Our Own Hall of Fame
EDWARD A. DEEDS
PATTERSON IMPRESSED
Deed Was ‘Idea’ Man, With a Business Mind
DAYTON DAILY NEWS FEBRUARY 19, 1961
BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH
Daily News Staff Writer
Fifteenth of a Series
When it rains and the Miami Valley doesn’t flood, when electric cash registers ring, when aircraft engines come off assembly lines—those moments are, in a way, memorials to a Daytonian.
He is Col. Edward A. Deeds, who was longtime president of the National Cash Register Co., father of flood control here, the man behind World War I’s famed Liberty engine.
Like so many industrial giants of his day he was born on a farm, went to a one-room school, became a teacher (in his case at 14) to earn money for college.
DEEDS RODE a horse five miles each day to Denison university where the shy, tallish broad-shouldered youth was a part-time janitor, fulltime captain of the football team.
In 1897 Deeds came to Dayton to work as a $6-a-week assistant draftsman at a small electric company, rose to superintendent and chief engineer within a year.
AT 25 HE went to the National Cash register Co. as a maintenance engineer ($40 a week), attracted the attention of President John H. Patterson by donning foundry gloves, putting a wet sponge over his nose and climbing a 175-foot smokestack to see what was wrong with it.
Deeds left NCR for two years to design and build a Shredded Wheat plant in Niagara Falls, but in 1902 he was back—this time as a vice president and assistant general manager.
HE PLANNED branches in Canada, Germany, England, France, Italy—and he hired a gangly man named Charles F. Kettering for $50 a week.
It was Deeds who had the idea for an electric cash register, Kettering who made it work. With a grease-stained handshake they sealed a partnership that was to give the world the self-starter and countless other inventions.
The TWO were a team—Kettering the inventor, Deeds the business mind, the idea man. In the Deeds barn, Delco was born. (“Ket and I have been as one since the day we agreed to work together,” Deeds later said.)
When the 1913 flood devastated the area Deeds led the fight to see that it would never happen again, barnstormed up and down the Miami Valley in the cause of flood control, donated a $100,000 building to house the Miami Conservancy district and served as its chairman until 1954.
HE RETIRED from NCR in 1914, but was back again as president in 1931 to whip the company out of its Depression doldrums and mold it into one of the world’s leading manufacturers again.
In between, Deeds went to Washington during World War I and, with the rank of colonel, spearheaded development and production of the Liberty engine, powering planes and trucks. A small group of men started from scratch, saw 20,475 produced before the war’s end.
BUT THE triumph was blunted. Charges of using his official position for personal benefit were brought against Deeds and a long investigation followed. Deeds was completely exonerated and for the rest of his life he was “The Colonel.”
When he returned to Dayton in the 30’s he was sitting on the boards of 28 corporations ranging from Cuban sugar to the most powerful bank in the world.
DEEDS AND his wife (the former Edith Walton, a Dayton girl he met at First Baptist church) made a second home of their yacht, “The Lotosland,” the first private boat in the world to carry an amphibious airplane.
(During World War II the yacht was requisitioned by the Navy, converted into a combat ship for anti-submarine patrol, got at least one enemy sub.)
Deeds, a man with a strong sense of duty, a good sense of humor and an even temper (only a shortage of chocolate ice cream could upset him), stepped down as chairman of the NCR board in 1957. He died last July 1 after a three-year illness.
He was never an advice giver. This was as close as he came: “Take any job you get seriously, but don’t take yourself that way.”
Return to "Our Own Hall of Fame" Main Page
