Obituary: David Culver '39

David Culver ’39, Speirs Medallist and former Chair of the Selwyn House Board of Directors, died on February 6 in Montreal.

 

The following obituary appeared in the Montreal Gazette on Feb. 8.



The following article appeared in the Montreal Gazette on Feb. 7.

 

David Culver, a Montreal business leader credited with spearheading the Maison Alcan project, died at his home in Westmount early Monday. He was 92.

 

David Michael Culver was born Dec. 5, 1924, in Winnipeg. He moved to Montreal as a child and grew up in the affluent Golden Square Mile area of the city.

 

Culver joined the aluminum manufacturing company Alcan in 1949, and served as the firm’s CEO from 1979 to 1989.

 

In addition to his business accomplishments, Culver will be remembered for Maison Alcan on Sherbrooke St., an award-winning building that married the old and modern architectural styles of Montreal. The building, designed by architect Raymond Affleck, served as Alcan’s international headquarters.

 

“Although he came from Winnipeg, you couldn’t dissociate him from Montreal, in particular Sherbrooke St., the central part of the city,” said Dinu Bumbaru of Heritage Montreal, who praised Culver’s commitment to preserving heritage buildings.

 

“In the midst of battles over massive demolitions in the 1970s, he imagined a new way of having a corporate business at street level,” Bumbaru said. “There should be a bronze, or maybe an aluminum, statue of him.” 

 

When he inaugurated Maison Alcan in 1983, Culver called the project “the realization of an old dream — to maintain a small but valuable part of Montreal in the style and dignity that is worthy of its heyday.”

 

Alan Freeman helped Culver write his memoirs Expect Miracles: Recollections of a Lucky Life, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2014. Freeman said Culver had an uncommon devotion to his company and its employees.

 

“He was really an extraordinary example of a business leader, of the kind we don’t really have that much of anymore,” Freeman said. “He really believed in personal loyalty to companies, and also that the company should be loyal to its employees. He was the quintessential community-minded business person.”

 

But Culver’s loyalty also extended beyond the corporate world.

 

“He was unbelievably loyal to Canada, Quebec and to Montreal,” Freeman said.

 

“You have to remember he was the leader of Alcan in the late 1970s through the 1980s during the period of the rise of the Parti Québécois and the big departure of corporate head offices from Montreal. He was loyal to the end to Montreal. And he insisted the company stay in Montreal despite a fair bit of pressure from his board, from investors, and probably from other management members of the company.”

 

Culver’s mother, Fern, was fascinated with French-Canadian history and culture, and Culver grew up with an affinity for Quebec’s francophone populace, something that was relatively rare among business leaders of his generation.

 

In his memoirs, Culver wrote about Alcan’s position as a steadfastly Quebec-based company.

 

“Over the years, I’ve often been asked why Alcan seemed to have such smooth relations with successive Quebec governments whatever their political stripe. While other large Canadian companies based in Montreal would occasionally incur the wrath of Quebec nationalists and be accused of lacking sensitivity to the French fact or of treating the province like a colony, Alcan seemed to escape that kind of opprobrium. 

 

“As a company, we always worked hard to have the best community relations possible, whether we were operating in Jamaica or Guinea or Australia. In the case of Quebec I really think that our understanding and appreciation of the province and its people had been imbued in the Alcan culture from its early days and so became part of the company’s DNA.”

 

The British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto acquired Alcan in 2007.

Aside from his business and civic accomplishments, Culver’s daughter, Diane, said her father was also a wonderful family man. And he remained an unwavering booster of Montreal.

 

“He loved Montreal, especially the multicultural aspect of it,” she said. “He believed that was what Canada should be.”

 

Culver graduated from McGill University in 1947 and obtained an MBA from Harvard University. He enjoyed golf and had a membership at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia. He also kept a summer residence in La Malbaie (formerly Murray Bay).

 

Culver was predeceased by his wife, Mary (née Powell), in 2014. He is survived by his four children: Michael, Diane, Andrew and Mark.

 

Funeral arrangements have yet to be announced, but a memorial service is planned for April.