I interviewed Floyd Bolin at his home in Alexandria, Minnesota, in May, 2003. He was 94 years old at the time, slight of build, ramrod straight, a little hard of hearing, and funny. I was a few minutes early when I arrived for the first of my two interview sessions with him. I rang the doorbell and got no answer. I knocked loudly and got no answer. The door was not locked so I opened it and called Floyd's name and got no answer. I stepped into the house a couple of steps, far enough to see Floyd in the living room, tipped back in his recliner, a blanket on his lap, his eyes closed, an alarm clock on the blanket. "Floyd," I said, "it's Tom Montag." Floyd opened his eyes, looked at me, looked at his alarm clock, and said, "Tom, you're a few minutes early. You'll have to go away and come back at 4:00 p.m." That's the sense of humor Floyd has, and that quick. My thanks to Ione Jensen and the Douglas County Historical Society for this transcription.
Vagabond: Now when did Dutch Girl Dairy come to an end, and why?
Floyd: Well, it was because the big companies got bigger and bigger. They would come into a town, especially Land O Lakes. They went into the processing of milk, too. They would come with a big semi and set up a dealer in town to handle their milk. The first thing they would do, they’d go to a town where they could see they could cut the price and then put someone out of business. They just did that in all the towns. They killed all the dairies in town except me. I was about the only one between me and some guys in the southern part of the state. One that lasted a little while longer was up north. I was the last one to go out. I sold my business, between the milk plant and all I came out smelling like a rose. Because I had the top outfit.
Vagabond: Who did you sell to?
Floyd: A fellow by the name of Larson. He was just a step ahead of Land O Lakes. Larson from Stillwater. He saw what they were doing and he was an old dairy man and he got mad. He saw what they were doing. They would just go into a town and kill the small dairies. He would find out where they were dealing and would go to the guy there and tell him that I’ll give you so and so for your place. That would prevent Land O Lakes from being able to cut the price. He sort of stepped in as a good guy. He did the same thing here with me. He came in here and said, I’ll pay you so and so. I told him, how about my men? I don’t want my men to lose the work. They were all friends of mine. He said, we can handle that. That’s what they were doing, they were consolidating. There was another dairy here in town, that I helped start. I had too much business to begin with. I gave him parts of my route even and got him going. A fellow by the name of Erickson. So this guy Larson, he bought both of them and as a go-between us and Land O Lakes Creamery, then they bought from him, and between them they worked out a deal where all of us could get paid a reasonable price, so that we wound up without losing our shirts. He was known as a competitor of Land O Lakes.
Vagabond: So he was getting big enough to deal with Land O Lakes?
Floyd: He stopped this business of Land O Lakes; they were a bunch of rascals. He fixed it so we got a reasonable price for our life’s work. It was inevitable that was the way it was going to go.
Vagabond: What year was that? 1958?
Floyd: Ya, 1958 is when I got out. I was okay. I sold and I had the building left. Larson, if it hadn’t been for him I would have lost my shirt to Land O Lakes. They had no mercy at all.
Vagabond: You’ve come to the end of the dairy business. What did you do after that? Did you retire then in 1958?
Floyd: No. I went to work for an investment company. The State Bond and Mortgage Company. I went on a crusade. Now that’s another segment of my life that I’m very proud of. It was a miserable thing because it involved a clash of philosophy to a certain extent. Called State Bond and Mortgage Company. A very, very solid, honest group of people that helped people save money. The insurance companies were gung-ho sell you insurance and they always talked about the savings that you had in there. Actually they sold savings in their sales as much as they did insurance. In fact, they put a lot of stress on that. But the irony of it is, if you try to save your money by the way of insurance, you risk losing it for your beneficiary. They have billions of dollars sewed up in the United States, in insurance policies sold as savings and insurance. Their way of doing it was that they would charge you about $27 to $30 a thousand for insurance coverage. In the beginning you had, the first day, you had that coverage for that money. But what happened was they took the bulk of that money and put it into cash value in the insurance.
There are ways of having insurance without risking your capital. The insurance company called on me and the man that taught me how to do it, they called on him and did the same thing to him. They came to me when I was in the dairy business here, doing well, and sold me insurance for $35,000. I owed over $75,000. That’s all I could afford. It cost over $700 a year. Well, I didn’t know the difference, you know. So here comes this guy from New Ulm and started talking to me. At first I almost threw him out. I didn’t want any more salesmen. He said I’ve got a story to tell you. He said your insurance is not the type of thing you think it is. He said our company is in the savings investment business. We will sell you together with a self-completion insurance policy along side of it but we will not tie up your principal in the savings plan. Now ordinary insurance like "20 pay life" is one of the most popular. A 20 year endowment plan. It’s been sold to millions in this country. You pay at a lower age when you start out, 20 years old or older. You could get it for $20 a thousand, between $20 and $30. It would cost you for $10,000 about $270 a year, depending on your age. Now then they said you had $10,000 of insurance. The first day you did, but then you had a higher price on that first thousand. As you went along, the settlement outside of what they call a dividend, which was about maybe 2-3% on the cash value that was in there, they kept as a cash value and that built up inside the insurance policy. But when you died that was not paid out separate from the face amount. Say you bought a 20 pay life insurance policy, an endowment policy, 20 year endowment. It would cost you $175 a year. It would cost over $100 a year anyway for a 20 year endowment. So you paid in, but in case of death, your family would get $10,000. They get it the first day, they get it the last day. The insurance costs only about
$3 a thousand for them to furnish, but the endowment costs more than that. A 20 pay life policy costs $27 a year. An endowment policy costs a lot more than that. But it didn’t make any difference on the settlement. If it was a $10,000 policy, that’s what they got until they had what they called a dividend in there, this cash value built up over and above the insurance. That would build up and that would become cash value. So if you got some of that in there, you would get the face of the policy plus what that cash value was. You wouldn’t get it in case you died, they kept all except the dividend on that. So when you got up to the end of a 20 year endowment, it was all your money in there. There was no insurance at all at the last. So if you died, the only insurance you had was the difference between the cash value and the face amount of the policy. Which was already your money. So at the very end you wound up paying the same premium for the last years of that policy and you probably didn’t have more than $100 of it as insurance. It’s the biggest graft that every hit the world.
Vagabond: So you started working for State Bond and Savings Company.
Floyd: With the idea of exposing this to the public. Telling the story of life insurance. A very, very difficult thing to do because people had respect for the insurance companies. They had been at it for years and years and praised themselves to the point where you believe you must never touch an insurance policy. It’s sacred. I went in there and I told them, "You’ve got to get rid of this thing. This is robbing your wife and kids." They would get mad at me because they thought I was just another rabble rousing-salesman. So I taught this for 30 years, I gave them my life, teaching the people of the territory I had how not to buy life insurance. Also to see to it that you could buy life insurance for a $1 a year for a $1000 when you were a youngster, instead of paying $3300. The graft was astronomical. I became a thorn in the side of the insurance companies. They tried everything in the world to stop me. They were going to have me arrested, and do this and that to me. But I didn’t pay attention to them at all. I went right ahead and told people, "You are robbing the wife and children." That’s what they were doing. To this day the insurance companies still doing it if they can get by with it. It’s unbelievable.
Vagabond: So this investment work is what you retired from?
Floyd: For 30 years I did that, and then I retired.
To be continued....
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