Lyle Carpenter’s eight brothers and sisters got more education than he did and used to wonder when he was going to get a real job. Probably too late now. He’s been at this insurance sales gig for 50 years.

Carpenter answered a blind ad in a Springfield, Mo., newspaper in the winter of 1956 and became one of 11 local people who signed up with American Republic Insurance Co. After three weeks, just three remained on the job. “After four or five months, I was the only one left,” Carpenter said.

Maybe the other 10 didn’t have the knack for this kind of work, but Carpenter did.

“This was at the beginning of health insurance in rural America,” Carpenter said. “Maybe one in four families carried health insurance.” To reach that untapped market, a carload of agents would travel the countryside, each trying to make three sales a day as they worked into the evening. At first, Carpenter was one of three trainees traveling with one trainer. For the first two or three days, the trainer never invited him to get out of the car. Finally, while the trainer was at one house, Carpenter would walk to another and knock on the door.

Soon he found himself making a fair number of sales. Folks were signing up for policies that would cover the prevailing charge of $8 per day for a hospital room, and up to a hefty $450 in surgical expenses. A couple could get health coverage for $5.50 a month, or go all out and get their office visits and house calls covered too for $8.75.

Four years later, American Republic was impressed enough to have the still-youthful Carpenter open an office in Clayton, Mo., and run it for six years. Then management sent him to open an office in Rockford, Ill., and finally the company’s top man, the late Watson Powell Jr., brought Carpenter to Des Moines to train managers from across the country.

He worked as the state manager for 18 years, then he began running the Central Iowa agency, as he still does today. Through it all, he never stopped selling insurance.

“I’ve been the top producer for the company maybe 40 of the 50 years,” said Carpenter, an agency vice president. “I was the top producer last year.”

When he and his wife, Glenda, are at their second home in Scottsdale, Ariz., his golfing buddies can’t figure out why he keeps working. When he comes back and finds the stack of callback messages on his desk, the sight doesn’t make him think: “They’re right.” No, it suggests to him that he’d better get to work helping his customers.

On a recent day of catching up after an Arizona getaway, he drove to Pella, visited about a dozen of his 1,100 customers in that town and got home at 10:30 p.m. It wasn’t a typical day, but it certainly suggests that he’s not gliding into retirement.

“I would feel guilty if I retired,” said Carpenter, who also teaches a Sunday school class of 2- and 3-year-olds at the Ashworth Road Baptist Church. He already plays tennis a couple of times a week and got in 78 rounds of golf last year; what else would he do?

“My wife suggested I could retire and do volunteer work, and I thought about it for about a week,” he said. “But I realized there’s nothing I could do to help the community more than helping with health-care questions.”

You also have to remember how Carpenter got started. He walked three miles to school as a kid in Missouri, and at the age of 17 ran the farm for a while after his dad was injured in an accident. Then he worked for a while in a produce house, sometimes salting hides and sacking wool in 100-degree heat before spending the afternoon in a below-zero locker handling frozen eggs.

Compared with all that, he says, “selling insurance wasn’t that hard.”