On the death of a banker who helped make Charlotte what it is today

Ed Crutchfield, the former CEO of First Union Bank, died last week at the age of 82. WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, remembers Crutchfield’s role in building modern Charlotte.

There’s a detail from a story that has stuck with me for nearly 30 years, and I thought of it again the other day after hearing that Ed Crutchfield had died.

I went back and looked up the story to make sure I had it right. It was written by Melissa Wahl for the Observer back in 1997, right after Crutchfield had pulled off what was then the biggest bank deal in U.S. history.

He had proposed that his company, First Union, buy Core States Financial Corp. of Philadelphia for $17.1 billion. After First Union’s board approved the deal, Crutchfield went home to wait for a response.

And while he waited, he smoked a bunch of cigarettes and ate a couple of hot dogs.

Here was one of the richest men in Charlotte, about to close out one of the biggest financial deals in American history. He could have had a tin of caviar flown to his house in a helicopter. But instead it was a hot dog that filled his soul.

This was always something that struck me about the business leaders who built modern Charlotte. To paraphrase that great philosopher, the wrestler Dusty Rhodes: They wined and dined with kings and queens, but they came from times when they just ate pork and beans.

They didn’t grow up poor, necessarily, but they grew up country. Crutchfield was from Stanly County and played football for the Albemarle Bulldogs. Hugh McColl, Crutchfield’s banking rival, grew up in Bennettsville, South Carolina, and later joined the Marines. Rolfe Neill, longtime publisher of the Observer, moved over and over as a child as his father chased jobs in the dairy business.

Those men, and a few others, formed the core of the group that transformed Charlotte in the ‘80s and ‘90s by spearheading projects for parks, education and development. There was an ulterior motive for all that — Crutchfield and McColl were building two of the biggest banks in the country, and they needed Charlotte to be a place all those new bankers would want to live.

Along the way, the two bankers built so many skyscrapers uptown that people joked they were in a sort of measuring contest. McColl ended up with the biggest building and the biggest name. But Crutchfield, in his time, was right along with him in making Charlotte what it is today.

Now the First Union name is long gone. Crutchfield retired in 2001 after being diagnosed with lymphoma. The bank later merged with Wachovia, and then Wells Fargo bought the whole thing in 2008.

In some ways that Wells Fargo deal was the end of a chapter in Charlotte’s history. The city is bigger now, and better, but it’s also more anonymous. It’s not as obvious who is leading the way, or if anybody is. I don’t think it’s a good idea to go back to the days when a small group of white guys were in charge. But it seems like Charlotte was lucky to have those particular guys, at that particular time. Guys who made billion-dollar deals, but also knew the value of a hot dog.