Clifford Orr

With his proposal at the 1944 convention in Detroit, Clifford Orr actually revived a project that had flowered in the late thirties, only to be crushed by the wheels of war. Under the auspices of local life underwriters associations, an experimental program of intermediate level, practical training of agents had been initiated in 1937.
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Clifford Orr, a close friend of Bendiner's was familiar with these pre-war effort.
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Orr, Rutherford, Edward L. Rieley, general agent for Mutual Benefit at Philadelphia and Walter Barton, NALU treasurer and general manager for Union Central in New York, represented the NALU.
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NALU secretary Clifford Orr was named chairman and Vincent Coffin, vice-chairman; Charles Zimmerman served as secretary, and Rutherford became treasurer.
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Philadelphia's Clifford Orr assumed the presidency of the Association. A graduate of the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania in 1924, Orr could look back on a successful twenty-four-year career in life insurance selling. A general agent for the National Life Insurance Company of Vermont in Philadelphia, he had received his Chartered Life Underwriter designation in 1932. Along with his years of leadership in both the local and national associations, he had earned everyone's respect for his devotion to the cause of agent education, particularly for his efforts in the creation of the Life Underwriter Training Council. "A very able man," Woodson observes, "Cliff Orr deserves credit for moving the NALU from a mere passive supporter of institutional, intermediate agent training to positive action.

During the discussion on agent education, Clifford H. Orr of Philadelphia, chairman of the Committee on Education, proposed a program that would eventually take shape as the Life Underwriter Training Council (LUTC).Recalling the NALU's role in the founding The American College of Life Underwriters, which had done so much to dignify the field force with well-informed professionals thoroughly schooled in the principles of insurance theory, Orr observed that it was only fitting that the NALU lead the way in inaugurating a program of practical training on how to sell life insurance.Life Association News reported:

He recited the discussion in the board of trustees on the previous day when it was pointed out that last year between fifty and sixty per cent of the men and women in the business wrote under $100,000 of business and 75 per cent less than $150,000.He emphasized the desirability of concentrating on skills and techniques in life underwriter training rather than on pure education.He asked the Council to give its approval to the decision of the Board that the National Association set up a department of education and training at National Headquarters to undertake and supervise this responsibility to its membership.
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Mr. Orr has since written that "the strategy of the presentation was paradoxically both the salvation and almost the defeat of the plan ,Quite understandably, many members of the Board refused to make any commitment of NALU funds for such a nebulous undertaking,The discussion continued for several hours, with the chairman simply insisting on the need for such a plan and the opportunity presented to NALU to sponsor an educational department."

In the discussion, the Board appeared to be split right down the middle.At last, Mr. Orr moved "that a sum not to exceed $2,500 be appropriated to get the proposition started, and if additional funds are needed, to place such a request before the officers and members of the Board before the Detroit convention."