Larry Austin remembers in 1960 when National Life employees moved from our home office on State Street next to the Statehouse to the brand-new building on the hill.
It was quite a showplace. Barre granite to clad the exterior. Marble to greet visitors in the lobby. And, it turns out, lovely tile at the elevators.
Unfortunately for the building’s designers, the tile was fairly short-lived. Larry remembers that it was because of the heels that women wore at the time.
“Their shoes were the things with the little teeny, skinny heels,” he said, laughing. “And they came up to this brand-new building with those little skinny heels and they put dents in all their tile floors all over the place. The company went out and bought caps for the bottom of their heels to keep them from ruining the tile floor they’d just put in. Right in front of the elevators it was like a meteor shore had hit the tile floor with everybody standing there.”
As anybody who has stood waiting for an elevator in Montpelier, the tile floors clearly didn’t last. But Larry has. For 55 years, Larry has been one of National Life’s most loyal employees.
Larry works now in Document Management Services but when he joined National Life in 1960 he worked in the actuarial department. (By the way, if you do the math, it doesn’t add up. We’ll get back to that.)
As you might imagine, Larry’s seen a lot of change over his time here. When he started in actuarial, computers hadn’t yet arrived at National Life.
“You had these desktop calculators,” Larry said. “They really weren’t electric. They were run by gears. You’d clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk on those things. We just calculated stuff all day long.”
Numbers had to be checked and re-checked – twice if they were for in-house use, three times if they were being sent out of the building, Larry recalled. But that changed with the advent of computers, and that’s where Larry’s future lay because it’s where his earlier work had been with the Air Force and the telephone company.
At National Life, he transferred into programming, where he worked until he retired in 1999 when National Life pulled back on some of its computer technology areas. Larry wasn’t really ready to retire, though, so he went to work for H&R Block for a few tax seasons, helping customers prepare their returns. He figures he prepared 2,000 or 3,000 each year.
But National Life was never far away, literally or figuratively. And this is where our math adds up. Larry was invited to come back and work in what today is known as Document Management Services. He works 40 hours every other week and has been here ever since, hitting 55 years of total service last month.
And he still walks the two miles back and forth to work. It’s not like he doesn’t have a car. He does. But he prefers the walk in sunshine or rain, cold or hot. He typically makes the trek from his home in the southeastern part of Montpelier up the “goat path” hiking trail from downtown. Even in the winter.
“Ninety-nine percent of the winter is fine,” he said. But he does come prepared in the winter in case there’s ice on the trail. “I carry crampons just in case,” Larry said.
Larry says he doesn’t have any plans to retire again just, yet, because he still enjoys coming up the hill. “It’s not a job,” he said. “I like to get out of the house and associate with people.”
