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The Early Bird. "No man ever worked harder all his life than I have," the Secretary says. And no man who didn't get up pretty early in the morning could get ahead of Charles Sawyer.
He made two smart investments—in American Rolling Mill, in which Colonel Procter was interested, and in Crosley Radio Corp., for which he was counsel. The investments, which he cannily sold out before the 1929 crash, became the foundation of a comfortable fortune. He acquired the franchise for a hockey team and formed a syndicate which erected the $3,000,000 Cincinnati Garden (hockey, boxing, wrestling and conventions). A Cincinnati sport and amusement promoter, Willis Vance, who had dreamed of such an enterprise for a long time, still keeps an architect's drawing of his project hanging in his office, draped in black—in memory of not getting up early enough in the morning.
The interests of up & coming Charles Sawyer were wide. He became attorney for Cincinnati's big Union Central Life Insurance Co. and chairman of its investment committee. After some criticism by examiners of the company's loan policy, Sawyer resigned the committee chairmanship. No loss was suffered in the investments. Sawyer remained as counsel until he took the Commerce job.
He bought a string of newspapers, one of which, the Lancaster (Ohio) Eagle-Gazette, he still owns. Today he also has minor interests in an advertising firm, the Churngold (margarine) Corp., American Thermos Bottle, Procter & Gamble, the Reds and the Garden. Besides the Lancaster newspaper, he controls Dayton's WING and Springfield's WIZE radio stations, and Cincinnati's Coney Island. Its Shooting Star roller coaster is the fastest ride in the state of Ohio.
Time for Politics. Charles Sawyer, busy making money, nevertheless had not forgotten politics. In 1930 he was defeated for Congress. In 1932 he was elected lieutenant governor, and two years later he filed for the governorship, but he was licked in the primaries by Tree Surgeon Martin L. Davey, a college friend. In 1938 he beat Davey in a bitter primary campaign, but lost to Republican John Bricker.
In 1944 Franklin Roosevelt offered him the ambassadorship to Belgium. "What could be more interesting," Roosevelt said to him, "than the carrejour [crossroads] of Europe in the closing days of the war?" Margaret Sawyer had died in 1937 after bearing him five children. In 1942 Charles Sawyer had married again: his bride was handsome Countess Elizabeth de Veyrac, nee Lippelman, a neighbor and onetime professional dancer. He took her off to Belgium. He escaped machine-gunning by a Nazi flyer on New Year's Eve, 1944, made friends among the Belgians by his understanding and sympathy, and returned to the U.S. at the end of the war. He planned to settle down in his rambling, unpretentious home in Glendale with its stretch of lawn and its' big recreation room containing a billiard table and a easeful of ribbons won by Sawyer horses and stock at state and county fairs.
Instead, in the spring of 1948 Harry Truman asked him to succeed Averell Harriman as Secretary of Commerce. It was a time when most Democrats were shying away from what looked like a lost cause. Sawyer took the plunge and went to Washington.