William H. Carter, president and general manager of the construction firm of Carter-Halls-Aldinger Ltd., who once cut corn in an Illinois cornfield for a wage of a nickel a day, Monday was elected president and general manager of the Winnipeg Electric Co.
At a meeting of the directors he was elected to succeed Edward Anderson, K.C., who has been president sicne Jan. 1, 1929. For more than 11 years he carried the business of the company's chief executive and assumed onerous duties in the period of reorganization. At Monday's meeting he announced that he felt the need of more time for leisure, and tendered his resignation.
It was accepted by the board with regret, although Mr. Anderson will continue as its chairman. This is a new position which was created to retain Mr. Anderson's services and advice.
Mr. Carter has been vice-president of the Winnipeg Electric Co. for a number of years. C. S. Riles, present director of the company, president of the Northern Trusts Co., and a director of other important companies, was appointed to take over Mr. Carter's duties as vice-president.
The new officiers will take over July 1. Mr. Carter's construction firm will carry on with its present staff.
The name of the company's new president has been associated with many buildings in the Winnipeg metropolitan area of the last 30 years, one of them the office building at Notre Dame and Albert St., owned by the company of which he is now the head. The Carter firm was awardded the contract to build it.
Similarly his name has been linked with most of the leading industrial developments in the province, the most recent one the Manitoba Sugar Co. Mr. Carter was one of the originators and founders of the Industrial development board and for five years was its president. Always anxious to attract and establish new industries in the province, his new position, he said, would lessen neither his interest nor efforts in this direction.
Mr. Carter's life story is a yarn of action and hard work. Shake the Who's Who by its thick back until the binding breaks and there's not much meatier in it than the biography of "Bill" Carter. Nearly all his years have been active ones in the building business, none of them in politics.
He was born in Bismark, Illinois, in 1874, and was educated in schools of Danville, close to the town of his birth. As a schoolboy he picked up a little on his own by cutting and stooking corn for neighbourhood farmers. This was the job at which he worked for five cents a day. When a little older he was a spare man on the local section gang, a job at which he had to use the pick and shovel. This was the seed of the idea of going into the contracting business.
In 1896 he obtained a job as timekeeper on building construction with M. Yeager and Son, a Danville building firm. In four years he went to Chicago as construction superintendent for William Grace and Co.
The Grace firm had contracts in many cities in the United States and Canada. In 1904 one of them was for work in the Angus shops of the Canadian Pacific Railway at Montreal. The firm sent Mr. Carter to Montreal. The superintendent on the job told him he would have to speak French, and Mr. Carter had to admit he didn't know a word.
"Then you're on your way to Winnipeg," he ordered.
"Where's Winnipeg?"
"Look it up on the map."
Mr. Carter did just that. He literally had never heard of Winnipeg. Having looked it up on the map he was there in three days and took charge of his new job.
The job with the construction of the Bank of British North America building at 426 Main St, since acquired and now owned and occupied by the Royal Trust Co.
When the job was turned over he went back to Chicago. A few days later he told the general manager that from then on, when he took it on the chin in business, it would be for himself. The firm tried to have him stay but when he wouldn't, the manager told him he was wise in his decision and wise in his choice of location.
That was the origin of the firm of Carter-Halls-Aldinger, Limited, which started business in Winnipeg in January 1907. Its first job was to add two stories to the Peck building, a wholesale clothing warehouse on Notre Dame Ave.
From the start of his business life in Winnipeg, Mr. Carter took a leading part. He was elected president of the Winnipeg Building Exchange in 1910, was re-elected in 1911, and again in 1914. He served as president of the Winnipeg Board of Trade, although he resigned during one of his terms because he was unable to spare the time fro mhis own business.
The Carter firm has built many of the best-known buildings in Western Canada. In Winnipeg it constructed:
It is now building the plant of the Manitoba Sugar Co. in Fort Garry.
Mr. Carter is either a director or officer of a number of other important companies in the west. He now lives at 523 Wellington Crescent.