This city has no adequate appreciation of the value to it of such a man as Clarence Kuester. So far as we known, there is not another single man in Charlotte who has done as much to herald forth the name of this community, to advertise it to the world and to construct it according to the best thought in community architecture as Mr. Kuester. It was well said of him the other night that while the people outside the city may not know the name of its mayor or the president of its Chamber of Commerce, they know the name of the man, who in season and out, has spent his life, at personal disadvantage, that his town might move forward.
Mr. Kuester has an abiding faith in Charlotte and this stands as the stay and support of his ebullient enthusiasm for his city. He has spent his life here; he has seen the city grow by leaps and bounds; he has seen it spring from a village to the largest city in North Carolina. He has seen its industries widen and grow strong and diversified. He has seen its people develop and its lines expand and he knows that Charlotte is destined to become one of the greatest cities of the entire South.
Other people may know the same thing, but they are not as happy in the expression of their faith as Mr. Kuester. Theirs is more of a passive conviction. His is an active, dynamic, ever-moving sort and when his faith gets to working within his naturally optimistic mind, it becomes a contagion. He sheds it out over those who mingle with him until at length there is an epidemic of enthusiasm just for Charlotte.
Mr. Kuester has just put over, with the aid of a loyal and faithful band of workers, one of the greatest tasks ever consummated in Charlotte. He was the leading personality in the membership drive of the Chamber of Commerce which was closed Friday night with the addition of 400 new members to that organization. A few years ago the present Chamber of Commerce was organized out of the remains of the old Greater Charlotte Club, which perished because there were not enough men like Clarence Kuester in the city. The Chamber was organized by the American City Bureau, an agency that hires itself to a city to put on these campaigns.
If that same agency had been brought back to Charlotte to put over the campaign of last week, it would have drawn out something like $3,000 of the proceeds. Mr. Kuester did the work himself by calling into his service a few score of workers who, like him, are invested with a deep faith in their community and who are public-spirited enough to give not only their money but their time and their interest to this community. And the Chamber of Commerce retains the money that would otherwise have gone to these campaign-promoting bureaus.
The city is thus made beholden again to Mr. Kuester. It already owned him a debt which it seems sometimes to have repudiated. It ought not to be so ungrateful as to forget this fine service he has just rendered and all the other splendid efforts which he will continue to put forth for his town.
From the editorial page of The Charlotte News, Sunday morning, March 20, 1921
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