As J.C. Taylor Insurance began offering antique auto insurance through Zurich to their personal lines customers, Hall and Hamel quickly realized they needed to devote more resources to truly specialize in this area and capitalize on what looked to be an emerging market. By the mid 1960s, they sought to find someone who could run this aspect of the business, and they needed this to happen sooner rather than later. As luck would have it, during this time National Union Insurance Company merged with AIG, causing their Philadelphia office to close. Because of the merge, one of the branch managers at National Union would find himself out of a job. His name was Robert P. Wallace. Because of the many connections that J.C. Taylor Insurance had made throughout the years, Albert Hall and Robert Hamel already knew Mr. Wallace and offered him the job to run the antique insurance side of their business. He was specifically hired because of his deep knowledge of the insurance industry.
At the onset, J.C. Taylor’s antique auto insurance book of business was relatively small. The majority of customers lived locally in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, although in later years the program would expand to include the rest of the continental United States. In 1968, Robert Hamel had decided to retire and sell his 50% share of the business to Robert Wallace and Ed Deegan, with Albert Hall keeping his share of the other half. Within six months of this new arrangement, Albert Hall died unexpectedly, leaving Robert Wallace and Ed Deegan as the new owners of J.C. Taylor Insurance.
Into the middle of the 1970s, J.C. Taylor’s book of business was beginning to slowly grow. Mr. Wallace decided it was time to ask his eldest son, Robert E. Wallace, to join him. Bob Wallace had spent the previous few years both teaching at a high school and coaching football. He would initially spend his early years at J.C. Taylor expanding his knowledgebase of the insurance industry from the commercial side. As the beginning of the 1980s approached, J.C. Taylor finally received the boost that they had been waiting for: the availability of cars that were eligible for antique insurance due to the exponential increase in car production in the post war 1950s and 1960s. It was during this period when J.C. Taylor’s program really began to skyrocket.
Of course much of J.C. Taylor’s success had roots planted back into the early 1970s when car shows, both local and national, began to take off in popularity. The AACA Eastern Fall Meet in Hershey, PA had grown to one of the largest shows in the country, and starting in the early 1970s, they were there with a booth, meeting their customers face to face. J.C. Taylor was the first insurance company to set up a booth at the Hershey Fall Meet. This was also true with the Fall Carlisle show which preceded Hershey the week before each year. Geographically speaking, having their business located in Southeastern Pennsylvania certainly helped J.C. Taylor become a constant fixture at these shows, but ask any longtime customer and they’ll tell you it was the connection with their customers that drove the success of the company the most. To this day, attendees at car shows still walk around carrying J.C. Taylor bags to hold their belongings, something J.C. Taylor starting handing out in the early 1970s before anyone else did. Through the support of businesses like J.C. Taylor, interest in car shows have grown exponentially and can now be found all around the country, every weekend of the year.