- Chronicles is made possible by a grant from the Erie Community Foundation, a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, support from Springhill Senior Living, the Regional Science Consortium, and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen.

- This is WQLN.

- On the 14th of June, 1887, a small boy named Henry Orth Hirt was born, the fifth of five children for Frank and Sarah Hirt of 639 East 10th Street, Erie, Pennsylvania.

H.O.

Hirt, like most people, did not grow up expecting to be an insurance salesman.

H.O.

Hirt, unlike most people, not only became an insurance salesman, but a co-founder to one of the largest companies his city had ever seen.

H.O.

Hirt was unlike most people.

H.O.

's father, Frank was a man of industry.

He had risen to foreman at Erie City Ironworks before forsaking iron processing for stonework.

Frank's Erie Mantel and Tile Company, as written in Bates' History of Erie County, "is in the hands of men whose ambition is not measured by small results."

One could wonder where H.O.

got it from.

Frank, Sarah and H.O.

's siblings, Zoe Isabella, John Melhorn, Kate Estelle, and Jenny Etta Albertina, moved down the street and around the corner in 1893.

Orth moved there with them, of course, not that six year olds are given much choice in the matter.

It was there on Wayne Street that H.O.

built his foundations.

- He was close to his family.

His family homestead at 1016 Wayne Street was where he really learned the values that guided him all the rest of his life.

Values, really, as much in the dining room as any other place because that's where the family gathered for meals.

- That's where H.O.

learned a lot of, I think sort of his very foundational philosophies on life that he then applied to business.

Things like the Golden Rule, treat others as though you wanna be treated.

- Probably what started him off is he came from a religious family.

His grandfather was a Lutheran minister.

And H.O.

Hirt.

He just was always looking to do the right thing.

I just, I don't see anything that points differently.

- H.O.

did practice his Lutheran faith, Luther Memorial Church on on 10th Street.

Although I will tell you, I've heard this story many times, he always carried things in his pocket that he was working on and so sometimes during a sermon he would haul those out and start to do some writing.

He was a stickler for detail, a stickler to follow through, a stickler to remain.

I'm gonna show you something that I've carried with me.

I'm 84 years old and I've carried these in my pocket ever since I started to work for him.

Index cards and a pen because if I was talking to him and he was saying something, I'd make sure I captured it, I'd write it down.

It's a simple task.

- Henry Orth Hirt entered the workforce at the ripe old age of nine, during days and summers off from Erie Public School Number 13.

He worked at his father's shop, which in those days had a storefront at the old Reed House, the northeast corner of Perry Square, along French Street.

H.O.

branched out into his father's old field.

When he wasn't attending the old Erie High on 10th and Sassafras, he worked at Metric Metal.

He was more than just a simple timekeeper.

H.O.

showed a propensity for the arts and sciences, passing the hours by with doodles and sketches.

- He was a student of biology and I think one of my favorite objects in our collection is his biology notebook from Erie High, which includes a number of drawings that are very carefully done, very detailed, exacting renderings of insects and flora and fauna.

- When he graduated from high school, his high school yearbook caption was "To argue was joy for this little boy."

That was a, a characteristic he had all of his life.

But the only person I ever saw win an argument with him was my wife, his daughter.

Almost every time, she could out logic him and that was something.

- He had an uncanny common sense.

He could really befuddle you with common sense questions and you'd have to think about 'em and it was right there for him.

He had that uncanny ability to know what to do.

- And so he worked for about 10 years before he went to college and was very proud of the fact that he paid his way through college.

He did take a couple of small loans from his mother and his sister, which he paid back with interest.

- H.O.

enjoyed Wittenberg College, a Lutheran school that later became the alma mater of his children too.

He joined a fraternity, befriended his professors, and by 1911, H.O.

ended up with a degree in biology.

An unusual choice for an insurance salesman, but alas, he did not yet know that was where his life was headed.

Instead, he took up the noblest profession: teaching.

Teacher Hirt's first classroom was in Iowa, where he taught biology and zoology.

While there, he got a call from a former Wittenberg classmate with another opportunity: teaching history at a private boys school in Texas.

But H.O.

had no experience teaching history.

So in just a few short months, he took several summer classes at Penn State to prepare for his time at Terrill School.

His hard work paid off and he loved teaching there.

In the summers, he'd work at a summer camp up in Ontario.

A fine career path was all set out for him, it seemed.

We know that wasn't what happened, but for now, we can imagine.

- When I started with a company I was 17 and I was just impressed by his command of things, particularly history.

- H.O.

Hirt's first passion, teaching, probably followed him throughout his career.

He made an effort to have a teaching training class every week in his office and they'd look at what happened, good, bad, ugly, what can we do better?

What can we improve on?

Education was huge to him, you know, that was a tagline.

Know your stuff, believe your stuff, do your stuff.

He was pushing that education, that teaching for all of the agents, everybody from the ground up and they made it easy.

You had to do the work but you could move ahead.

- He was a consummate teacher, wanting to impart to us his wisdom, his thinking, and get us to understand how important thinking was.

- "Think" was a very important word to him and IBM coined that slogan back in the fifties and he had a little sign behind his desk.

"Think."

He expected people to think and use common sense.

He really, I think would've been content to be a teacher.

But fate entered in there with tuberculosis in about 1915.

- TB was a killer, you see.

Regardless of how fashionable a cough and sickly pallor were for the Victorians of decades prior, once that tricky bacterium became active, few survived.

Vaccines and antibiotics were years away.

The smog covered cities of the second industrial revolution certainly did not help recovery.

Even in the 21st century, it can take months or years to get back to health.

Tuberculosis, like a wild animal, is not easily tamed.

H.O.

went to New Mexico to recover in the desert sun and attempt to tame the microscopic beast.

Unlike many, he survived.

- That really changed the entire course of his life.

I often joke that without tuberculosis, none of us would would be here right now because it's what sent him from Texas back to Erie.

And I don't know that he would've ever returned or switched careers because he loved teaching.

He was beloved by his students, by other faculty members.

He had a true passion for it so it's kind of hard to imagine him wanting to switch careers.

- And so he spent the better part of a couple of years recovering from tuberculosis and that was before we had antibiotics to help it along.

And he is one of the few at the time that survived.

Look what happened.

He lived to be 95, so there must have been something strong in his constitution.

- When he was away living in Texas and then later in Silver City, New Mexico and he was recovering from tuberculosis.

He was always writing home to his mother, to his sister, so they had a very close bond.

And he returned to Erie.

He was feeling pretty good, ready to start, kind of, working again.

Did a few odd jobs and then went to work for a failing grocery store and he completely turned the grocery store around.

Profits rose within like his first week of working there.

He had the shelves all restocked, money in the bank, people were getting paid, vendors were getting paid.

And that was really kind of an incredible experience for him and he did very well at it and he was a great salesman and that's I think what contributed to his success in Erie Insurance.

- But TB had left its impact on his physical strength.

Just before he turned 35, H.O.

resigned and finally entered the insurance industry.

- We had the good fortune to work for a very excellent company based in Philadelphia, was a reciprocal the same as the Erie, it's called the Pennsylvania Indemnity Exchange.

And it was a fine company in every respect, honorable to the nth degree.

We call that a good fortune that we were connected with it because we had that as a model to work from.

- His brother was a branch manager there and had a need for a new salesperson and was in kind of a tight spot.

So H.O.

was really helping out John by going to work for him and he took very well to the insurance industry and this was really the first time that he had been in the industry.

But with his personality, the way that he could sell, he took to it super well.

He convinced his brother, John, to hire a second salesman and John was reluctant at first because of course that would require an additional salary, but H.O.

assured him that the person he would hire and recommend would more than make up for that.

- Raised out in McKean County, Oliver Grover Cleveland Crawford did not set out to be an insurance salesman, either.

By 16, he had dropped out of high school and was sailing out of Erie on the steamer Michigan, the US Navy's first iron hulled warship.

After five years on eight ships, O.G.

Crawford got his land legs again, finding work on the railroads around Erie.

H.O.

met O.G.

around the time he returned to Erie from New Mexico and the two became friendly through a shared passion for community work.

The two men would soon realize they had a particular set of skills: sales.

- So he recruited his friend, O.G.

Crawford, who at the time had been a brakeman for the railroad and O.G.

came to work with H.O.

and they worked there for a couple of years, but really did not like the pay and the working conditions.

They felt that they were overworked and underpaid.

- He didn't get along too well with his older brother and he and Crawford decided, let's go off on our own because we know what we can do, the two of them.

He and his partner wanted to set up a mutual insurance agency and they tried to get an agency appointment with several mutual insurance companies and they didn't have any room for them.

He found out later on that the reason they didn't is because his brother went around and picked up all those agencies so that they couldn't get them.

So they said, well, the only company we know anything about is the Pennsylvania Indemnity Exchange, which is an accessible reciprocal exchange.

So let's do that.

- And so we finally just resigned as of the end of 1924 and spent three months and 20 days organizing, promoting the Erie Insurance Exchange.

- He had set the company up as an exchange, not as a mutual or a stock company, which means that the policy owners owned the company.

- The management of the Erie Insurance Exchange limits its take out of each premium to a very modest amount.

- By contract 25% and they would use that 25% to build the buildings, pay the salaries, all the expenses.

- Therefore the very large percentage of each premium is available for service to the policy holders, primarily to pay their claims.

- He was enamored with that concept.

That's the policy holder's company.

The other thing is he used to call it an appropriate profit, appropriate to all of the stakeholders.

Policy holders first; in his words, they feed and support us.

Second, the agents who bring the policy holders into us.

Third, and only third, and a far third, was those of us whose job was to serve the policy holder and that agent.

That was our job.

- Insurance has always been in the service of protection.

Now insurance isn't the oldest business one can enter, but it may have a few thousand years on most other modern industries.

Oops, too far.

Here we go.

Thousands of years BCE, the ancient Chinese, Indians, Rhodians, and others practiced various methods of collective risk management, mostly to protect river and seafaring goods from the perils of storms, pirates and leviathans.

What started as simply adding floats to crates of wares and coin became written laws for Babylonians and collective contributions for mutual protection by Saxons.

Roman burial societies grew into guild funds supporting sick and impoverished members.

Ancient trading codes became regulated policies.

The coffee shop Lloyd's of London popped up as the center for trading marine insurance.

After water, though, came fire.

The efforts to rebuild from the 1666 Great Fire of London blew up the insurance industry, so to speak, and several companies sprang up from the ashes.

The first insurance in the newly established United States was also for fire insurance and started by none other than Ben Franklin in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Shortly thereafter, the old concepts of guild protection became life and disability insurance.

Once we moved from horse-drawn carts to horseless carriages, people started looking to insure those expensive purchases, too.

Given the state of those early vehicles, it's only fitting that the auto insurance industry started as fire insurance.

This is where we return to our dear founders.

Along with the rise of the automobile in the early 20th century, society was shifting, shaking, shimmying into the Roaring Twenties.

Mr. Hirt had found his Mrs. Hirt, the lovely Ruth Louise Peterson, and the two were preparing for their first child, Frank William Hirt.

The industrial age was doing the city well.

Manufacturing giants like GE, Hammermill, Griswold, Jarecki, and others kept the engines churning, after making them, of course.

The two men's industry connections helped them bring in interest in their budding company.

The likes of Hammermill's, William Bromley and Ed Nick of Northern Equipment and a variety of other manufacturers, wholesalers and regional industry leaders filled out the board, but the two founders pulled in potential policyholders from the shop floors, too.

And so H.O.

Hirt and O.G.

Crawford set out to stake their own claim in the insurance industry.

But with H.O.

's growing family, striking off into the challenges of entrepreneurship was a big risk.

O.G.

provided the push he needed.

- I must give Mr. Crawford the chief credit.

He had more nerve than I had and it took a good deal of prodding on his part to get me moving along with him and carrying out his idea.

- To the day he retired, he would never refer himself as the manager.

He had a a title that he would use when he'd be talking to people.

"I'm the co-founder, president and general manager."

He never, never, never used the word founder.

He always used co-founder.

Now gotta realize we're into the seventies long after O.G.

Crawford left and he's still giving the man credit.

- O.G.

was extremely competitive and he would set goals for himself for the number of apps he could write in a day or a month.

And it was impressive what he could do so they were very competitive.

And H.O.

credits O.G.

with having the backbone and the courage to go out on their own because H.O.

was a little bit more apprehensive.

He had just been married, he was starting a family.

So can you kind of imagine coming home to your wife and saying, "I quit my job and I'm going to start a business" and you have a baby on the way and all those sorts of things.

- They founded the company on April 20th and his son was born on October 8th, so he had a newborn at home, you know, was starting a new venture, didn't know how it was gonna go.

He was very nervous about it.

But anyone that knew him knew he would not fail because he would had such determination and as he would say, he was stubborn and that stubborn determination kept him just working on it and and succeeding.

Our one time board chairman, Mort Graham, once described H.O.

as "Salesman Supreme and Unexcelled."

Sam Black who worked with us.

was our first full-time adjuster in 1927. described O.G.

Crawford as the best salesman he ever knew.

And Sam Black was no slouch as a salesman.

- In the early days, it was seven days a week.

We wrote $31,000 worth of premiums our first year.

- Well, the company was his love.

He would tell me that when he'd come home from work, he would then go out that evening to deliver policies.

That was a big thing with him.

You don't just sell a policy, you go out and you deliver to the person, make sure they understand it, make sure that if they need for service, he's the one to call.

And so he would place his wife in the car, it was an open air touring car, and put a blanket over her and she would accompany him on those evening rounds.

He had to do what he had to do and those are tough times and he made the best of 'em.

- She knew what she was getting into when she married him because he was working for the Pennsylvania Indemnity Exchange when he got married.

But then she didn't know that he was gonna go out and start an insurance company, but she was supportive of him in that regard.

- The founding principle of the building was to provide policy holders with as near perfect protection, as near perfect service as is humanly possible, and to do so at the lowest possible cost.

It's a really simple philosophy, but to provide exemplary service and to do so at an affordable cost, who wouldn't be attracted to that?

- We had started out in rented space, rented office space at what is now the Avalon Hotel at 10th and State, formerly the Scott Block Building.

- And so we were there to receive them with open arms because the policyholder was a mighty precious thing.

Those early days, - Starting a business is not easy.

Even before their first policy was enacted for George Epp and the Epp furniture company, there were folks trying to keep the Erie from getting off the ground.

- The old line stock companies did not like having a competitive reciprocal exchange around.

- We had to sell our stock at a hundred a share to enough people to give us $31,000.

- Do you mean to say... - Twenty thousand needed for a guarantee fund and 6,000 for working capital.

- Right at the very beginning, the competitors arranged to have a bill go through the legislature that raised that capital requirement.

He was able to persuade some legislators to postpone that for a year, and he was able to get the financing he needed then to, to cover that.

But it, it was a a real blow to him when, when that happened.

But you know, sometimes when you say you're paranoid, sometimes really people are out after you and that was, that was the case for them.

They had a a real struggle but he overcame every one of 'em.

- After dealing with these early crises, a third appeared on the horizon.

Some personnel troubles had the board of directors considering the worst: selling the ERIE.

Behind the scenes, one of the directors conspired to get himself elected president of the ERIE as the current president, William Flynn, was stepping down.

Concerned about this director's behavior, O.G.

and H.O.

convinced the rest of the board to instead elect William McCain to the presidency and he successfully kept the company in Erie and with its founders until Hirt himself became president in 1931.

- They did have an offer to sell for a decent profit, but they chose not to.

And I'm sure there have been many times over the years where the company has had the opportunity to move the headquarters out of Erie, Pennsylvania and to go to Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, but that was never really an option for us.

It was this is a, a homegrown business in Erie and it's going to stay here.

- He wanted the company to be named Erie Insurance.

He was proud of the city.

The family was from Erie.

They had deep roots in Erie and he did a lot of things to help Erie in quiet ways.

- So he felt keenly responsible for starting a business in Erie and maintaining it here.

And he was proud of the, the growth that the company had in Erie up until the time he knew it and, and until he died.

- Shortly after we were founded on April 20th, 1925, H.O.

sent out letters basically saying to the local community, "Hey, we started an insurance company.

Did you know that $15 million in premiums are being sent out to all across the United States and even into Europe And that money could be here, we could be creating jobs here, we could be filling up the banks here."

- It was a, during a period when boosting Erie was quite the thing.

- The boosterism was just a, a way of bringing companies and dollars and corresponding jobs to Erie County.

That was the interesting thing.

When he worked for the other insurance company, nothing had ever been based in Erie County and early in the 1900s there was a huge push about boosterism trying to bring business into Erie.

And we still do that.

We still do that today.

- And so that got a lot of interest and a lot of the local community really excited about the business.

- All that excitement meant that as the crash of the Great Depression faded, the Erie was poised to blossom out of its toddler years.

The old Scott Block would no longer do as a home office.

- We started out with two rooms, eventually took over the entire third floor and then had a couple offices on the fourth floor and some storage on the second floor.

- Where did you move to next?

- We moved to the building owned originally by the C.F.

Adams company at the southeast corner of Sixth and French Street where we have plenty of room for the next 18 years.

- The C.F.

Adams Building dates till like 1911, 1912 and it was actually built as a show room for the C.F.

Adams Company.

H.O.

Hirt thought we were gonna have room forever.

- The ERIE, a company unlike any Erie had seen, was ready to grow.

A newly founded company is a bit like a newborn baby: a little frantic, a bit exciting, and the reason you won't sleep for the next six months.

But if you manage to keep your head, some say you might even enjoy it.

H.O.

Hirt and O.G.

Crawford, like most new parents, had been doing their best to raise their young company with good foundational values, a community of support, and the fewest bumps and bruises possible.

But not every relationship stands the test of time.

Eight years after the founding, O.G.

retired from the Erie, moving on to the next stages of his life and taking a few odd jobs before fully retiring.

H.O.

would need to raise Erie Insurance on his own.

- They came to a resolution.

H.O.

bought out his stock and Crawford went off mostly into retirement in Florida and other places.

Then H.O.

knew that he had a clear path forward, but he was always the CEO of the company, from the beginning.

They didn't call it CEO in those days.

He called himself manager.

H.O., he said that Crawford was the father and he was the mother.

- After O.G.

retired, H.O.

would write in the bulletins that he was a single mother raising the baby that he and O.G.

had created together.

- We call ourselves the Erie family and he rather looked upon himself as the head of that family.

The right man for the right time that brought Erie Insurance from its infancy in 1925 right on through the time he retired, - He always had respect for Crawford.

In fact, in our second home office building, the first one we owned, which is now our Heritage Center, the only picture on the walls in that building was a picture of O.G.

Crawford outside H.O.

Hirt's office.

- Being a single mother isn't easy, now nor then.

As company president, the responsibility of growing Erie Insurance fell on H.O.

's shoulders.

He had to go above and beyond.

- It was 1934.

The state enacted a financial responsibility act, which required people to have insurance, auto insurance.

And at that time then he set about to have our auto policy be different than the standard policy.

- As I recall, these policies with the super standard features were so designed that there was a dot in the margin where there was a super standard feature.

- An X.

For extra features.

An X.

- So you just counted the Xes and that showed how superior our policy was to others.

- That's right.

Super standard insurance.

- Called them 31 super standard features.

We actually had over 50.

He was initiating advantages for our policy over the competition and he was always keeping track of what was going on in the business and the industry.

- As far as a product line, we started off basically as an automobile insurance carrier and we got into fire, then we broadened into commercial, but he stayed that he wanted to be in the home, the family, insurance market.

Only later that we start to expand into into business insurance - What brought about the next move, which was really a dramatic one.

And what was it?

- The building of this present home office, which we thought would be good for the next 50 years.

But even then we soon found we needed additional space.

- Business took off so well when we moved across the street into what we now call the H.O.

Hirt building We went from 30 employees in that 18 years to 180.

And just to show the magnitude of how much the company had grown, 20 years later, when I first started here in 1976, we had 1200 employees.

So in 20 years we had gone from 180 to 1200. Business grew that much.

- H.O.

was a visionary and really I think it showed up in the way he expanded the company.

He always said, I don't wanna be the biggest insurance company in the world.

I wanna be the best.

And so he was very deliberate about how he grew and even where we grew.

We have never gone into a state that didn't touch another state that we were in 'cause of his philosophy.

If we get too far away from home, we won't be able to find Erie people.

Now we think there are Erie people throughout this entire country, and we know there are, but there's something to be said for that deliberate, thoughtful process to how he, he's expanded the company over time, different product lines that he got into, et cetera.

- But not every product line would be a success and the responsibility to Erie Insurance employees and policy holders weighed heavy on H.O.

- He always had a fear of failure.

There was no question about it.

And in conversations I've had with him, he was really very nervous about that time.

- There were moments of doubt, but of, of strife that are accompany any new business.

No one spared from that.

It's how you handle it, I think, that marks the character of the person and also helps them to grow in that character.

He told me that when he would get nervous and this was so hard to believe, he would peel an onion and eat it like an apple.

It would help settle his stomach.

Now, true story, I don't know.

He told me that, but I could see him doing that.

- So in 1936 and 1937, Erie Insurance dabbled in covering long haul truckers and they really took a bath on it.

From 1926 on, we had always had an A+ rating.

It dropped to a B.

- The A.M. best company, as you know, is the principal rating agency for insurance companies.

They downgraded us and H.O.

didn't think that was right.

- He called AM Best and he said there has to be a mistake.

And he calls 'em back a couple weeks later and he says, if I can prove there's a mistake, is it worth a 5-cent cigar?

And A.M. Best says sure.

- He went to see Mr. Best himself and got the working papers that Best used to rate us and proved that they made a mistake.

- So A.M. Best goes, okay, you've proved your point, we'll increase it to a B+.

And he was not able to reprint the entire book, but what he did was he sent out a newsletter and said, sorry, we've made a mistake that B rating should be a B+.

And then the following year it came back up to an A and it came up to an A+ within the two years.

So instead of just the 5-cent cigar, he sent him an entire box of Cubans.

- H.O.

was not one to shy away from a challenge or the hard work needed to bring something to fruition.

Unlike many folks, he took that responsibility to heart.

If something went wrong, he would be there to fix it.

- Any complaint didn't go to me or anybody else.

It went to him.

He handled all complaints.

- So if you had a problem, you could speak directly to H.O.

He wanted to be involved in all of those conversations, which I think is what made us so successful because he did not hand that off to an underling and say, I'm not gonna deal with someone who's complaining or has an issue that's, you know, below me of not doing that.

- We do that today.

Now I can't, I can't have 7 million customers come into my office one at a time and talk to me and I can't have 7,000 employees come into my office and talk to me.

But we have, we have mechanisms in place now where I'm aware of the situations that are brought to our attention.

I monitor them.

Sometimes I do respond to them.

So to this day, what used to be called the complaint still reports to the CEO of the company and that's H.O.

's signature.

- There was a time that we used to publish a little claims directory would fold it up and we inserted into the policy, and I can remember it from heart.

And in the claims directory, his name and home telephone number was there.

Have you ever had knowledge of any other company president that you could reach at their home?

- His home phone number was in that claims directory.

And once in a while he'd get a call at two o'clock in the morning from somebody betting somebody else that they couldn't call the president of their insurance company, but I could call the president of mine.

And so if he got them on the line, he'd keep them on the line and sell them on what a great feature that was.

He was always selling.

- We get thousands of complimentary letters, which I don't even bother to read because they can do no harm.

We're proud to file 'em and show the vast number of filing cabinet drawers that we have jam packed with them, but they can do no harm.

But every complaint is investigated by me and answered.

And if there was just cause for the complaint, we certainly do everything in our power to make amends, but many times we find that the complaint is not well founded.

- There were times when I would pick him up, he'd come out with a sheaf of papers from a weekend, and say, we need to look into these when we get to the office.

They were people who had called them at home with a complaint or inquiry or what happen, and we would look into them when they got to the office.

So service was very key to him and that never changed.

We'll be gone to the person who didn't give service.

So that didn't change.

- He was the one who took it on and used it as a teaching moment.

He would reprint in bulletins if he got a letter with a complaint and he would say, okay, here's where we may have misstepped and how could we improve the ser, the service.

And he would reach out to policy holders and and want to retain their business.

- The insurance industry is a service industry and anyone that enters the industry, especially as a salesman who doesn't have that thought, well grounded in his mind is not likely to be a success.

- He really believed in being compassionate and empathetic.

And he wrote over and over again in the bulletins, encouraging agents and employees to exercise compassion and empathy because the type of industry that we're in, if you're not able to provide those things to our policy holders, then you're in the wrong industry because you're often encountering a customer on one of worst days of their lives.

They've experienced some sort of catastrophic loss.

They've had a car accident.

Their house has burned down.

Something horrible has happened to them.

And if you can't exercise compassion and give them dignity and respect, then this is not the right job for you.

And he was not shy about saying that.

- If you don't have trust in insurance, there's no reason to do business.

- H.O.

knew that reliability was crucial in an industry where so many things were uncertainties.

Whether to those employees he worked with or the policy holders he worked for, he made himself available.

- We employees had bought him a door knocker one time for a Christmas gift; we all chipped in.

And he had to put it on the inside of the door because that door was always open.

It was rich symbolism, which means that anybody could walk in and see him.

And there were times that people would walk in off the street.

They could have been policy holders.

They could have stopped in for a visit.

They were always welcome.

And when we would get him things, he didn't want material objects, he would say, well put that money towards the War Orphans fund.

And so we would do that.

- One of his favorite charities was the War Orphans Fund, which gave money to children who were affected by war torn countries.

So he often would use his birthday, which was on Flag Day, June 14th, as an opportunity to kind of fundraise for some of these charities.

- One day he tells a story in a bulletin.

He's sitting at church and he whispers to the wife.

He said, what do we pay for a can of cat food?

How much cat food do we feed the cat?

She says, well one, one can if I feed them.

Two if Susie feeds them.

And cat food was 29 cents a can.

So he's thinking 29 cents a day versus 58 cents a day, maybe people can afford that quarter a month.

He put it out though in the newsletter to employees and he asked for a pledge of as little as a quarter a month, $3 a year.

- He would draw pictures of himself as a flag pole sitter, which was a fad in the 1920s and thirties.

He never actually participated in this, but he was very tickled by the idea of the endurance test of sitting atop a flagpole for days on end.

So he would draw himself as a flagpole sitter in various poses, sometimes jumping off with a parachute, insurance applications raining down around him and he would have an umbrella.

And so he would say things to encourage agents and employees to give as generously as they could to this charity that was so special to him.

- I looked and tried to figure out how many children that may have affected between 1949 and 1980, and I figure roughly it's over a hundred children now.

It doesn't seem like a lot, but it's a hundred lives that it made a difference to.

And he was constantly doing that kind of thing.

He admits that everybody had tons of charities to take care of, but you know that one was near and dear to his heart and eventually that morphed into United Way.

- And he did a lot of things to help Erie in quiet ways.

Now, none of the magnitude now, but here's another story for you.

There was a Black church on 11th Street, which was in the throes of redevelopment.

This would be in the sixties.

And they did not have enough money to build a new church, which was subsequently built on Pennsylvania Avenue.

H.O.

Hirt put up a large part of the money.

He did a lot to help Erie.

He never wanted them known.

He'd never asked for any accolades at all.

- Whatever he did, he was all in.

The company, was H.O.

's child and maybe his favorite child because he spent a tremendous amount of time.

He worked seven days a week.

He, he tried to be a good parent.

He, he was older.

For example, he was almost 50 when his daughter was born.

His son was born 10 years before, but his son left home when he was 17 to go in the Navy.

And so he was out of the picture.

His daughter spent a lot of time with his sisters, the aunts.

He wasn't around a lot, but he was revered.

- It can be hard to balance responsibilities to your family, your company, your employees, and their families.

H.O.

watched the company grow so much over the years, but he did not forget the early days either.

When his old co-founder was about to turn 65, H.O.

reached out.

O.G.

Crawford would receive a pension.

The ERIE had not implemented one in those early years while O.G.

was working there, but H.O.

made sure he would get it now that they had.

H.O.

Hirt was, as they say, good people and good people, like good parking spots and the darn TV remote, can be hard to find.

But H.O.

wanted to make sure those at Erie Insurance were good people, too.

- He wanted people who could think and use common sense.

And so he would recruit people that had those talents and those were people then that helped us grow and become a competitive company.

- We had a, a wonderful cast of characters, and I mean it most complimentarily, at Erie Insurance.

We had people, I'll say this to you, that other companies would not have hired for one reason or another, licitly or illicitly.

He hired them.

And what do you suppose the reaction was?

Unfettered loyalty.

- Well, I really think it's, that's what it's all about, is getting the right people in place and then cultivating their development.

We hire people who understand that they aren't the only person in the room, that other people have feelings, other people have needs.

H.O.

was a great teacher and the way we impart knowledge and, and teach people today is quite different, but we make significant investments in that.

And part of that investment in people's development is learning what our culture's all about and behaving that way.

- We adopted very early, "the ERIE was above all in service" and that's been our advertising slogan and our ideal in all the years since then.

- It extends to our customers, our policy holders, and to one another as colleagues.

One of our retirees had recently shared a story with me that he was working for the company and it was shortly before H.O.

passed away, but H.O.

was visiting Founders Hall and this gentleman was waiting to talk to the CEO and he was just kind of milling about the office.

And H.O.

had noticed him and he went up to him and asked, how can I help you?

What do you need?

Can I do anything for you?

And at this point he had been retired, but he saw this person that looked like he needed some assistance.

And even though it was an employee, he didn't realize that he thought it was a customer and he wanted to, to lend a helping hand.

- He urged his son to get the education that he needed so that he could take the company forward.

And he did.

He succeeded his father.

- No parent knows what their child will grow up to be.

They can only do their best to raise them well.

In 1976, H.O.

Hirt's service as president of Erie Insurance ended, - I think it was in September.

He announced to the board that "I'm going to retire at the end of the week."

The board persuaded him to wait until they had a chance to talk about that.

And we all knew who his successor was gonna be, but they wanted to go through the, the motions of it.

So, you know, he went full throttle and then stop.

- I remember going up to visit him a, a few months afterwards and he seemed to have become more relaxed, more wistful.

He probably was pushing himself towards the end and he knew when to go out and he went out on his own terms and with style.

- When H.O.

retired as the CEO and he passed the helm to his son, Bill Hirt, he left him a note.

It's probably my favorite H.O.

quote, which is "Never lose the human touch."

And it's something that I think about every day and it's such a sort of simple sentiment, but it just again, describes his character and the way that he wanted the company and the business handled forward after his retirement.

"Never lose the human touch."

This is a relationship business.

This is a business that cares about people and you can't lose the human touch or you've sort of lost your path and deviated from the principles and the the mission of the company.

- The first day that I took the office, I went in and my head was racing and responsibility is the thing that hit me.

All of a sudden, the gravity that every CEO in the history of the company has occupied this office and here I am and asking myself, can you really do this?

I still feel that gravity today.

I never thought I would have this job, but I believe that I got it for a reason and it kind of comes back to my value system.

I try to operate thinking what would he do in this situation?

He was very clear.

"Never lose the human touch."

What does that mean?

His operating style was really born out of that philosophy.

Put people first.

The golden rule.

All those things we still talk about today.

- I think that just encourages your employees to do the same sorts of things.

It starts from the top and it trickles down.

And I think our CEOs have been very aware of that.

I had just recently started my job and I was struggling across the parking lot with like a large box of archival materials that I was delivering to the archives.

And out of nowhere, Tim NeCastro came up from behind and said, Hey, let me take that box.

Where are you going?

Let me take it for you.

And took time out of his day to carry the box for me to the archives.

And I just remember thinking that what CEO of a Fortune 500 company would help someone struggling with a box, take a few minutes out of their day, walk them to where they're going, ask 'em how their job was going, what could I do for you?

Are you happy?

Those types of things I just don't think happen at other businesses.

- When I started at the company the first time in 1976, he was just retiring.

but our paths kind of crossed at the same time and everybody had just grown up.

The stories that you could get from people that had been here 10, 15, 20 years.

- But it was through his force of personality and force of character.

He lived through several wars and the great depression.

The company thrived and succeeded during all of that time.

- We, we hosted a retiree tour here yesterday and I was talking to a number of people and I always ask tenure, and it's very rarely do I talk to someone who was here fewer than 25 years.

- I retired from Erie after 33 years.

- I retired after about 30, 32 years.

- I was with Erie Insurance for 25 years, and I've been back for a year, almost two years.

- I was with Erie for 37 years.

- I retired from Erie Insurance after 41 years with the company.

- I had 46 years total at Erie Insurance.

- We have a list every month that shares service anniversary milestones.

And there's always one or two people that are celebrating 50 years of a service anniversary.

And so if you're a leader and you worked for H.O.

and you really believed in his mission and his values, you're going to impart that on your team.

And it's just sort of a snowball effect from there.

The, the longevity definitely contributes to the preservation of our values.

Institutional knowledge.

We're big on knowledge transfer here.

- He ran the company for its first 50 years.

And I always look upon that as a blessing because he put his indelible imprint on the company.

- Tom's at the helm now for the other 50 years.

And I don't mean this as, I don't wanna embarrass the gentleman, but I, I mean this with all my heart.

Tom is the one that Erie Insurance is what it is today.

He thinks like H.O., he has the integrity of H.O.

Hirt, and especially important, he has the vision of H.O.

Hirt.

Now that vision is considerably broader than what could have been realized or what would've been needed before.

That vision would've been very narrow back then, but it was a vision enough to grow the company.

To take that kind of company and to burst it wide open takes a much broader vision.

And there's a real trick to that.

And Tom seems to be able to have done it - Even though he passed on in 1982, H.O.

Hirt's legacy lives on in those who knew him.

- Well, he would just be overwhelmed.

I've seen him around the time he retired and what the size of the company was then and, and then the few years after that and to see how the company was continuing to grow.

I'm going to kind of quote what Mort Graham said at H.O.

's funeral.

He said, "if you want a monument, just look around you."

Even though it's been now many, many years since he died, it, it's still his monument.

I think he'd be a very proud father.

- He would say to us, "We all have a price for which we can be bought."

And he paused and he said, "I hope I get to the grave before I find my price."

And there's been temptations in life.

Maybe to want to take the shortcut, but no, you don't take it.

Now at age 84, I look back on my life proudly and contently and I owe so much of that to H.O.

Hirt.

I think, I think you're getting your answer.

That's, that's what he means to me.

I was so privileged simply by a circumstance to have been able to work with him that I think he'd be very proud to know that service and the other core values are still very much alive.

- If you do give your policy holders the proper service that they have a right to expect, you will grow and you will prosper.

And that is the secret of the success of the Erie Insurance Exchange.

We follow through on every complaint and we do our tasks each day in such a way as to when the continued loyalty of our policy holders and hence, we grow, grow, grow.

Because each year we're adding a new layer of policy orders to the layers that have been accumulated over the years.

- Chronicles is made possible by a grant from the Erie Community Foundation, a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, support from Springhill Senior Living, the Regional Science Consortium, and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen.

- We question and learn.