For over 40 years, Ken Brownlee has opined on how insurance adjusters should investigate and handle claims, so the process is fair for all involved. (Photo courtesy of K. Brownlee)
When Bob Hope turned 80, he said that was the age when even your birthday suit needs to be sent out for pressing. My birthday suit is now a bit wrinkled, and it's time for your resident Iconoclast to set down his image-smashing hammer and retire to new ventures. It has been fun but having written this column for 45 years is enough. The claims industry is changing, and I'm not prepared to change with it.
The insurance industry has actually changed very little since my first encounter in 1959 at a title insurance company, checking deeds, liens, and mortgages in Cleveland. I exchanged that Case Western Reserve University job for a full-time journalism career with The Wall Street Journal (the Cleveland publishing plant) until graduation. Then it was a vocation in social work for both the state of Florida and the U.S. Army during Viet Nam, and supervising a downtown homeless shelter at night in the 1980s.
In 1967, I joined Crawford & Company and am still on the CAT-team reserves. My career took me around the country and even to London. A CPCU designation in 1972 gave that career a boost into loss control and risk management, teaching and publishing both the Crawford Risk Review and as the founding editor of the CPCU Claims Quarterly. Authorship of four textbooks for Crawford, five textbooks for Thomson Reuters West, and National Underwriter followed. I co-authored CPCU 5 and, in 1993, took over Pat Magarick's insurance textbooks.
As I write in my memoir, the combination of insurance, social work, and journalism made a fascinating career and still left room for travel, music, and lay ministry. Madonna, my wife of 53 years, and I have been in most European countries at least twice, every state and Canadian province, Russia, China, Australia, and New Zealand, plus Mexico and the Caribbean. A lot was by train, being a ferroequinologist. (Ferro – iron; equine – horse; ologist – student thereof!) In my travels, I've been appointed an "Admiral in the Navy of the Great State of Nebraska" and commanded a rowboat on the Platte River! I've taught History of American Transportation at three university Osher Institutes, as well as ethics and insurance, and lectured on insurance in almost half of the states.
I've published eight Dr. Fairchild mysteries; the latest, a collection of five called Cuyahoga Stories, is available through most book stores, and I have more that I want to get on paper. As a tour guide at Atlanta's Cathedral of St. Philip, I published a book on its beautiful stained-glass windows, The Year in Liturgy and Church History. My wife (was the photographer) and I did a similar book on the windows of St. Petersburg's Christ UMC, where she was once the organist.
A claim occasionally shows up in my novels. There's a marine insurance claim — piracy — in the first Cuyahoga Stories novel, and terrorism in another. For those unfamiliar with the Cuyahoga River, it runs through the middle of Cleveland, and the Valley became a National Park after I wrote about it in Valley of the Gray Moon.
The original idea of iconoclasm was to break the image that claims adjusting was a true profession and to encourage adjusters to make it a real profession. While there are hundreds of professional adjusters, adjusting still is not a true profession like law or medicine, so in this endeavor, I've failed. Maybe someday adjusting will overcome AI and become a real profession. Until then, good-bye.
Ken Brownlee, CPCU, ARM, (brownleeken029@gmail.com) is a former adjuster and risk manager based in Atlanta, Ga. He now authors and edits claims adjusting textbooks. Opinions expressed are the author's own.
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