Induction Year: 1975

Mervyn Hayden Sterne

  • September 9th, 2021

Mervyn Hayden Sterne made Birmingham his home in 1909, and for more than six decades he would be one of its most notable leaders.

In 1916, he formed M.H. Sterne and Company, a firm specializing in stocks and bonds. In 1917, Sterne suspended business and joined the Army, was commissioned a First Lieutenant, and served eleven months in France. After his discharge, he formed the investment banking firm of Ward, Sterne, and Company, which became one of the leading financial institutions in the state. Today, Sterne, Agee, and Leach, Inc., is a prominent investment banking business. Sterne and his partners were pioneers in financing schools and modern road paving programs. In 1922, Sterne married Dorah Heyman. Sterne’s dedicated spirit extended to his religious life as well. He was affiliated with Temple Emanu-El. In 1936, he was the first chairman of Birmingham’s United Jewish Fund. Sterne served in World War II, serving as a major with the Army Services Forces, General Staff Corps. Upon his discharge, he returned to Birmingham where he raised more than $400,000 in just two days for aid for Europe’s Jews. He also organized a fundraising drive for Birmingham Southern College and Howard College, which raised $1,500,000 in just seventeen days. In 1948, he was nominated for Birmingham Man of the Year. In 1968, the Alabama Securities Dealers Association recognized him as one of the south’s leading investment bankers.

James Franklin Rushton

  • September 9th, 2021

The story of ice manufacturing in Alabama is the story of James Franklin Rushton and his father, William James Rushton.

In 1881, the elder Rushton purchased an ice machine which he set up in Birmingham. The city’s rapid growth in the late 1880s provided a ready market for Rushton ice, and the business prospered. The younger Rushton, known familiarly as Frank, began work in the family ice factory as an oiler in the engine room. Eventually, he worked in every department and became an expert in all facets of the business, and by the turn of the century, he was his father’s chief assistant. Eight ice plants were constructed in the Birmingham area. Through their retail sales outlet, the City Ice and Delivery Company, the Rushtons arranged efficient delivery of their ice to customers. Together father and son developed the business into one of the largest and most successful of its kind in the south. Frank served several years as a vice-president of the National Association of Ice Industries. After his father’s death, Rushton further expanded the family business by establishing the Franklin Coal Mining Company and the National Coal and Coke Company. Frank Rushton is also remembered for his public service. His most notable public work was his leadership of bond drives during World War I. His colleagues at his funeral observed of him, “no man of his generation was more closely identified with all that was best in Birmingham.”

Louis Pizitz

  • September 9th, 2021

Louis Pizitz, a part of the great migration of Jewish immigrants to the United States in the late 1880s, longed to be free from the restrictive laws that had led to the poverty of the Jews of Eastern Europe.

Pizitz arrived in New York in 1889 and soon took out naturalization papers and married Minnie Smolian, a former resident of Poland. Pizitz began his career as a peddler, and his experience taught him lessons he never forgot: buy wisely, sell honestly, know your customers and treat them with dignity. The panic of 1893 and the lure of a developing metropolitan area drew him to Birmingham in 1897. With a few hundred dollars, he rented a small building on First Avenue North and opened his store with eight employees. Pizitz was successful in Birmingham. He often shared his good fortune with others. In 1915, thousands of coal miners and their families faced starvation in the midst of labor strife. Pizitz sent truckloads of food and clothing to the mining communities. During World War I, he headed numerous Liberty Bond drives. Pizitz weathered the Great Depression, and in 1937, his store had grown to 74 departments and 600 employees. Pizitz was a pillar in the Birmingham Jewish community and was a founder of the Temple Beth-El. In 1948, he won the Good Will Award of the National Conference of Christian and Jews. In Birmingham’s Centennial Year, Louis Pizitz was chosen one of ten leading businessmen in the city’s history.

Ben E. May

  • September 9th, 2021

Although few knew the magnitude of his endeavors, Ben E. May’s contributions are now recognized by the giants of the medical field.

Ben E. May, a Mobile businessman, contributed more to the eradication of suffering and disease than many scientists. At the age of 15, he worked in a sawmill where he learned about the enterprise in which he would make his fortune. After one year of formal higher education at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he moved to Mobile. May quickly recognized the value of timber property and began acquiring cut-over lands with the idea of reforesting them. May’s fortune was made during World War I as he supplied England with much-needed timber for the war effort. May took the money he made from this venture and invested it inland in southwest Alabama, Florida, and California. He founded and became president of the Gulf Lumber Company in Mobile in 1940 and served as vice-president of Blackwell Nurseries. He also served as director of the First National Bank of Mobile and Morrison’s Cafeteria. May’s real success in life came from his intense desire to use his wealth to assist others. May supported the Weizmann Institute; Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin; Dr. Paul Dudley White, renowned cardiologist; and Dr. Charles B. Huggins, director of cancer research at the University of Chicago. May was also instrumental in establishing the Southern Research Institute in Birmingham.

Wallace Davis Malone Sr.

  • September 9th, 2021

Wallace Davis Malone, Sr. built First National Bank into one of the largest financial institutions in the southeast.

Malone, a graduate of Dothan High School in 1912, received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1915 from The University of Alabama. He then entered the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration but left prematurely to serve in World War I. After serving in France, he was honorably discharged as a First Lieutenant. Malone returned to Dothan to become manager of the Dothan Guano Company, a large fertilizer manufacturing company. He eventually bought the company’s outstanding stock and controlled the company until selling it in 1955. In 1934, Malone married Alice Mae Dee. When his father died in 1939, Malone became president and chairman of the board of First National Bank. During his tenure with the bank, it became one of the largest financial institutions in the southeast. In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Malone to the National Council of Consultants of the Small Business Administration. Malone also served in several political capacities across the state. He served on the Dothan City Council and the Alabama House of Representatives. Malone was active in the community as a founder of the Alabama State Chamber of Commerce and The Haven, a rescue home for alcoholics in Dothan. During World War II, Malone became a dedicated conservationist. Under Malone’s guidance, the Alabama Bankers Association promoted soil conservation. When Malone resigned in 1954, he began to travel. His ventures took him across America, Africa, South America, and Vietnam.

Charles Henderson

  • September 9th, 2021

Known as Alabama’s “business governor” for his many commercial interests and for maneuvering the state out of debt, Charles Henderson was also a successful local politician, education supporter, and philanthropist whose public contributions to the city of Troy and Pike County created schools and a hospital for children.

Henderson was born on April 26, 1860, at the family farm at Gainer’s Store, an area now known as Henderson, 12 miles south of Troy. He was one of six children of Jeremiah Augustus Henderson and Mildred Elizabeth Hill Henderson. Jeremiah Henderson represented Pike County at the Alabama Secession Convention and served in the Fifty-Seventh Alabama Regiment during the Civil War. He then moved to Troy and established himself as a merchant, becoming one of the wealthiest men in southeast Alabama.

Charles was educated in the private schools of Pike County, where he was greatly influenced by a teacher who had been a Baptist missionary. Henderson enrolled at the Baptist-affiliated Howard College (now Samford University), then located at Marion, but was forced to leave after two years upon his father’s death in 1877. He returned home to manage the family business. Because he was only 17, he had to seek an act of the state legislature to be permitted to run a business. With two of his brothers, he entered the mercantile business known as Henderson Brothers, which became a phenomenally successful concern that brought prosperity to the Henderson family and to the town of Troy.

Henderson and his brothers sold this business to an uncle in 1890, and the future governor established the Charles Henderson Wholesale Grocery Company. In addition to that venture, he was the majority stockholder and president of both the Pea River Power Company and the Standard Telephone and Telegraph Company. Henderson also served on the board of directors and was a stockholder in the Farmers and Merchants Bank of Troy, the Standard Chemical and Oil Company, the Troy Compress Company, and the Alabama Warehouse Company.

Henderson entered local politics when a group of Troy citizens urged him to run for mayor of that city. He was elected in 1886 and served three terms before withdrawing from public life to devote himself to his flourishing business empire. After a brief respite, he agreed to run again in 1901 and after winning, served a total of 12 years as mayor. During his tenure, the town established a public school system, and he helped to establish and serve as a trustee of the Troy State Normal College, now Troy University. On November 7, 1887, Henderson married Laura Montgomery of Raleigh, North Carolina, who was a teacher in Troy’s new public school system. The couple had no children, and Laura shared her husband’s devotion to numerous civic and cultural affairs.

Henderson’s career took another direction in 1906 when he was elected to the Alabama Railroad Commission. He was appointed president of the commission and served two terms from 1907 to 1915. Using his membership on the commission as a stepping stone to higher office, Henderson ran for governor in 1914, defeating former governor Braxton Bragg Comer in a Democratic Party runoff. He easily defeated the Republican, Progressive, and Socialist Party candidates in the November general election.

When Henderson took office in January 1915, the state was deeply in debt (nearly $1 million by one account), with dim prospects for balancing the budget. With the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914, the price of cotton plummeted, and the economy of the state was devastated. Within two years, however, the economic picture brightened, and the state began to share in the nation’s wartime prosperity as federal monies flowed into the state for the Muscle Shoals munitions development and training camps. Wages for Alabama workers increased and neared the national average. Henderson paid off outstanding debts and placed the small surplus in the treasury. Having seen the result of basing the state’s economy on a single crop, Henderson devoted much of his remaining life to encouraging agricultural diversification. He himself was a significant landowner, having an estimated 3,000 acres in Pike County when he became governor.

Henderson also faced continued problems surrounding Prohibition. As an Episcopalian, he was less committed to total abstinence than the Baptists and Methodists who made up the bulk of the state’s population. He, like former governor Edward O’Neal, favored allowing local governments to determine their own rules, but the majority of the new legislature favored absolute statewide prohibition. Henderson vetoed the legislation, only to have his veto overridden. Thus, Alabama was a dry state before national prohibition was instituted, with Alabama’s approval and ratification, by the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919.

After the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, Congress passed conscription legislation. The process of drafting young men into the armed services revealed that a disproportionately large number of Alabamians were rejected because of poor health or for illiteracy. Henderson called on the legislature to provide additional funding for the state’s Department of Health and for public schools. The legislature permitted school districts to levy a property tax for local schools, and many lawmakers took advantage of this legislation to increase community funding for schools.

Although Henderson was clearly a representative of the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, he encouraged progressive causes where he saw a need. He commissioned the Russell Sage Foundation to study the state’s governmental institutions. That report, issued late in 1918, declared that Alabama’s educational, public health, child services, and prison systems were woefully inadequate. It affixed blame for the substandard programs on the state’s inequitable tax system, a subject that has remained contentious up to the present. Henderson advocated reform, but subsequent governors Kilby and Graves acted on most of the issues raised by the Sage Foundation report.

Henderson also proposed reform of the court system, but when the legislature delivered only a part of his request, he vetoed their measure. He succeeded in passing a primary election law that established procedures for certifying candidates and for setting the dates for such elections. Henderson also worked to reform the health care and living conditions of state prisoners. He lobbied for support of the state’s highway commission, and Alabama was among the first states in the country to receive funds from the federal “good roads” bill backed by Alabama senator John H. Bankhead. Henderson’s administration was marked by a workable blend of conservative economy and mild, but important, progress.

Following his term as governor, Henderson returned to Troy to manage his business affairs, but he continued in public service. Gov. William W. Brandon appointed him to the new Alabama State Docks Commission and made him a trustee of Auburn University. He received an honorary degree from the University of Alabama in 1923. In late 1936, Henderson contracted influenza and then suffered a mild stroke. His condition worsened, and he died in Troy on January 7, 1937. At the time of his death during the depths of the Great Depression, Henderson’s estate was estimated to be worth $3 million. He provided trusts for his wife and sister, but the remainder of his estate was placed into a trust for the public good. For 20 years the proceeds went to the construction of public school facilities in Troy, and later monies were used to support the Charles Henderson Memorial Hospital for Crippled Children. A number of his relatives attempted to break the will, but its validity was upheld by the Alabama Supreme Court in two separate cases. Through this notable donation and his steady tenure as governor, Henderson’s legacy survives. An armory in Troy was named for him posthumously, as was a World War II Liberty Ship, the USS Charles Henderson.

Biographical information provided by the Encyclopedia of Alabama.

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