I mastered it fairly quickly.

The first thing that I did was stupid. I removed all the comments to make the program more efficient. In my defense:

  1. I documented what the program did did on a separate document referencing the line numbers.
  2. Programs in those days were so slow that removing the comments actually did make it slightly more efficient.
  3. My one and only programming class was six years earlier, and Господин Muchnik never taught us about documentation.
  4. I had no training for this job.
  5. Shut up; I already admitted that it was stupid.

Patti Lewonczyk7 was in charge of producing the proposals. A girl named Paula, who was, I think, fresh out of high school, did most of the data entry. One time something went wrong. I don’t remember what the problem was, but I fixed it easily. However, I had to ask Paula to run the program again for one plan—perhaps a fifteen-minute job. She got very upset and started crying. Evidently she thought that I was yelling at her. I told her that she did nothing wrong, but she was still very distraught.

My second big project in Individual Pensions involved the reports that were sent annually to the companies that had purchased one of these products. A company in New York had developed a software program to produce these reports. A group of clerks led by Carolyn DesRochers filled out coding sheets with the current census information for each plan a month or so before the anniversary. This information was supplied to the Hartford by the customer.

Same-day service with the dog.

How, you may ask, did we get the coding sheets to the software company? Someone from the Hartford transported a box of them every day to the bus depot downtown. A Greyhound bus then brought them to New York where someone from the vendor picked them up. The vendor’s software program then processed the data and created the report on attractive formatted paper and sent it to Hartford in a box on another bus. Someone from the mailroom picked it up at the bus station and delivered it to Carolyn.

Dave McDonald’s8 title was only Secretary, but that indicated that he was the top man in the department. He summoned me to his office one day to tell me that for some reason the program to produce the annual reports was no longer producing accurate information. The clerks had been observed whiting out the numbers printed on the reports by the computer and inserting corrected numbers using typewriters. This required a great deal of time and produced ugly reports that reflected badly on the company and especially the department.

I Iinterviewed Carolyn and a clerk or two about it. I also talked with someone knowledgeable at the vendor. It turned out that the vendor only allowed for a few choices of interest rate when setting up a policy. This caused no problems for a while, but by 1972 interest rates had started to rise, and the Hartford was quoting (and selling) plans with higher interest rates than the program could handle. The proposal program that Patti’s group ran calculated the interest using standard compound interest formulas. The report program, however, did not calculate interest; it looked it up on tables that someone had populated when the system was written. Evidently the designer of the program did not know the actuarial formulas, and no one had foreseen the significant increases in interest rates. I asked my contact at the vendor if their programmers could fix this. He was not sure that anyone would know how to address it.

I reported back to Dave McDonald all that I had discovered. He was gobsmacked. I never found out what was done about it, and I did not ask who had approved the purchase of a service with such a severe and obvious flaw in it. I designed thousands of programs over the subsequent five decades. I took some wrong turns, but I never made this big of a mistake.

The other task that I remember concerned lapse rates. In determining a reasonable premium for any life insurance product—all the pension plans had an insurance component—it is important to account for the possibility that whoever pays the premium might allow the policy to lapse. In general, there are quite a few lapses in the first year of life insurance policies and much lower rates later. On these policies there were inordinately high lapse rates for the first five or six years. I was asked to examine a sampling of the policies to determine what the causes were.

I discovered that most of the alleged lapses were not caused by the customers’ failure to pay the premiums. Instead, the sales agents were arranging “attained-age conversions”. The agent went to an existing customer and told them that the Hartford was now offering a new product that would be a better deal for them. He would request a quote from Patti for converting the plan. This was done by lapsing the policies on the old plan and issuing new policies based upon the current age of the policyholders. The agent was right. The customer who converted received either lower premiums or higher benefits.

Everyone (except the Hartford) profited from attained-age conversions.

It was a win-win-win-lose situation. The customer and its employees got a better plan, and the agent got a first-year commission on the same plan. Since the first-year commission on many life insurance policies is more than 100% of the first annual premium, this was a real windfall for the agents. Moreover, since the Hartford had four or five individual pension products, an agent could pull the same trick more than once. Quite a few agents had been doing this for years. The Individual Pension products were yielding good sales but no profits.

I know that there were fairly high level meetings that involved Dave, Paul Gewirtz, the actuary in our department, and the Sales Department. The sale people were adamant that this technique should not be taken away from them. Evidently some of the agents who used it were very influential. The problem was not resolved by the time that I left, but in the end my understanding is that the Hartford (and most other companies) stopped selling these products.

The A model of the HP 2000 could support 16 users, the F could manage 32. Rumors claimed that some employees on the twenty-first floor had found the built-in game programs, including a nifty one in which two people could call plays for opposing teams in a football game.

At some point someone put me in charge of the computer room and the computers. This did not involve much responsibility, but no one was suspicious if I spent time in there during slack periods. I wrote a program to produce sheets for a football pool. Each week I selected twenty competitive college games and five programs. At the bottom of the page I listed my Bottom Ten college teams. I think that I charged $1 per entry, and the person with the highest score won the whole pot, which was between $20 and $30. I might have gotten in trouble for this, but the spirit of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” prevailed. I won the jackpot once.

On paydays there was also a pool that was run by Wayne Foster. At first employees bought tickets, and the person whose ticket was drawn won the prize. I bought a ticket every week, but I never won. Sue Comparetto won the pool once, and she tried to use the money to buy a round of drinks at the Shoreham Hotel, the site of the customary Friday night get-together of employees from the twenty-first floor. Since she was almost certainly the poorest person in attendance, the offer was rejected and, in fact, roundly disparaged as contrary to the spirit of the payday pool.

After Connecticut instituted a lottery, the rules were changed so that half of the pot was used to buy lottery tickets. The lucky winner got both the remaining cash and the tickets. I never participated in this, and it surprised me that any actuary would have anything to do with lottery tickets, which have a worse payoff than the numbers racket.

Don Sondergeld.
Don Sondergeld.

At some point Don Sondergeld assigned a special project to Tom Corcoran and me. The company that marketed the software for the APL programming language wanted to sell the Hartford the rights to use the language on the mainframe. The plan was to install in the handful of departments in which actuaries worked expensive APL terminals that were connected to the mainframe. A certain portion of the computer’s disk space would be allocated to the APL users. Something may have been done about sharing memory, too.

The advantage was that the actuaries would gain access to the computing power of the mainframe without being subject to the rules of the Data Processing Department. In those days tying to get new software projects approved and implemented by the DP people was an incredibly time-consuming task. The standard joke was that if you wanted to know how long a project would take, double the estimated amount and use the next higher unit. So, one hour meant two days; six months meant twelve years, etc.

APL programs require far less (in terms of number of characters) of computer code to make the same calculations. However, the APL representatives were unable to give us an example of a project that was relevant to Life Actuarial or Individual Pensions that APL could handle significantly better than Fortran or BASIC. It would be totally inappropriate for the two big projects that I had worked on. Both required extensive use of string variables. In APL a string of characters was treated as an array rather than a different type of simple variable. To me this seemed like a fatal flaw. Tom was more enthusiastic than I was. He liked the simplicity, and he had heard good things about it elsewhere.

I am pretty sure that the Hartford never purchased the product. This project was probably doomed from the start; my specialty was debating on the negative. Selling me on anything is very difficult.

The bills from Kaman and Tymshare produced a strong reaction. The Hartford bought its own HP 3000 computer and charged the Operations Research Department, not the Data Processing Department, with its management. A guy named Gerry Schwartz was put in charge of the new machine. Its operating system supported both BASIC and Fortran. The connections were over telephone lines using teletypes. Users in several departments brought over some simple BASIC programs that they had been using on Kaman’s HP 2000, and things went quite well for a while.

After my stint in Individual Pensions I was rotated to work for Jan Pollnow. My primary responsibility was to produce a monthly report, which my predecessor Chris DesRochers9 (husband of Carolyn), had been generating using a set of columnar accounting sheets.

The Hartford got its very own HP 3000.

I decided to write a BASIC program on the HP 3000 to replicate Chris’s sheets. As I added more code it got slower and slower. Eventually it brought the system to its knees. I had to set it off to run when I left at 5:00 and hope that it finished before I arrived fifteen hours later.

Gerry Schwartz blamed this on BASIC. He said that I should convert this new program to Fortran. Since I had never used Fortran, it took a while to do this. The conversion helped a little, but it still was horribly slow. Then Gerry suggested that I use “the segmenter” on the Fortran code. This involved breaking the program into pieces. This was a new concept for me, but at least there was printed documentation. I don’t remember any details of this implementation, but segmenting did improve the performance to a level of barely tolerable.

I spent a great deal of time getting this to work, but it made the monthly task much easier. The program ran without problems for a few months, but then one month’s data produced erroneous results. The problem was easy to fix, but it was a black eye for the department, and Jan called me on the carpet for it. As usual, no one checked my work.10

A few months before my departure Jim Cochran was brought in to our area to work with me. I made sure that he understood both the technical and operational aspects of the program before i started my next adventure.

* * *

I retain a few other vivid memories of my days working at the Hartford. People with a “coffee cart” came around every day at about 10 a.m. to sell coffee, donuts, and other pastries. This prompted a coffee break that became longer and longer over the weeks. Eventually the bosses warned everyone not to turn it into a floor party

I cannot remember the exact time that the buzzer rang to indicate that it was closing time. I wager that most of the clerical employees can. A large portion of the clerks, almost all of whom were female, would have all of their materials put away and their belongings gathered well in advance. The mad dash to the elevators when the buzzer sounded was somewhat comical.

Friden

Most of the clerks in Life Actuarial were supervised by Bob Riley. Almost all of them had Fridens on their desks, and they used them all day long. The machines were not 100 percent reliable. Every once in a while one would go berserk while performing division and start making awful noises. I am not sure why the clerks themselves were not allowed to unplug the calculators, but Bob always rushed over to take care of it. They generally seemed to work OK after they were plugged back in.

There must be a mountain of those Fridens somewhere. I wonder where it is.

Making copies of documents in those days was a process. At the time photocopiers were both rare and expensive. To my knowledge there was only one in the entire tower. It was manufactured by Xerox, and everyone called it the XM11 machine. Someone would carry the document from the department to the floor on which the machine resided. The courier would stand in line near the operator of the machine. Sheaves of documents were presented one at a time to the operator, who passed judgment on whether they were worthy of duplication. For those that qualified copies were made, and both sets were given to the courier.

It might have been possible to use interoffice mail to do this, but there was no telling when (or even if) the documents would be returned.

I searched the Internet for pictures of photocopiers from this era, but I found nothing that approached the bulk of the one used at the Hartford (as I remember it).


1. I did not realize this at the time, but the Hartford was owned by ITT, which was then the prototypical conglomerate. Under Harold Geneen the company acquired all kinds of businesses. When Geneen left, the ITT spun off the Hartford.

2. In 2023 Mike Winterfield was still an active member of the Hartford Bridge Club. I played with him at a tournament once, as described here.

3. The purchaser of an annuity agrees to pay an amount—all at once or in installments. The party selling the annuity adds interest and deducts expenses and profit before paying it back in installments when the purchaser reaches a certain age. In variable annuities the interest rate is recalculated each year based upon the performance of the stock market or another index. Insurance components complicate the calculations. In the early seventies few actuaries were familiar with this product.

Not available in 1972.

4. VisiCalc was released in 1979, but it only ran on an Apple II. Lotus 123 did not appear until four years later! Excel was introduced in 1987.

5. In 2020 Don Sondergeld is retired, but he is an active member of the Hartford Bridge Club.

6. There is much more information about Sue here and in subsequent entries.

7. Patti and Tom Corcoran married while I was coaching debate in Michigan in the late seventies. They had two children, Brian and Casey. In 2021 they both live in Burlington, VT, with their respective families. Patti died in 2011. My tribute to her can be read here.

8. Dave McDonald retired from the Hartford in 1995 as a Senior Vice President. He died in 2011. His obituary is here.

9. Chris died in 2013. His obituary can be read here.

10. These four words will probably be on my tombstone: Nobody checked his work.

11. XM stood for Xerox machine, but everyone still added another “machine” on the end when talking about it.