Carter was born on December 11, 1879, in
Crafton, Texas. After his mother died in 1892, he moved away from his remaining family, to
Bowie, Texas, where he supported himself with a variety of odd jobs. At those jobs, he learned salesmanship, and became a travelling salesman as a young man. Bowie residents have recalled that he was one of the original "chicken & bread boys" who sold sandwiches represented as "chicken" to passengers at the rail station during the depression. The sandwiches, it was thought, were really made of rabbits that the boys had hunted. To this day Bowie has an annual Chicken & Bread Festival each October.
Publisher In May 1905, Carter accepted a job as an advertising space salesman in Fort Worth. A few months later, he agreed to help finance and run a new newspaper in town. The
Fort Worth Star printed its first newspaper on February 1, 1906, with Carter as the advertising manager. The
Star lost money, and was in danger of going bankrupt when Carter had an audacious idea: raise additional money and purchase his newspaper's main competition, the
Fort Worth Telegram. In November 1908, the
Star purchased the
Telegram for $100,000, and the two newspapers combined on January 1, 1909, into the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In 1961,
National Geographic said that Carter had done "more than any other one person to build the city into its present image". He persuaded Southern Air Transport (now
American Airlines) to move its headquarters from
Dallas to nearby Fort Worth. Several oil companies moved or kept their headquarters in Fort Worth after personal interventions by Carter. In addition Carter was influential in obtaining for Fort Worth the construction of
Air Force Plant 4 (now the headquarters of
Lockheed Martin Aeronautics) and the relocation of Bell Aircraft (now
Bell Helicopter Textron). Carter's disdain for Dallas, Fort Worth's much larger and much richer neighbor, was legendary in Texas. One of the best-known stories about Carter is that he would take a sack lunch whenever he traveled to Dallas so he wouldn't have to spend any money there. He was also quoted as saying "Fort Worth is where the West begins...and Dallas is where the East peters out." On his orders, the
Star-Telegram television station,
WBAP-TV, avoided mentions of Dallas or of even being part of a merged Dallas–Fort Worth television market on his orders even when it was clear the two cities would be a single market. Carter's heirs maintained this line until
NBC pressured them to relent several years after Carter's death, along with a move of its transmitter to
Cedar Hill to cover both cities equally. After World War II, Carter stopped barnstorming on behalf of Fort Worth. In January 1951, Carter received a donation from the
Texas and Pacific Railway—
steam locomotive No. 610—and he put it on static display near the
Will Rogers Memorial Coliseum on behalf of the
Southwestern Exposition and Fat Stock Show. In 1953, he suffered the first of several heart attacks; the final one, two years later, was fatal. On June 23, 1955, Carter died in Fort Worth, Texas. He was buried in Greenwood Memorial Cemetery in Fort Worth. ==Legacy==