George H. Olmsted
Major General George Hamden Olmsted[1] (March 18, 1901 – October 8, 1998) was an American military officer and insurance executive.
He carried on the dream of Arthur J. Morris, the founder of Financial General Corporation, that "anyone who has a steady job can qualify for installment credit from a bank".
In athletics, General Olmsted was the featherweight boxing champion of the academy and won his varsity "A" as manager and second-string quarterback of the 1922 Army football team.
[2] After graduation, Olmsted served in the active army until October 1923 when he returned to civilian life in Des Moines to enter business with his father who was running a small insurance agency.
In September 1924, he married Virginia Camp, his high school sweetheart and left his father to start his own firm, Olmsted Inc. Agency.
He attracted the attention of prominent persons at the national level of the Republican Party and was invited to meet with President Herbert Hoover at the White House.
Travelers Mutual struggled through the depression years becoming one of the first companies to offer insurance and premium financing to the fledgling long haul trucking industry.
Frantic appeals were coming to the United States from Great Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and Free French Forces in North Africa.
Thousands of allied prisoners of war (including General Jonathan Wainwright, the hero of Bataan) were being held in eleven Japanese POW camps in China.
The letters stated that the war was over, that the allied powers would hold the camp commander personally responsible for the safety of the prisoners and that he should fully cooperate in an immediate repatriation.
The last great problem to face Olmsted in China was what to do with the surplus equipment that had to be left behind in the Theater as American forces departed to come home.
The management team that he had built in his companies before leaving for military service had performed well during the war years and his return became a matter of picking up where he had left off.
[citation needed] After an unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination for governor of Iowa in 1947,[2] he continued to expand his business activities and became a partner in the Equity Corporation in New York.
So successful were his activities that he was promoted to major general in 1951 and assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense to assume command of all US government military assistance be it Army, Navy, or Air Force.
[3] Henry N. Conway, Jr., senior vice president of IB, stated that several loans on greatly overvalued property in Bimini and Freeport had been made by Mercatile but no terms had been established.
Working with the support and cooperation of the Department of Defense and the Departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, the Program offers financial grants to outstanding young officers that are graduates of the three service academies, ROTC programs or OCS/OTS, for two years of graduate study and educational travel in a non-English speaking foreign country.
Scholars are expected to travel extensively throughout the region where the university is located interacting with the residents and learning as much as they can about local customs, traditions and history.
Olmsted died at his home in North Arlington, Virginia, on October 8, 1998, after a long period of incapacitation due to a stroke in the mid-1980s.
[6][7] His older brother Jerauld Lockwood Olmsted attended the Naval Academy but died from polio only a year after graduation.
