Roy James Carver

Roy James Carver (December 15, 1909 – June 7, 1981) was an American industrialist and philanthropist. Carver started the Carver Pump Factory with his brother and then later owned Bandag. As a philanthropist, he started the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust.

Personal life and career Carver was born on December 15, 1909, to James and Laura Carver in Preemption, Illinois.

During a postwar trip to Germany, Carver bought the North American rights to a manufacturing process for tires created by Bernard Anton Nowak as a part of Bandage, Inc. The process "cures or vulcanizes rubber tires at lower temperatures than other retreading processes". After Nowak died in 1961, Carver bought the worldwide rights to the process and gained full ownership of Bandag. Bandag became one of the top American corporations in the early 1970s. In 1973, the company earned the 909th spot on Fortune top 1,000 companies. During the late 1970s, Carver created more than 850 dealership franchises in more than 50 countries. Carver was interested in different languages and had learned Italian, French, Spanish, and German. He founded the Roy Carver Memorial Pavilion, a treatment center at the University of Iowa Hospitals, Carver Hawkeye Arena, a large biomedical research facility and the Carver Wing of the Museum of Art. Carver provided the funds to the University of Northern Iowa to complete the UNI Dome and built the Roy J. Carver Engineering Building at the University of Illinois. As a result, the University of Iowa renamed the College of Medicine as The Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine. Millions of dollars given by the Carver Trust have funded the Carver Scholarship Program. His widow, Lucille Carver, funded several projects as well.

Carver died of a heart attack on June 7, 1981, at 71 years of age in Marbella, Spain.