Los Angeles County
Biographies
JOHN WILLIAM WHITTINGTON
WHITTINGTON, JOHN WILLIAM, General Agent of the Aetna Life Insurance Company, Los Angeles, California, was born in England, July 21, 1867. His father was John Whittington and his mother Lydia (Colbon) Whittington. In 1895 he married Ida May Belville in Los Angeles. There are four children, Wayne Colbon, John Wentworth, Dorothy Winifred and William Edmund Whittington.
Mr. Whittington was educated in the public schools of England, but took no higher studies at that time. In 1900 he took a special course at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles.
As a young man, his first business effort was with the Midland Railroad, in England. His first employment with this system was as a booking agent. The railroad business did not appeal to him strongly as a life profession, and in 1887 he became associated with Dr. Bernardo’s Homes for Destitute Children, situated in London, England. At the same time he was connected with the Wesleyan East England Mission in London. Mr. Whittington was deeply interested in this work.
He resigned his position in England, and in 1890 came to Los Angeles, where he has been situated from that time up to the present writing. On arriving here, he sought and found employment with M. A. Newmark & Company, with which firm he was connected for ten years.
In 1900 he was given an opportunity and entered the life insurance business, which he has followed from that time on.
His first work along this line was with the Mutual Benefit Insurance Company of Newark, New Jersey. He remained with this corporation for three years, at the end of which time he became the Southern California general agent for the Aetna Life Insurance Company of Hartford, Connecticut.
Since 1903 he has been associated with the Aetna Life Insurance Company. For two years he was President of the Los Angeles Life Underwriters’ Association, and managed and directed the campaign which brought to the city of Los Angeles the National Association Convention, which was held here in 1908.
During 1909 and 1910 he was President of the National Life Underwriters’ Association. During these two years he made a deep study of life insurance as regulated throughout the country today. It was during this period that he visited practically all of the life underwriters’ associations throughout this country, as well as in Canada, investigating conditions of the various association branches. He spent over four months in traveling from city to city, covering over 18,000 miles on the trip.
Mr. Whittington, who has made a deep study of life insurance for the past eleven years, is considered to be one of the best life insurance authorities in the West, and he has done much for the benefit and development of the work since taking up his residence in Los Angeles, where he is well known.
Aside from his business associations, he is a prominent citizen of Los Angeles and is a director of the S. P. C. A. He is a member of the Chamber of Commerce and the Union League Club of Los Angeles and of the Sierra Club of San Francisco.
Mr. Whittington is a thirty-second degree Mason and is a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church.
Transcribed
by Joyce Rugeroni.
Source: Press
Reference Library, Western Edition Notables of the West, Vol. I, Page 746,
International News Service, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles,
Boston, Atlanta. 1913.
© 2011 Joyce
Rugeroni.
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BIOGRAPIES