NASHVILLE HISTORY CORNER
Leaving a job with a family legacy can be a big decision. Ridley Wills II talks about how he made one of the biggest choices of his life. BY RIDLEY WILLS II The biggest decision of my lifetime was to marry Irene Jackson. This summer we will have been happily married for 59 years. The next biggest decision in my life came in 1983 when I was a 49-years-old senior vice president of American General Life and Accident Insurance Company with more than 1,000 home office employees reporting to me. I had spent 25 years in the life insurance business, nearly all of which time I was affiliated with the National Life and Accident Insurance
Company that my grandfather, Ridley Wills, co-founded with Neely Craig and Runcie Clements in 1901. The decision facing me in 1983 was whether to remain with American General, which had acquired control in 1982 over NLT, the parent company of the National Life and Accident Insurance Company. The safer decision was to remain with American General, where I was a senior officer with a large salary and a possible path to the presidency. The riskier choice was to resign from American General, and choose
another career. I thought that if I left AG, I would probably never be on the board of Vanderbilt University, where my father, Jesse Wills, and my grandfather, Ridley Wills, both served as members. In the late 1970s, before anyone knew that NLT would be acquired in a hostile takeover, Dr. Garth Fort, medical director of National Life, said to me, “Ridley, someday you will be president of National Life.” In 1982, that possibility disappeared when American General acquired NLT and its subsidiaries.
April 14-28, 2021 | The Contributor | NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE | PAGE 5
I want my wife, children, grandchildren, and my brother and sister, Matt Wills and Ellen Wills Martin, to understand the thought processes that led me to resign from American General in 1983. By the time American General announced its acquisition of NLT on November 4, 1982, I had already decided to stay with American General long enough to determine if I felt comfortable working for that company. As I was then chairing National
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