4 notable people who sold life insurance

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(AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

Charles Ives (1874-1954)

Most Americans familiar with music history recognize modernist composer Charles Ives as one of the first American composers to gain international renown, even though his innovative music was largely ignored by the general public during his lifetime. But people keenly familiar with insurance history might know that Ives was also a pioneer in the field of estate planning.

Ives, a musical prodigy as a child, could have followed the career path of an organist/choirmaster/composer/teacher and gone from Yale to complete studies in a European conservatory. Instead, he headed for New York in 1898 to begin as a $15-a-week clerk with the Mutual Life Insurance Company. In 1899, he joined the Charles H. Raymond & Co. insurance agency, where he stayed until 1906. Upon the failure of that agency, Ives and friend Julian Myrick formed their own insurance agency, which would become Ives & Myrick, where he remained until he retired in 1930.

While continuing to work as an organist and compose music in his spare time, Ives made a living entirely via the insurance business. He built the agency into a very successful enterprise, devising creative ways to structure life insurance packages for wealthy people. He achieved considerable notoriety in the industry in 1918 after publishing a book, "Life Insurance with Relation to Inheritance Tax," which laid the foundation for the modern practice of estate planning and was considered "the Bible of estate planning" at the time. His insurance industry peers were often surprised to learn he was also a composer.

According to a biography posted on the Charles Ives Society website, Ives composed at a pace hard to believe between 1908 and 1917, given that his insurance agency was burgeoning. "From these years comes the completion of much of his greatest work: Three Places in New England; the symphony Holidays; the intense and mystical Second String Quartet; most of the monumental Fourth Symphony; the Second Orchestral Set; the Concord Sonata; the sprawling, raging Robert Browning Overture; many songs both progressive and traditional; and studies in various states of completion including the Tone Roads."

He composed very little after suffering a heart attack in 1918, and not at all after 1927. Ives died in 1954, just as a pioneering biography of him was completed. It was not until a decade later that the musical mainstream began to take Ives seriously.

Charles Ives image courtesy of the Charles Ives Papers, MSS 14, in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University.

Homer Plessy (1862-1925)

Long after American civil rights pioneer Homer Plessy was at the center of the landmark United States Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, he sold life insurance for the People's Life Insurance Company.

Plessy was the American Creole plaintiff in the case, who was arrested, tried and convicted in New Orleans of a violation of one of Louisiana's racial segregation laws. In a calculated effort to strike down segregation laws, he was recruited in 1982 by the Citizens' Committee of New Orleans to intentionally violate the state's separate rail car law. The case was appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Plessy lost in 1896, but the resulting "separate but equal" decision had wide consequences for civil rights in the United States for decades. The Supreme Court eventually overturned the doctrine in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, and it was later outlawed completely by the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.

After the 1896 decision, Plessy faded from public view and lived a normal life, fathering children while continuing in religious and social activities in his community. It was during his later years that he sold life insurance and collected premiums for the People's Life Insurance Company. He died in 1925 at the age of 61. A bronze plaque on the Plessy Tomb in New Orleans commemorates his place in history, and Plessy Park is located at the intersection of the two streets where Plessy refused to move to a segregated passenger railcar.

See also:

• 6 famous brands started or saved by life insurance
• Slideshow: Selling processes of top producers
• Why life insurance producers love their jobs