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Mike Light, Laclede Mutual Insurance Company and Mike Light Insurance Agency
My story starts with a one-room schoolhouse, an outhouse out back, and a mail route that has never changed.
I was born and raised right here in Laclede County and I still live on the same mail route I’ve lived on all my life. Even when I was in the Air Force for four years, my home address stayed the same. My family has been on the same piece of land since 1901. My great-grandfather John Light came from Tennessee and bought the farm that year. About six months later, he sold it to my grandfather when he got married. It has been in our family ever since. We are officially a century farm now. I live there today with my wife and raised all my kids there too. They are all still nearby. The farthest one lives on the other side of town. The rest are just down the road. You cannot ask for much more than that.
Growing up out in the county was a different world. We did not have indoor plumbing when I was little. There was just an outhouse out back. Somewhere around ‘51 or ‘52, my folks built on to the house. They tore off the lean-to kitchen and built a bigger kitchen and dining room. That was when they finally put in indoor plumbing. I remember when we got a telephone in the house too. That was not until about 1974.
I started out at Delto, a one-room schoolhouse that is still standing today. My cousin owns it now. It had a potbelly stove at one end of the building, so one end of the classroom would be warm and the other end freezing cold. We had one teacher for all the grades. You would sit there and do your homework while the teacher worked with the other kids. On Fridays, if we got all our work done, we had ciphering contests. Two kids would go up by the blackboard and do long division or multiplication problems until someone got beat.
Eventually Delto got voted into the Lebanon school district. I went to Franklin School after that and then finished at Lebanon High School. I tried college for a semester at SMS in Springfield but ended up joining the Air Force in 1967 after I got my draft notice. They told me on a Thursday to report to Kansas City on Monday. I became a security policeman, which meant I spent a lot of time walking around B-52s and guarding the base. I spent time in Vietnam doing base security, and while it was not easy, I know I had it better than a lot of others. They offered me six thousand dollars to re-enlist when my time was up. That was a good bit of money back then. I told them I would do it if they could promise me one base stateside for the next twenty years. They said they couldn’t do that, so I came back home.
While I was stationed at Ellsworth Air Force Base in Rapid City, South Dakota, I met my wife. She was from there. I always tell people I kind of tricked her into coming to Missouri. I came back first and she stayed behind to finish college. I told her we were going to move to Florida where my uncle worked for the police department in Tampa. That plan fell through. She moved down here about a month after we got married and we never left. We had four kids in ten years, and they all stayed close. That is what I am proud of more than anything. Our kids are raising their kids on the same land we walked as children. And our business is still helping the same families we have known for generations.
After the military, I worked a few different jobs until an older neighbor called me one morning. He wanted to retire and asked if I would be interested in taking over his insurance business. I went up there and talked to him, and that was it. I started writing policies for Laclede Mutual Insurance. My first commission check was fifty dollars. Back then you did everything yourself. You sold the policy and then you adjusted the claim too. I remember being a kid and tagging along when the old agent came out to the farm after a storm took some tin off our barn roof. He looked up and said two of those pieces can probably be straightened, one is no good, and three more are missing. He said he would give Dad five dollars and told him to send his boys up on the roof to fix it. That is how insurance worked back then.
I started working downtown around 2004 or 2005. At first I worked from home, but as I got more clients I needed an office. The building we are in now is owned by Laclede Mutual. We run the agency in the front and they run the mutual side from the back. My daughter Sandy started helping me early on. She was working at the bank while she went to school. I offered to pay her the same as what she made at the bank if she would come work with me instead. She said yes, and now we are still at it.
The company was originally started by Gustav Snyder, who also moved here in 1901, just like my grandpa. It’s been around over 100 years. It’s a mutual association, which means it’s owned by the policyholders. We have a board that gets elected at the annual meeting. I’m the president now. We’ve had some families and properties that’ve been with us since the beginning in 1913. It’s not a big fancy operation, but it’s local.
Our building sits on the corner of Commercial and Jackson. It is easy to tell people where we are. We always say we are near Cackle Hatchery and Noble Hudson’s old place. That usually does the trick. We did a full renovation of our building about five years ago. It really changed the way things looked on this end of downtown. It feels good to have contributed to that.
Downtown has changed a lot over the years. When I was a kid, we would come in on Saturdays. Everybody did. There were benches along the sidewalks and the men would sit there on what we called the spit-and-whittle corner. They would chew tobacco, spit, and whittle on sticks while their wives shopped. It was a place to catch up and visit. That was what Saturdays were for. It was a different kind of community back then. Slower. Simpler.
This town has always been home. To live in a place where your roots run deep and your neighbors know your name, that is what community means. And I am proud to be part of a downtown that still feels like that.
