FDR insurance-job desk coming to Hyde Park

ALBANY -- Franklin D. Roosevelt, insurance salesman?

While the future 32nd president of the United States didn't hawk policies, he did work for a Maryland-based insurance company from 1921 to 1928. After his failed attempt to get elected vice president in 1920, the position allowed him to mine the political and financial contacts he would need when he next ran for public office.

Now, the wooden desk that FDR worked at during his eight-year stint as a business executive is being donated to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park.

"This desk is what FDR used to maintain his public connections," said Bob Clark, supervisory archivist at the FDR library, 75 miles north of New York City in the Hudson Valley. "We're delighted to have it."

The walnut desk, made around 1920, is owned by Zurich American Insurance Co., based near Chicago. The company, a subsidiary of Switzerland-based Zurich Financial Services Group, is donating the desk to the FDR library as part of the company's commemoration of 100 years of doing business in America.

Roosevelt's employment with a company later purchased by Zurich is a lesser-known but still important segment of his pre-White House days, according to a business history expert.

"He was able to make the connections between all the players," said Bruce Weindruch, founder and chief executive of The History Factory, a Virginia-based consulting firm that worked with Zurich on the FDR desk project.

The desk nearly got lost in the shuffle of a corporate office move in the mid-1980s, when the Fidelity and Deposit Co. of Baltimore was relocating its Manhattan operations. The New York staff asked an executive at the company's Baltimore headquarters what they should do with one of the old desks, because the new offices had no room for clunky vintage furniture.

The executive had the desk shipped to his Baltimore office.

According to Zurich officials, not long after the desk arrived, the executive attended a retirement luncheon for a longtime employee of the company's Manhattan clerical staff. The executive was informed by the retiree and one of her contemporaries that the old desk he had was in fact the same one FDR used.