Western & Southern Life Insurance Company

Either summer or Fall of 1961, Gertrude (via Kelly Employment Services, aka Kelly Girl) got me a job at Western & Southern Life Insurance Company in downtown Cincinnati on 5^th over near where the garden in front of the P&G world headquarters is now, probably Broadway. I stayed there either until I graduated from VMC or until the end of that summer.

W&SLI, on the top floor of the new building on the corner of 5^th & Broadway, had what today we would call their data center. The processing was using punch cards with no other media storage. They had a brand new 1401 which they were learning how to use. Our crew of college students worked second shift.

There were 18 model 083 card sorters, one new model 101 statistical sorter, a number (more than 5 and less than 10) of model 407 printers with attached "summary" punches, a few model 557 "interpreter"s that printed information on a card from its contents. There was an old model 604 calculating punch seldom used. There was a model 650 drum memory computer in the corner used for statistical calculations for actuaries. It ran so hot that it had a large pipe (~2' diameter) above it to vent its heat out the roof.

Repetitive work included printing the books the agents carried to manually record the premiums paid by the policy holder (so called "industrial insurance".

One special job I can remember came one day when we were told we had to make a test file for the 1401. The doors of the freight elevator opened and out came a forklift holding a pallet of boxes of IBM punch cards. In the end we used 3000 boxes of 2000 cards in each box.

We went to a lower floor where there were large machines holding trays w/about 1000 cards per tray. The trays were on a device in the machine which rotated front to back so all trays could be accessed. There were ~ 10+ trays across.

We took the trays up to the top floor where we reproduced the contents and put the cards back into the same tray. We then ran a pass through the interpreter, before going to the sorters. That many cards required block sorting on policy number. Instead of the the usual low (right) column to high (left) column sort, we sorted first on the high column. Because the high column had alphabetic values (two punches per column) from policies of acquired companies, the first pass was on the "zones". The top hole is the "12" hole for A-I; then the "11" hole for J-R; then it was tricky. The "0" hole could be a numeric if only one punch or else a signal of S-Z if two punches.

The output was 3 or 4 stacks of cards placed in large metal vertical trays. The next person took a tray, say "12" punch, and sorted that numerically. The pockets 1-9 would contain letters A-I. These were placed in other tray or in boxes marked with the letter contained..

When the column was done, the next lower column could be done.