News Release -- 1998

Tribute to Helen Flory

We mourn the passing of Helen Flory, a long-time employee of the Pension Board, now known as the Brethren Benefit Trust (BBT). Wil Nolen, President of BBT, gave the following tribute to Helen during a memorial service at Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren on April 16, 1998

I grew to recognize from a distance her cheery chuckle when she came to our office for her annual visit. Peering down the corridor from my office door, I would see her visiting with some of our staff, always interested in our work, but especially the work of the Pension Plan, the program she helped to birth and then to guide for over 30 years.

Actually Helen started her career in the church offices well before the Pension Plan and long before the offices were built on Dundee Avenue. Her first assignment was as an eighth grader during a school holiday in 1917, followed by successive stints that add up to 45 years, two thirds of which were in the old South State Street church offices. But it was in the Pension Plan that her work was best known.

From 1943-1974 the Pension Plan had an operations staff of one, Helen. She saw the plan grow from the first plan member in September 1943 to 1200 members and 265 annuitants when she retired in 1974. She recorded the first dollar contributed to the plan and watched the assets multiply to almost $13 million when she retired.

On her visits with us she would pepper me with questions about changes in procedures and rules of the plan, contributions, asset growth, benefit provisions, and tax laws. She would listen in amazement at how much her baby had grown and the increasing complexities involved in managing the plan she knew so well.

In 1998 the Pension Plan is in its 55th year.

In most successful long-lasting programs there are generally important people behind the scenes without whom the program would not have been as successful. We have rightly credited persons such as Leland Brubaker, H. Spenser Minnich, Harl Russell, Bob Greiner, and Galen Ogden for the early development of the Pension Plan, and indeed each of these men provided significant leadership. But they all had one thing in common: they worked with Helen. And I'll tell you a little secret. Like many of the people who now work with me, she made their work easier and they all expressed appreciation for Helen. She was the glue who implemented their decisions, who kept the records up to date and provided the reliable administrative support for whatever the need.

When Helen's retirement was announced at the 1974 Annual Conference in Roanoke, Virginia, the delegates responded with a long spontaneous standing ovation. Thousands in that audience knew and appreciated the significance of the woman behind the scenes.

I never had the privilege of working with Helen, but from those who did I know these things about her work:

• She was focused and disciplined, determined to wade through the mountain of work that landed on her desk each day;
• She was accurate and reliable, essential traits if you're going to last for 30 years in pension services;
• She was a pleasant woman, fun to be around, a person with whom it was easy to be colleague and friend.

I will miss the chuckle, her warm countenance and gracious manner, her annual visits, her probing questions, our quiet chats. But I will always be grateful for her legacy of diligence, which made the work of those who followed easier and helped to make the retirement of so many church workers better. Here is a tribute to a former employee who died last week.