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After listening for hours to Carter eloquently describe a project to make Fort Worth a seaport by dredging the often-dry Trinity River the 350 miles from Fort Worth to the Gulf of Mexico, his good friend Will Rogers gestured for silence and whispered: "Listen! I hear those seagulls now." Once Carter emerged from an all-afternoon session with President Franklin Roosevelt and announced triumphantly: "I got my five feet." Carter had talked F.D.R. into adding five feet on to the Government's proposed mile-long Convair plant, because Tulsa was about to get an aircraft plant a mile long and Carter wanted Fort Worth's to be bigger.
The Dry Holes. Amon Carter was born in a log cabin at Crafton, Texas, the son of a blacksmith. At twelve he left home and took a job as a dishwasher in a boarding house. His extraordinary salesmanship showed itself early when he began selling gilt-edged picture frames, soon had a staff of salesmen working for him. In 1905 he went to Fort Worth for the first time, rented a typewriter for 50¢ a month, and had business cards printed that said: "The Texas Advertising and Manufacturing Co." But his most impressive piece of business equipment was a $2,000 diamond ring, which was easy to pawn to finance new ventures. Two budding newspaper publishers, D. C. McCaleb and A. G. Dawson, who were starting the Fort Worth Star in the city, hired Carter as their ad manager. He soon bought out the partners and borrowed enough money to buy out the Star's opposition, the Telegram.
As the Star-Telegram grew, so did Carter's enthusiasm for Fort Worth. He once talked so eloquently about the city's future to Publisher William Randolph Hearst that Hearst bought the only morning daily in the city. Hearst was sorry; in less than four years Carter's competition was so tough that he sold out to Carter, leaving only the small (cir. 52,393) evening Scripps-Howard Press to compete with the Star-Telegram (combined morning-evening circ. 246,354). For $300 Carter bought a radio station (which later became the paper's profitable WBAP-TV), then branched out into the oil business. After drilling 99 dry holes, Carter struck a rich oilfield and sold part of it for $16.5 million to set up the Amon Carter Foundation, a charitable organization that has helped build many of the city's schools, universities, museums and parks.
Until three years ago, Carter kept a tight rein on the Star-Telegram. Then he turned over the paper's operation to his able, Texas-loving son Amon Jr., onetime artillery officer, who was captured in North Africa, spent 27 months in a German P.W. camp during World War II. Early this year, slowed down by three heart attacks, Publisher Carter made his last public speech at the opening of the 1955 Stock Show. Last week, at his home in the city that is a monument to his energy, showmanship and imagination, "Mr. Fort Worth," 75, died of uremia resulting from arteriosclerosis.