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High Marks. Howe was born in Waltham, Mass, to a family whose ancestors had been Americans for more than 200 years. U.S. Naval Hero Stephen Decatur was a collateral relative; Julia Ward Howe, who wrote The Battle Hymn of the Republic, was a distant cousin. Howe's father was a carpenter who built small houses, one at a time. Howe went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, got high marks, and stayed on for a year as an instructor in engineering.
He left M.I.T. for a teaching job that paid better—$2,000 a year—at Nova Scotia's Dalhousie University in Halifax. When he arrived in Halifax, aged 22, he was almost broke and had to borrow $100 to tide him over until his first payday. One of his colleagues recalls: "He was a typical good young M.I.T. graduate—vital, clean-cut, tireless, very, very fit, and very, very pleasant." He was also a good teacher.
In 1913, the Canadian Board of Grain Commissioners offered him the job of chief engineer. Howe declined: "No, thanks. I've never seen a grain elevator." But when the offer was renewed, Howe took out his Canadian citizenship papers* and left Nova Scotia for the West.
Wooden storage buildings were just being replaced by modern concrete terminal elevators when Howe first went to Western Canada. "I knew nothing about elevators," says Howe, "so there was nothing to hamper me." He worked out new ways of speeding up construction and designed cost-cutting improvements. To replace the slow process of unloading grain with hand shovels, he developed the Howe Car Dumper, a machine which can lift a boxcar full of grain off the railway track, tip it over and empty it in eight minutes. It is still in use at most Canadian terminals.
Howe's fame as an elevator engineer spread through the grain country, and he decided to cash in on the demand for his services. In 1916, he set up his own engineering firm in Port Arthur, Ont., Canada's main Great Lakes grain terminal. Later in the same year, he married Alice Martha Worcester, a friend of his M.I.T. days and the daughter of J. R. Worcester, designer of the Boston subway.
Quick Rejection. Both marriage and business prospered. The Howes had five children—three daughters and two sons—in six years. C. D. Howe Co. Ltd. drafted plans for 85% of the grain elevators built in Western Canada, designed bridges, docks, factories, flour mills and industrial buildings in all of Canada's provinces and in the U.S. Howe's work took him as far afield as Argentina, where he designed several of the great grain terminals that still tower over Buenos Aires' waterfront. "When I build them," says Engineer Howe, "they stay built." In an era of relatively light taxes, his firm grossed $10 million a year; overhead in the modest Port Arthur headquarters was low.
His engineering career gave him something more valuable than money. He gathered a knowledge of Canadian economics that few native-born citizens could match. He became "a walking Who's Who, encyclopedia and atlas of Canada's businessmen, production problems and geographic situations."