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John O. Todd, CLU, Northwestern Mutual Life, MDRT president in 1951, pioneered the use of life insurance by publicly held corporations and opened many other doors to insurance sales which professionals now take for granted.
It is hard to imagine that a highly successful life insurance professional could wind up actually producing more after his 65th birthday than he did before it, but that is exactly what has happened to John O. Todd.
His now famous General Electric Company case which opened up the use of permanent life insurance by large publicly held corporations was concluded when John was 67 years old. The John O. Todd Organization, a service and marketing group, was formally inaugurated on his 68th birthday, and since then has placed over a billion dollars of new coverage.
Now at age 91 and still active, his star-studded career has included consecutive annual qualification in MDRT for 58 years (a record) and virtually every honor the industry can bestow on one of its own.
But, like so many who have made it to the top, John Todd's life has had its peaks and valleys, and the road to success has not always been smooth. Upon graduation from Cornell in 1924, John took a job with Cargill Elevator Co. in his native Minneapolis, not so much because he was looking for a career as a grain merchant but because he wanted a job so he could marry Katie (his wife of now 68 years).
After about 18 months on the Cargill job, he was introduced to the greater possibility for progress, as a life insurance agent, when he went to a two-week night school class offered by The Equitable of New York, where he says he was first exposed to "the miracle of life insurance." This excited him enough to leave the sure salary of $150 per month to take an agent's contract with The Equitable on a strictly commission basis.
"I realized that I had the opportunity to sell something that would make more money for the client than for me and I liked this idea," John says, "for I saw a place where even without the education of a doctor or a lawyer, I might --with what I could add to...