It does sound like a whole life policy, and your parents would have been better served just investing the $150 a year (if that is what they paid since the beginning). If they'd gotten an average of 7% plus compounding over 27 years, it would be worth well over 11K.
And to point out the not-so-obvious, if you're to the point of having enough assets to be semi or fully retired, you don't really need any life insurance because you have money and investments to sustain any dependents - you're "self insured" at that point. If you died, they'd still be okay.
Term life insurance is what you should get when you have dependents that need your income - usually you get it for a certain amount of coverage that will give your spouse/kids a chance to get up to speed and able to stand on their own. You buy it for a period of 10 or whatever years, and pay VERY reasonable rates to get a large amount of coverage that would make it possible to pay off a house and debts, provide for college funds and allow spouse to survive comfortably without you. It's comparible to car insurance - you buy coverage for when you're driving the car (needing to cover dependents) but if you sell the car (end policy) then you both walk away. You get MUCH higher coverage for less of a payment than if you tried to get that same amount through whole life; see milla's 23/mo = $276/year for 500K coverage for the term, as opposed to your whole life policy 150/year for 60K. BIG difference there. She's paying a bit less than your policy, for over 5 times the coverage, and she'll only need it until the kids are grown and/or they are FI.
Whole life insurance is basically pay until death to get a small amount at the time of death, but if you added up all the money that was paid out for the policy, you'd have definitely been MUCH better off just taking it and investing it on your own. So basically, they're taking a chunk of your money to manage your funds and they're investing it and making a substantial profit off of it, while giving you a very small return.