David G. Carter’s father didn’t trust banks. He made a good living off of his Dayton, Ohio, general store, but all the money he saved — about $40,000 in total — went into lard cans he kept in the home where he lived with his wife and two sons. As a survivor of the Great Depression, it seemed like the safest option for his savings.
Until one night in 1948, when the house caught fire.
“All the money in the lard cans went up in smoke,” Carter said. “We went from having, to not having.”
Carter, 5 years old at the time, saw his family go from middle class to destitute in the space of an evening. His father died the following year, and Carter, his mother and older brother, had to fend for themselves.
Carter is now chancellor of the Connecticut State University System, and he still carries faint burn scars on his right side — but that isn’t the only legacy of the fire. His family’s financial situation prompted him to go to work, first in growing and selling beans, then in paper routes, and — at the manly age of 11 — he took on construction labor and learned skills that he uses to this day.
Skills For Life
As a child, he learned how to set studs, mix mortar for bricks, finish cement and other hands-on work, thanks to a neighbor who took him on as an employee. The pay was minimal, but “I should have been paying him,” Carter said, noting that he still uses that know-how in construction projects. When he was president of Eastern Connecticut State University, he sometimes stopped by to advise construction crewmen when they worked on campus.
The neighbor was just one of the people involved in his career development. Carter’s childhood was littered with people who, in one way or another, gave him jobs to do and helped him out.
Several elementary school teachers in his hometown had a particularly profound role. They gave him odd jobs, like grading papers or doing yardwork, even though Carter had a troublemaking reputation at school.
But it wasn’t they who guided Carter onto higher education; he made up his mind to do that on his own.
He wasn’t spurred on by any high-minded goal to acquire knowledge, either. He made the decision one day on a construction job, when he was shoveling gravel in negative-5-degree cold. As he shoveled, the sweat actually started to freeze right on his skin, and Carter realized he’d had enough.
“So I said, ‘I’m going to college.’ I admit, I went to stay warm,” he said.
And on the site of his next job, at the Central State University library in Ohio, Carter’s outlook changed again. One day while working at the library, rearranging newspaper racks, he had some time to kill and actually started to read the newspapers. He’d read local papers before, but hadn’t known anything about papers such as the Boston Globe, the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times.
“I started reading, and it changed my whole life. I got hooked — I went to school year round,” Carter said.
He became a teacher and administrator in the late 1960s and early 1970s, finally going into the University of Connecticut’s education department, then to Eastern and finally, two years ago, at CSUS.
MY FIRST DOLLAR
