Late last month, I received an e-mail with an unusual subject line: “1947 Commemorative 50th anniversary edition.”

The sender, Dick Burks of Van Zandt, Emrich & Cary Insurance, an agency in Louisville, Ky., wrote a simple message: “I have a copy of this, and was wondering if your office would like to have it.”

As it turns out, the library in NU's Hoboken, N.J. editorial office has our 100^th anniversary edition from 1997, but not the 50^th Anniversary, so I welcomed the gift.

The 320-page volume arrived last week, affording me little time to pore through its contents—a task I am eager to undertake. I did, however, read the introductory page written by then editor C.M. Cartwright, identified as “the dean of all insurance editors” (something to aspire to), who had been at NU for 48 of its 50 years.

Here's a part of what he wrote, apologizing for the fact that the edition did not capture all of industry's achievements of half century: “Everybody sees the benefits that flow from insurance after a death, a fire, a huge liability judgment, an injury. Yet the major contribution of insurance to the social and economic welfare…is the removal of fear, the substitution of certainty for uncertainty, and the widening of spending, investing and living areas.”

Cartwright also pays tribute to E.J. Wohlgemuth, “who went to Cincinnati with $64 in his pocket and founded an insurance periodical” in 1897.

Times have changed. While the 1947 edition covers familiar ground—agency survival, growth, coverage changes, reinsurance and even rating agencies—fears about terrorism chronicled in NU over the last decade were unknown and unmentioned.

Special Reports /

Happy Memories: NU Thanks Van Zandt, Emrich & Cary Inc.

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