Industry: Utilities

Joseph M. Farley

  • October 26th, 2021

Joseph M. Farley of Birmingham is a well-known attorney and retired Alabama Power Company executive.

He attended Birmingham Southern College, then transferred to Princeton University where he earned a degree in mechanical engineering. He attended graduate school at The University of Alabama’s College of Commerce and Business Administration and completed his formal education with an LL.B. degree from Harvard Law School. He was a member of the law firm of Martin, Balch, Bingham, and Bouldin before joining Alabama Power, where he advanced to president and director. He has held a number of positions with Southern Company, including president, CEO, and director of Southern Nuclear Operating Company. He has served as president of the Alabama Chamber of Commerce and as president of the Rotary Club of Birmingham. He has been active in a number of educational and health care causes. He is a member of The University of Alabama President’s Cabinet and a member of the Culverhouse College of Commerce and Business Administration Board of Visitors.

Elmer B. Harris

  • October 4th, 2021

Elmer B. Harris says you can’t buy a step-by-step manual for achieving success, and you can’t find a secret seasoning for making something out of yourself. But for someone whose life is recognized marked by ambition, it’s surprising how Harris can whittle down his prosperity, notch by notch, success by success, to reveal one modest, bare-bones mantra — one he’s followed since he was a kid.

“Don’t ever turn down an opportunity,” he said. Not even when it’s flipping hot dogs and scooping sundaes.  Aside from his first job at the local Dairy Queen in his hometown, Clanton, a few more opportunities knocked on teenage Elmer’s door.  Clanton’s WKLF radio station was looking for help, so 15-year-old Harris signed up to be a DJ. He got the job, and there he played requests for “Hound Dog,” gospel, popular, reported the news, and learned how to be articulate. He introduced himself to worldly affairs and had constant interaction with all sorts of people from different backgrounds — an experience that helped him when he became a leader in business.

Born in 1939 to Alton and Lera Mae (Mitchell) Harris, he attended elementary and high school in Clanton.

While he worked at the station and at Dairy Queen, Harris squeezed in two other jobs.  He ran a printing press and also worked in a local machine shop.  A year or two after Harris graduated from Chilton County High School, a gentleman strolled into the shop and presented Harris with an opportunity.  He asked Harris if he wanted to be considered for Auburn’s co-op education program with Alabama Power Company.  Harris said yes and interviewed with Alabama Power the next week. For five years, he alternated spending three months studying electrical engineering at Auburn and the next three in Selma learning engineering, management, and leadership skills from the folks at Alabama Power.  “If you can learn how to manage and lead people toward their own successes,” Harris said, “your company will take care of itself.”  He believes a person should always find a way to say YES, not NO when needs and opportunities arise.

He graduated from Auburn in 1962 with a degree in electrical engineering and then earned his master’s degrees in engineering and business administration a few years down the road. He has received six honorary doctor degrees.  He stayed on with Alabama Power and over the years handled positions of increasing responsibility in the company, including being elected senior vice president, and then executive vice president and chief financial officer in 1979.  In 1985, he made a move to become the executive vice president of Georgia Power Company, a sister company. And when he returned to Alabama in 1989, he became Alabama Power Company’s President and CEO.  When he came back, he felt several things needed to be changed to increase employee initiative and decision-making, increase employee relationships with customers, enhance community and charitable activities, and minimize price increases.

While Harris was president, a lot of things changed.  On his first day, he “burned” all eight books of procedures and replaced them with “any employee is authorized to make any decision that is in the best interest of the company and its customers, bar none.”   He remembers back in the days of the late 70s and early 80s when Alabama Power had about a 30 percent approval rating with its customers. He attributed that mostly to the lack of direct communication and relationships between the company, elected officials, and its customers. In a bold decision, Harris cut about 50 percent of the supervisors and managers at Alabama Power, predominantly by using early retirements.  He wanted employees to be able to make immediate decisions and be able to give customers immediate answers.  The company’s approval rating climbed significantly into the 95-98% range.  There’s no substitute for personal relationships is another one of Harris’s philosophies.

In the early 90s when Harris was president of Alabama Power, one of the biggest opportunities for the state fell onto his plate.  He remembers when he, Governor Jim Folsom, Jr., and his ADO Director Billy Joe Camp, first got wind that Mercedes-Benz in Stuttgart was looking for a place outside Germany to open a plant. The company announced they had selected 200 potential sites around the globe and Alabama wasn’t one of the chosen. When Folsom asked Harris if Alabama should try to get Mercedes to come, Harris said yes.  He told Folsom the state had to be aggressive, put a team together, start setting goals, and stand behind every commitment made, even if when it became uncomfortable.  Alabama was the only candidate that made every deadline and parameter Mercedes set, and when it came down to the wire, Alabama offered Mercedes a controversial (at the time, but not now) $250 million incentive package and won the plant.  That’s another one of Harris’s philosophies:  When an opportunity comes up, you do what you have to do to be competitive and win in an honest ethical manner.

Throughout his professional life, Harris has made charity part of his career. He founded the Alabama Power Foundation, the largest corporate foundation in the state, and funded it at over $150 million dollars.  The foundation has given nearly $100 million to Alabama charities and institutions. He also founded the Georgia Power Foundation when he was Georgia Power Company’s executive vice president.  He has held leadership roles at many civic and nonprofit organizations and served on the board of directors for well over twenty-five corporations and entities, including Mercedes-Benz US International, Southern Company, Samford University, the Business Council of Alabama, the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama, the Boy Scouts of America and Nature Conservancy.   Harris is a graduate of the Air Command and Staff College as well as the Air War College.  He served twenty-five years in the military as a command pilot flying the latest jets in the Air Force inventory and achieved the rank of Colonel in the Air Force and Brigadier General in the Alabama Air National Guard.  He retired from the Air Force when “the Power Company started interfering with my pleasure.”

Continuing his long history of international and economic development activities, Harris serves as Honorary Consul General of Japan. He is married to Glenda Steele Harris.  They have two children, Lori Harris Elmore and Tommy Harris, and six grandchildren.

Charles McCrary

  • September 24th, 2021

Charles McCrary has spent the entirety of his career, which has spanned 40 years, at the Southern Company and its Alabama Power Company subsidiary, which he led as president and CEO. At Southern Company, he served as Vice President for Southern Nuclear Operating Company and was President of Southern Company Generation, among other executive-level roles.

While at Alabama Power Company, he established a mutually beneficial partnership with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. This partnership, known as the AP model, is recognized throughout the public utilities industry and has received awards from the industry and federal agencies. Variations of it have been adopted by the utility industry across the United States. McCrary is a current member of the Auburn University Board of Trustees and the boards of Regions Financial Corporation, Great Southern Wood Holdings, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. His business expertise is highly valued, demonstrated by his previous service as chairman of the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama and service on the boards of Mercedes-Benz U.S. International and Protective Life Corporation. He was inducted into the State of Alabama Engineering Hall of Fame in 2003.

In 2015, the Alabama Power Foundation honored McCrary by founding The McCrary Institute at Auburn University. The Institute advances the research and development of new energy system technologies to improve the reliability and security of the power grid and related civil and industrial infrastructure critical to our nation’s operations.

McCrary attended Auburn University, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering. He also earned his Juris Doctor from the Birmingham School of Law. He and his wife Phyllis reside in Birmingham and have two sons, Douglas and Alex, and five grandchildren.

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.

Thomas Wesley Martin

  • September 9th, 2021

Thomas Wesley Martin (1881-1964) was perhaps Alabama’s premier businessman of the twentieth century.

An attorney, utilities executive, economic recruiter, research promoter, and booster for Alabama, he began his long career in Alabama as an assistant in the attorney general’s office in 1903. He was the general counsel, president, and chairman of the board of the Alabama Power Company, an association that began in 1911 and ended with his death in 1964.

Thomas Wesley Martin was born in Scottsboro, Jackson County, on August 13, 1881. His parents, William Logan Martin and Margaret Ledbetter Martin were from pioneer Madison County families. His father was educated at Cumberland Law School, and the family moved to Montgomery in 1889 after Gov. Thomas Seay appointed Logan Martin attorney general to fill a vacancy. Young Martin studied law at the University of Alabama and was admitted to the Alabama bar on December 5, 1901. He then worked in his father’s law practice, where he had as his mentor longtime legislative clerk and Alabama attorney general Massey Wilson, who introduced Martin to the legal issues of dam construction on rivers in Alabama. Together, the attorneys worked on several cases that paved the way for the development of hydroelectricity in the nation.

One of Martin’s most important goals was to improve the economy of Alabama and to increase jobs in the state. He was, of course, in the business of selling electricity and was actively engaged in convincing new industries to locate plants in Alabama to use that electricity. He also was committed to extending electricity into rural areas and directed the most extensive rural electrification program in the South 15 years before the federal government established the Rural Electrification Administration in 1935. Martin supported research grants to determine how electricity could improve the farmers’ quality of life and the profitability of farms and was responsible for the founding of the Southern Research Institute and the state Chamber of Commerce. He was successful in convincing the U.S. Congress to create the Horseshoe Bend National Military Park to commemorate the Battle of Horseshoe Bend.

In 1911, Martin was retained by James Mitchell, a Massachusetts engineer who was planning to build a large dam on the Coosa River. The following year, Mitchell bought out Alabama Power owner William Patrick Lay, who owned the rights to the dam site. Mitchell began construction on the dam, which he would name for Lay, and completed it in 1913. The dam was made operational in 1914, the first step in building an electrical system—generation, transmission, and distribution—in Alabama. In June 1919, Martin married Mary Evelyn Tyson of Montgomery; the couple would have no children.

Mitchell eventually folded his various companies into the Alabama Power Company, and Martin served as general counsel to that company from 1912 until Mitchell’s death in 1920. Martin succeeded Mitchell as company president and began a rural electrification program that same year. He also created a hydrology laboratory at Alabama Power, one of the first in the nation, to assist with dam design. Alabama Power’s second dam, Mitchell Dam, was completed on the Coosa River in 1921. Also in 1921, Martin established an economic development program to recruit new industry to Alabama. And in 1924, he directed Alabama Power to fund research by the Alabama Polytechnic University (now Auburn University) to determine how electricity could increase farm profitability.

Over the next decade, the company would construct four more dams, one more on the Coosa and three on the Tallapoosa River. These facilities provided inexpensive hydroelectricity for the state’s economic development and for the new electrical appliances rapidly appearing in the 1920s. Beginning in 1921, Martin led the drive for interstate electrical connections between Alabama and Georgia, and in the mid-1920s, he was able to form Southeastern Power & Light as a holding company for Alabama Power. Martin organized utilities in four states—Mississippi Power, Georgia Power, South Carolina Power, and Gulf Power companies—and folded them into his holding company. He sent men he trained in Alabama to operate these companies and to develop the electrical systems in neighboring states. In 1929, control of Southeastern Power & Light was acquired by Wall Street investors who merged it with Midwestern utilities and the Tennessee Electric Power Company to form a $1 billion holding company, Commonwealth & Southern (C&S). Martin became the first president of C&S but retained his presidency of Alabama Power, to which he returned full time in 1932.

With the coming of World War II, Martin worked to acquire defense industries and military bases for Alabama, such as the Hollingsworth & Whitney plant located in Mobile and the Childersburg-based plants that produced explosives. After the war, he chaired the state committee that led efforts to convert abandoned facilities to peacetime industries. Convinced that the South lagged behind the North in research, he persuaded other state industrial leaders to join him in founding and funding the Southern Research Institute (now Southern Research) in Birmingham, which was created to make the southern industry more competitive. The facility became active after 1944.

In the 1940s, after the federal Securities and Exchange Commission ruled that Commonwealth & Southern had to be broken up under the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, Martin took a leadership role in creating the Southern Company, which became the holding company for Alabama Power, Mississippi Power, Gulf Power, and Georgia Power by 1949. Martin was adamant that it be a true southern company with a southern board of directors, southern attorneys, and a southern services company headquartered in the South that would provide the engineering services for the operating companies.

In the late 1950s, Martin initiated a second dam construction program that provided electricity for the state’s post-World War II boom. In the 1950s and 1960s, Martin led Alabama Power Company’s construction of dams and generating plants on the upper Coosa River and on the Warrior River. Martin also helped organize the state chamber of commerce to coordinate and promote economic development.

Martin was a lifelong student of U.S. and Alabama history, often researching and writing about topics he was interested in, giving talks, and publishing essays. He wrote French Military Adventures in Alabama (1939) and revised it twice with new information, Doctor William Crawford Gorgas of Alabama and the Panama Canal (1947), Candles in the Canebrake: An Historical Sketch of the Time and Setting (1955), and The Story of Horseshoe Bend National Military Park (1959). In 1913, Martin had urged James Mitchell not to build a dam that would flood the land at the Horseshoe Bend of the Tallapoosa River. In the 1950s, Martin actively pressured the U.S. Congress to create the military park commemorating the U.S. victory, led by Martin’s hero Gen. Andrew Jackson, at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. He worked with the Alabama Department of Archives and History on many projects and acquired and donated French wallpaper commemorating the Vine and Olive Colony, a nineteenth-century community of French settlers near present-day Demopolis in Marengo County.

For more than four decades, Martin was recognized as a national leader in the electric industry, honored by the Edison Electric Institute, Forbes Magazine, and others. But he never forgot his roots in the mountains of northern Alabama. The driving force of Martin’s life was his love for Alabama and its people and his determination that, as he often said, “the second half of the twentieth century belongs to the South.” He died of a heart attack in Birmingham on December 8, 1964, at age 83. He was buried in the Martin family plot at Oakwood Cemetery in Montgomery.

Biographical information provided by the Encyclopedia of Alabama.

Charles A. Collat, Sr.

  • August 17th, 2021

With over $1 billion in annual sales and 1,500 associates distributed across 79 locations in 14 states, Mayer has grown to be one of the largest electrical product distributors in the nation.

Collat joined Mayer as an associate in 1953 in its corporate offices in Birmingham, Alabama, soon after serving his country in the U.S. Air Force in Japan during the Korean War. Mayer was – and remains today – a family-owned business: Patsy Weil, whom he married in 1953, was the daughter of the company’s founder.

Working his way up the ranks within the company, Collat became owner and president in 1979.

Realizing the need for education in the distribution industry, he and his wife established the Ben S. Weil Chair of Industrial Distribution at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. However, their commitment to UAB goes deeper than that: over the years, they have given well over $25 million to the school and are among its strongest supporters.

In recognition of their contributions, the business school at UAB is now known as the Collat School of Business. He is also a member of both its Leadership Cabinet and President’s Council. Collat has been recognized for his service to the institution with its President’s Award and was the recipient of an honorary doctorate of humanities.

Collat’s personal philosophy is “Do Good and Be Better” which is something he has strived to do all his life. To that end, he has served in a leadership capacity at community-oriented organizations such as the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind Foundation, the Boy Scouts of America and Rotary Club. He was also a past president of Temple Emanu-El in Birmingham and created and chaired the Temple’s endowment fund for many years.
Collat was born in Savannah, Georgia. He attended the University of Georgia where he earned an accounting degree.

He was married to Patsy Weil Collat for 62 years. She passed in January 2015. They have four children: Nancy Goedecke, Caki Mendel, Susie Collat and Charles Collat, Jr. Collat has ten grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He is currently married to Joanna Gotlieb Collat.

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