Stuart A. Robertson - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Stuart Robertson was born on February 28, 1918, in Montesano, Wash., in Gray’s Harbor County about 95 miles southwest of Seattle. The family was shaken when the father, a civil engineer, died just three months after Stuart’s birth. Eventually, because of their mother’s efforts and working outside of school, all five children went to college.

In 1934, Robertson at first entered the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho, because of the low tuition. But when he was told he must pay a higher out-of-state rate, he transferred to the University of Washington where he helped meet the costs of board and tuition by working part-time as a houseboy in a campus sorority and with a second job at the federally funded National Youth Administration. During summer breaks, he worked at a pea cannery, earning 37 cents an hour.

In his junior year at college, Robertson was reconsidering his future course when he saw a recruiting notice for actuaries on a bulletin board in the math department. After some research to find what an actuary actually did, he became intrigued. Milliman principal Stan Roberts once described actuaries as “doctors of probability,” in that their occupation involves calculating the likelihood of such things as how long an individual will live after retirement or how likely someone is to come down with a specific disease. These calculations are used by companies like insurance firms and financial institutions to calculate rates and decide what services to provide.

From his research, Robertson learned that he could earn the status of Fellow in the Actuarial Institute by passing tests and decided this might better serve his goal than a bachelor’s degree. A day after his 19th birthday, he began a job as a clerk for the actuary at the Great Northwest Life Insurance Company in Spokane, Wash. He also began studying for his first actuarial exam.

From 1937 to 1947, he rose through the ranks at Great Northwest to become a vice president in the firm. He dealt with multiple aspects of insurance, including actuarial work, accounting, underwriting, and stockholder and policyholder relations. In 1939, he married childhood acquaintance Marjory Moch, whom he’d been dating since high school. In 1947, he accepted his first actuary-only position at Northwestern Life and returned to Seattle.

At this point, anticipating his final actuarial exam, he began to consider a move to the East Coast to expand his prospects. But then he met Wendell Milliman, who made the case for the potential of actuarial consulting. Milliman had established the first consulting actuarial practice in the Pacific Northwest in 1947. He worked for state government and firms that were too small to have their own actuarial departments.