Profile · Manitowoc, Wisconsin
Charles Cameron West
Cornell-trained engineer who bought the Burger yard in 1902; longtime president of The Manitowoc Company; WWII submarine builder
$410,000
Charles Cameron West turned a Manitowoc wooden-ship yard into the company whose cranes still carry the city's name. Born in Mendota, Illinois, on September 22, 1877, he earned a mechanical-engineering degree from Cornell in 1900, spent two years in a Chicago yard, then in 1902 joined Elias Gunnell and L.E. Geer in buying the Burger & Burger works on the Manitowoc River, where clippers had come off the ways since 1847. He launched one wooden steamer for tradition, then switched to steel. After World War I the ship orders died. The machine shops that already cut boilers, engines, and every plate in-house turned to industrial cranes, dredges, and cement and paper-mill gear. That diversification, he later told Time, is what saved the bacon. When the next war came he negotiated with the Navy, took a contract for ten submarines, and built them indoors through Wisconsin winters: fifteen sections, thirty-eight to sixty-eight tons each, launched sideways. The first boat went eight months early. Time, in November 1942, put the contract at $32.8 million and employment at about 6,200 people on three eight-hour shifts, seven days a week; the Navy called his former dairymen and cherry pickers custom-tailor shipbuilders. The Herald-Times obituary later credited twenty-eight submarines plus a farmed-out fleet of invasion barges, a civilian Certificate of Merit in 1943, two terms on the school board from 1925 to 1931, and honorary Boy Scout county presidency from 1933. West built 1404 Michigan Avenue in 1905 and died there on October 3, 1957, still president of the closed corporation. The yard later moved to Sturgeon Bay; the crane works kept Manitowoc's name. The Wisconsin Historical Society notes the Michigan Avenue house for its association with nearly his entire Manitowoc career. The city's claim is the fifty-five years on this river, not the Illinois birth certificate.