Charles W. Carvin (5 March 1897—19 March 1974) was a textile industry executive, amateur cartoonist, and performer. He worked as a toastmaster and entertainer beginning in the 1930s.
Carvin was elected to The Lambs as a non-professional non-resident member in 1946. He remained a Lamb until 1970.
Born in Kensington, Philadelphia, on March 5, 1897, Carvin was the son of a 45-year-old Irish barkeep. His mother died when he was a year old and his two half-sisters raised him. He spent a year or so in Los Angeles, driving a milk wagon with his half-brother and learning to tell stories—while he was supposed to be in school. By 1918 he was in Texas flying Curtiss JN-4 biplanes and selling war bonds for the Army Air Corps. After the Great War, he went to work in the basement of a hosiery mill and made a little extra cash by selling some of his early cartoons. But there wasn’t enough money in cartooning to support a family, so he moved into sales, where his dialect stories brought him success. He married the aristocratic Stella Marie Murphy, went to textile school at night, and was soon cashing in on a sensational new product: synthetic rayon yarn.
He was the first tenant of the Empire State Building, opening the New York office of Clifton Mills there on April 1, 1931, a month prior to the official opening. He went on to be a director of the Industrial Rayon Company and eventually his own firm, the Charles W. Carvin Corporation. His theatrical performances were generally private, to business, philanthropic, and servicemen’s organizations.
Modern Textiles magazine would eventually call him “famous as the almost official raconteur of the whole textile industry,” and the industry’s “greatest wit, story teller, jokesmith and toastmaster.” He entertained troops at U.S.O. shows with Bob Hope (who once said Charley’s was the hardest act he’d ever had to follow).
After having dinner with Harry Truman, he spent six months in Washington as the textile bureau chief for the Office of Price Stabilization, during which time he was lambasted by the columnist Drew Pearson for daring to tell a group of businessmen that if they felt they needed higher prices, they could talk to his boss. In the 1950s, the New York Conference of Christians honored him for his charitable work and Jews, elected to the Board of the Philadelphia Textile Institute (now Philadelphia University), and awarded an honorary L.L.D. degree by St. Joseph’s University.
The key to success, he used to say, was to treat your customers like friends and your friends like customers. In keeping with that philosophy, he started sending out elaborate self-drawn Christmas Cards each year, refusing to acknowledge a distinction between the friends and the customers to whom he sent them. As his business grew, so did his mailing list.
Drawn between 1928 and his death in 1974, his Christmas cards and other drawings chronicle the history of America in the mid-20th century, panoramas of characters ranging from world leaders like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Adolf Hitler, to performers such as Noel Coward, Mae West, and Will Rogers, to cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse, Dagwood Bumstead, and Popeye.
Charles W. Carvin died in Boca Raton, Florida, on March 19, 1974. He was 77 years old.
A collection of his Christmas cards was posthumously published by his family. OK Mother, That Man’s Here Again!!: The Christmas Cards of Charles W. Carvin, ISBN 978-0-9768183-5-9, is available online.