Just another day at work: May 6th 1944

Anyone familiar with the insurance industry knows that it runs on records and documents of all kinds. From claims to policies everything  is documented. In today's world more and more of that documentation is digital and our records team is still in process of digitizing some of our older documents.

When I interview candidates most guess that Pinnacol is between 20-50 years old and they are often surprised that we are actually approaching our 100 year anniversary  next year. We do have customers who have been with us every day for our nearly one hundred years of service. Recently one of our Records staff, Jose, brought to my attention a document he was scanning that was older than most. This particular document was being processed by our company between May 6th and June 16th 1944. One of Jose's peers, Diane, asked me if I was with the company then. I respectfully assured them that was not the case!

The time frame between May 6th and June 16th 1944 saw events unfold that changed the course of the world and that have an impact to this day on everyone that calls planet earth home. Most will clearly recognize that the world was at war during this time, and the history buffs won't miss a beat by recognizing the key event during these days in May and June. In what has become known as D-Day, June 6th saw Allied forces land on the coast of France and by the end of the day German positions in Normandy would be bombarded with more than 175,000 troops, 600 warships, and nearly 10,000 bombers and other aircraft. By the end of June nearly a million Allied troops would be fighting on French soil. Allied leaders in the Pacific theater were planning a similar invasion of Japan for October of the following year. Peyton Manning recently brought new fame to the term "Omaha" but 70 years ago Omaha and Utah beaches on the Normandy coast were seeing some of the fiercest fighting of the war.

When our company received this paperwork on May 6th very, very few people had any inclination of what would be coming in the next several weeks. By the time we had finished processing it in mid-June Hitler had unleashed his long-promised "secret weapon" against England. Over the next 80 days, V-1 rockets would kill 5,500 civilians and cause widespread destruction.

And as is always the case with the cycle of life while death and destruction were raging in Europe and the Pacific some very famous people were being born  in the U.S. George Lucas (May 14th) and Gladys Knight (May 28th) were born while we were processing this paperwork, and Tim Rice, Danny DeVito, Diana Ross, Joe Frazier, Tony Orlando, and Barry White were born this year. And if you have a tendency to apply liberal amounts of sunscreen during the summer months you might be interested to know that Benjamin Green was trying to invent something to prevent soldiers from sunburn. He went on to create the Coppertone Company.

We tried to read the signature of the employee who first signed off on the paperwork but it was illegible. What we do know is that when they went home on that afternoon of May 7th 1944 if they stopped for gas they would have paid 15 cents a gallon and if they ran to the store for a loaf of bread it would have been an additional 10 cents. Doesn't sound like much but bear in mind the average annual wages in 1944 were $2,400, rents averaged $50/month, and the price of a new home was $3,450.

And the policyholder whose paperwork we were processing those 70 years ago? Jose looked it up and yes, they are still with us.