Word: livestock
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...Chicago's recent International Livestock Exposition, none of the hopeful breeders vying for blue ribbons were half so fidgety as a pair of Illinois businessmen named Frank W. Harding and Clinton Tomson. "One good fire and we would have had it," says Harding. The reason: Harding, 51, and Tomson, 53, are partners in the American Livestock Insurance Co. of Geneva, Ill., biggest and fastest growing of the U.S. companies that specialize in insuring animals...
Just ten years old, American Livestock now operates in 35 of the 50 states, writes 5,000 policies a year. When Harding and Tomson decided to form the company, both were livestock breeders and Harding also acted as U.S. agent for Lloyd's of London's livestock insurance business. "This is a crap-shooting business," says Harding. "We're betting against the roll of the dice." So far, he and Tomson have called the dice pretty well. Since 1954, American Livestock's annual premium volume has nearly tripled, to $1,800,000, and the company...
Bent Necks. American Livestock's biggest competitor is Hartford Live Stock Insurance Co. ($1,250,000 in 1962 premiums), a subsidiary of Hartford Fire Insurance Co., which covers mostly saddle horses, cattle and dogs. New York's Animal Insurance Co. of America ($700,000 in premiums) writes most of its policies on horses; it paid the biggest loss ever on a single animal-$1,000,000, when the race horse Bally Ache died after a training accident two years...
...American Livestock gets 60% of its business from insuring cattle (usually stud bulls at premiums amounting to 6% of the animal's value) and 30% from insuring horses. The firm also insures dogs, cats, hogs, sheep, turkeys ("very hazardous because they're so vulnerable to changes in the weather," says Harding), mules, ponies, lions, tigers, monkeys, walruses ("We lost two of those damn things"), seals, elephants, gazelles and giraffes ("We have to make certain that their necks aren't bent during shipment"). They once insured a pink porpoise ("He survived nicely"), and they currently have a four...
...63rd International Livestock Exposition in Chicago's pungent Union Stockyards, a gentleman farmer from Poughquag, N.Y., named Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., 48, took home a raft of ribbons. His polled (hornless) Hereford cattle, part of a herd of 300 raised on his 1,100-acre ranch 25 miles south of Hyde Park, grabbed off ten prizes, including a first and second place award. A manager runs the place, but Roosevelt, who bought Clove Creek Farms twelve years ago, spends most of his summers there and keeps in touch from his Washington law offices the rest of the year...