Gary Zeman '81 talks about the inevitable
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
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Posted by: Larry Estevez
By JOHN H. PALMER
Hour Correspondent
Let's face it −− it's a conversation we're all going to have someday.
It's a fact of life that we don't last forever, and if you're like most people, you wonder who's going take care of your loved ones when you're gone.
In other words, who's going to pay for it?
Meet (Iona Alum) Gary Zeman ('81), an impossibly happy man who for 27 years has made it his career making people comfortable talking about their inevitable demise.
Zeman, 53, has worked for Allstate Financial Services since 1993. His official title is Personal Financial Representative, but his specialty is long−term financial planning −− a job that usually includes selling life insurance.
"I live in a world where I make something that people don't want to deal with actually comfortable," he said. "It's like the dentist. You dread going but you're always glad once you're done."
From his office high atop an office building at 200 Connecticut Avenue, Zeman has a birds−eye view of the Silver Star Diner, I−95, and a good portion of the city he grew up in. Walk into his office and you are immediately greeted with one of the biggest smiles you've ever seen. He has a happy−go−lucky demeanor that makes you instantly warm up to him. His is a personality that invites you to trust him in a heart−to−heart chat.
And trust him you better, because he's gonna get personal. At it's simplest, life insurance is a crap shoot against your life. Just like a car insurance company takes a bet against your chances of having a car accident, a life insurance company bets against the odds that you are going to die. To make it a fair bet, they are going to need to know a lot about you.
When Zeman talks with a prospective client about life insurance, he says he gets to know people "intimately and quickly" about details that most people never think of. Within a short period of time, he'll know about your job, your income and any debts. You'll tell him about your medical history or high cholesterol. If you travel to dangerous places or have dangerous hobbies, he'll want to know about that, too.
"Your doctor doesn't know if you're bankrupt or rich, and your accountant doesn't know that you're hypertensive, but from the insurance angle we need to know it all," he said. "How often do you sit with a woman and within 10 minutes you ask her how much she weighs and how much she makes?
That's what we do."
Zeman is a lifelong Norwalker who has made many friends along the way. Born in 1957, his father was a car salesman at W.R. Austin, which eventually became Maritime Motors. He grew up on Forbelle Drive, a neighbor of the Silvermine Tavern and moved nearby to Inwood Road when he was 10.
His family loved to vacation on Cape Cod, and moved to Dennisport for a year before they realized that the cape was lonely and deserted in the winter −− no place for a social family used to hosting cocktail parties with 50−60 people. In 1971, they moved back to Norwalk on Wildwood Lane.
He graduated from Central Catholic High School in 1975, and took a year off from school to earn some money. He began working at Tulox Plastics on New Canaan Avenue, where he worked in production control. It was here that he got his first taste of the business world, learning about the relationships between production and sales staff.
He went on to Sacred Heart University, where he got a 2−year paralegal degree and finally graduated from Iona College with an economics degree in 1981. Unbeknownst to him at the time, Zeman learned a lot about money theory and estate law, the bedrock of what he would need to know for financial planning.
He immediately put these skills to work in 1981, when he and a friend bought a bread distribution business. They made a large profit selling wholesale bread and baked goods to stores such as Stew Leonard's and eventually school systems in the area. Zeman loved the work, but the advent of the in−store bakery in the mid−80s put an end to his bread business and led him to start thinking about the future. He was thinking about going to law school when he met up with a friend who worked at Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance. (more...)
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