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Ideal News
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John M. Carter Celebrates 90th Birthday
Oct 29, 2008
The John M. Carter Story
John Merriken Carter works at Ideal Aerosmith in Menlo Park, California. He celebrated his ninetieth birthday on October 19, 2008. John’s grandfather, John Merriken Carter, born in 1843, was an attorney who served as the Secretary of the State of Maryland while in his twenties during the American Civil War. He was instrumental in financing the Maryland Institute of Fine Arts. To this day, a photograph of him as former President greets people when they visit the Conference Room of the Institute. John is proud to be the fifth great-grandson of Colonel George Ross of the American Revolutionary Army. Ross, from Pennsylvania, was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. George Ross’s nephew married Betsy Ross, who sewed the first American flag. A wooden table with a drop-leaf feature, once owned by George Ross, is now in John’s home. John’s birthplace was Baltimore County, Maryland, which later became part of the City of Baltimore. His father, David Carter, was in the lumber business. He cut the trees, milled the wood, then marketed the wood products for hardwood floors, furniture, and special wooden cabinets that Philco used for the radio installations they sold throughout the country. John remembers that his father would bring home some black walnut lumber, hand it over to him, and say, “Let’s see what you can make out of this.” John’s mother, Mary Rowland (Hopkins) Carter, was from a small community in northern Maryland known as Port Deposit on the Susquehanna River. She met David Carter at Ocean City, Maryland, on a summer day at the beach. They were married in Port Deposit in 1906. John was the youngest of four children born to Mary and David. His oldest sister was born in 1908, a brother came along in 1911, and a second sister in 1916. John’s brother David served as a U.S. Army Captain and was caught up by the Japanese in the “Bataan” death march in the Philippines. An American submarine torpedoed and sank the enemy ship that was later transporting David to Japan as a captive. John attended the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. This was an all-boys high school, in which the passing grade was seventy percent. John excelled at Poly and earned a membership in its Honor Society. He enjoyed membership in the school radio club and earned his amateur radio license W3ELO in March, 1934. He still holds the same radio call sign today. The CW speed required at that time was only ten words per minute. During the summers, John took a job with the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company as a draftsman and customer service representative. His mission was to prepare the customer bills from the meter-readers’ reports. John’s teenage years were full of mischief. While playing with his CW key, it almost electrocuted him, and his father was furious because the subsequent relay made too much noise in the middle of the night. His rig overwhelmed the electrical power at his parents’ home, and the lights flashed as he happily carried on transmitting to a ham in Australia. He built a radio that enabled him to hear pioneer Pittsburgh radio station KDKA, one of the first radio stations in the country. At seventeen, John lied about his age and joined the Maryland National Guard. He worked diligently through the ranks and earned a 2nd Lt. commission in the Field Artillery. John was accepted to the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. He began his campus life in a dormitory but later moved to a fraternity house known as KAO (Kappa Alpha Order). One of the earlier members of this fraternity was J. Edgar Hoover. While attending classes, John learned to fly a piper cub single-engine, high-wing aircraft for his private pilot’s license and a Fairchild for an advanced aerobatics course. In January, 1941, John’s National Guard unit was called up to active duty. However, he had only a few months to complete his degree, so he asked for a waiver from duty. In June of 1941, he graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland. Because he was at the top of his class among engineering students, the Westinghouse Electric Company immediately hired him as a microwave tube division scientist and gave him the job of building magnetrons and klystrons. He later helped establish a new Westinghouse plant in Fairmont, West Virginia. In May, 1942, John married Helen Day of Baltimore. In 2008, they celebrated their sixty-sixth wedding anniversary. The newlyweds moved to a new town across the river from Washington, D.C., known as Fairlington, Virginia. In July of 1942, John left Westinghouse and joined the U.S. Navy. He received a commission as an Ensign and was assigned to the Navy Department in Washington, D.C. Once there, John joined the Aircraft Radar Design Group and became part of a secret project group charged with developing a guided missile with television, which was unknown at that time. After six months of working on the secret project, John asked for a transfer to the South Pacific War Theater for overseas duty. He received the transfer—to Brisbane, Australia—to join the 7th Fleet, Service Force. About this time, Helen returned to Baltimore, where she gave birth to their first child in 1943. John’s brother, David, was a prisoner of war whom the Japanese held in Southeast Asia. John was assigned to Milne Bay, New Guinea, as the Radio Material Officer. This was a large ship repair facility. He became the technical troubleshooter on the new, and in many cases, still secret radar equipment. As war moved further toward the Philippines, John earned promotion to Lt. Junior grade. He became the Staff Radar Officer Commander Aircraft 7th Fleet, which had no aircraft carriers. Still, it was responsible for many aircraft, including both seaplanes and land planes. When General MacArthur landed in the Philippines, John was on board a seaplane tender that took part at Leyte and Lingayan Gulf operations and eventually Manila Bay in the Philippines. John learned about the Navy’s plans to train 50,000 men as pilots for the invasion of Japan. He applied for and was granted yet another change in duty, which included a trip home to see his new wife and son. Then it was on to Dallas and Corpus Christie, Texas, for training on the Stearman and the AT6 aircraft. John was just graduating from naval flight training when the war ended in 1945. John returned to Westinghouse in Baltimore at their special Air Arm Division. He became the Manager-Fighter Radar Engineering, where for six years he was responsible for the design, development, and production engineering of a series of successful high-power, fire-control, radar systems. He may have been the first weapons-system manager to complete the integration of aircraft and electronics jointly for a specific military purpose in the Marine F3D Skynight. This was the latest postwar advanced nightfighter radar known as the AN/APQ-35, consisting of a high-power 250-kilowatt search radar, a separate tracking radar with an advanced computer for gunnery, and a tail-warning radar. On November 2, 1952, over Korea, the F3D Skynight recorded the first nighttime downing of a jet by another jet. The Skynight destroyed more enemy aircraft over Korea than any other Navy or Marine type. For several years, John was also the industry member of the Department of Defense, Research, and Development Board, Airborne Radar and Guidance Equipment Subpanel. Some of the electronic systems John developed are still used today and considered state-of-the-art. Contracts with the U.S. Government during this time were over $140 million and resulted in the Westinghouse Corporation earning the maximum profits being allowed under military contract redeterminations of the time. In his young adulthood, John was the first person in his neighborhood to have a homebuilt television receiver. Baltimore’s WMAR recently celebrated its 60th anniversary, and in its early years, before it had any decent programming, John watched its Indian-head test patterns. His TV had a huge chassis that dwarfed its tiny, round video screen. All his son’s friends got wind of it and came to his house to “watch TV.” John Jr. assumed all his friends had TV, little realizing that his was the only kid in Baltimore who did. In 1948, John earned the Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University. In 1952, John left Westinghouse and became the President and General Manager of California Technical Industries, which had been formerly known as Color Television, Inc. He pioneered CTI in automatic electronic test equipment, three-axis flight simulators, and microwave boresighting equipment. CTI eventually became a division of Textron, Inc., with John President of the division. In 1953, John purchased a Cessna 180 airplane new from the factory. He still owns it and flies it often out of the Palo Alto airport. John is a duly elected member of the Stanford University Chapter of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society of North America. In 1961, John formed Carco Electronics in Menlo Park, California, a few miles from his home in Atherton. The new company would design and build flight motion simulators for the development of guidance and control of weapons. John donated 14 United States patents to Carco, which flourished as customers from all over the world—including Australia, England, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and Taiwan—purchased John’s products. The U.S. Government was a big customer of Carco, with large facilities using his products in China Lake and Point Magu for the Navy; in Huntsville, Alabama, for the Army; and at Elgin Air Force Base in Florida for the Air Force. These devices manufactured by John and his company, Carco, would cost the client between $300,000 and $3,000,000 per unit. Carco produced and sold over 500 of them. Carco had to send out its own highly skilled employees with each device to install it properly at the client’s facility. John took part in system design, installation, test, and sales. When asked how many trips he made to Paris, France, he replied, “One hundred or more. And to Tokyo, Japan, 75 or more.” In October of 1984, John was on a business trip for Carco in south India when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her own bodyguards. The government stopped all transportation—except walking—for several days. John served as the President of Carco almost into his 80s, when the Board of Directors suggested he was getting old and they had a potential CEO who would expand the company tenfold. John agreed, and they bought back his stock in the company. They asked him to come back as a consultant, but sadly, after a short time, Carco filed for bankruptcy. In 2005, Carco ceased to exist and a bankruptcy court auctioned off its assets to a competitor Acutronic USA, Inc. John’s illustrious career continued however, because Ideal Aerosmith of East Grand Forks, Minnesota, hired many former Carco employees and John became Manager of the Hudraulic Simulators Division. Today, John remains as active participant in the Menlo Park facility of Ideal Aerosmith. The November, 2005, Cessna Pilots Association newsletter reports that John received The Wright Brothers “Master Pilot” award by the FAA. It was given in recognition for his 65 years as a pilot and in appreciation for his service, technical expertise, professionalism, and outstanding contributions that have furthered the cause of aviation safety. The prestigious award was presented at an Air Safety Foundation seminar on September 20, 2005. I had the opportunity to visit John’s radio shack and to view his original logbook that clearly shows his first QSO of March 6, 1934. He currently uses an Icom 2at handheld VHF radio when traveling around the area. At his stately home in the Atherton area, John has a Heathkit model HX-10 Marauder transceiver with a coiled tuner on the wall with a ladder line feeder. I also noted a 1957 ARRL radio amateur’s handbook on the desk. John maintains his membership in both the ARRL and the QCWA. All four of John’s children have Baltimore as their birthplace. The oldest, John M. Carter, Jr., came into the world in 1943. He graduated from Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California, with a degree in Aeronautical Engineering. He served as a navigator in the F4 phantoms in Vietnam, where he earned a Distinguished Flying Cross from the Navy. He currently flies for NetJets out of Columbus, Ohio. John’s daughter, Helen Jennings, born in 1946, also graduated from Cal Poly, where she won the Poly Royal Queen award. She has enjoyed a career as a schoolteacher and a math leader. In 1949, Hugh was born. He graduated from San Jose State University with a degree in business. He lives in Newark, California. It was a proud day for John, as CEO, when Hugh succeeded John as the President of Carco, but Hugh moved on to become a project manager for HSQ Technology, Inc. in Hayward, California, where he is still employed. The youngest child was born in 1950. Tom became a tennis champion at the University of Idaho, where he earned the Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology. In graduate schools, he earned masters and doctoral degrees. He now serves as a Baptist pastor in Dinuba, California. John has ten grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and a very supportive and understanding wife, who is the love of his life.
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