Life's Work

As he does once each year, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co.'s stooped, bushy-browed President Leroy Alton Lincoln last week invited reporters to discuss his company's annual report over lunch in his leather-paneled executive dining room. As boss of the world's biggest life insurance company, he had some impressive figures to give them. In 1949, said Lincoln, Metropolitan had boosted its assets 6% to a mammoth $9.7 billion. It had not yet overtaken the world's biggest corporation--American Telephone & Telegraph, whose assets total $10.8 billion--but it was on its way. In 1950's first two months, said Lincoln proudly, Metropolitan had sold more group insurance than in the entire previous year. A big reason: it had just signed a contract with Bethlehem Steel Corp. for a $325 million blanket policy covering 107,000 workers.

Such good news made a fitting valedictory for 69-year-old Leroy Lincoln, who, at year's end, after 15 years as president, will step up to chairman.* To reporters he introduced his successor, Executive Vice President Charles Gillies Taylor Jr., 66. Unlike President Lincoln, who joined the Metropolitan as a lawyer in 1918, President-designate Taylor has been in the business for 50 years.

Bloody Ground. The eldest son of a Scottish immigrant, Virginia-born Charles Taylor wanted to be an electrical engineer but, unable to afford college, switched to insurance "because I could work with figures." He rose to the vice presidency of Richmond's South Atlantic Life Insurance Co., went to Metropolitan as a Lincoln protege in 1932. "I thought I would be able to retire early," he said last week.

"Here I am an old man, and still working." In its 82 years, the Metropolitan has had only six presidents. It began as the National Union Life and Limb Insurance Co., formed to insure the lives of soldiers & sailors fighting in the Civil War, was still getting organized when the Union Army lost 17,287 men at the battle of Chancellorsville. Result: the company collapsed. It reorganized the following year, changed its name to Metropolitan in 1868. It got another bad jolt in the 1918 flu epidemic, when at the peak of the disaster, more than 5,000 claims a day were trundled into Metropolitan's home office, loaded in huge wicker baskets. Metropolitan paid 68,000 death claims.

Happy Homes. Wars and epidemics now hold little terror for Metropolitan, which has so much cash that it has been forced to invent new ways of investing it. One of the most successful: its eight apartment house developments in New York, California and Virginia (total capacity: 125,000 people), in which the Metropolitan has invested $300 million in 30 years. To Metropolitan's 33 million individual policyholders, one of the most reassuring facts is that the company's checks have long borne the signatures of Washington (Lawrence, third vice president) and Lincoln. Soon they will have to be content with Washington and Taylor.

*Frederick H. Ecker, 82, the present chairman, will become honorary chairman.

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