Albert Earle Finley was born on the western shore of Virginia, near Heathsville in Northumberland County – the youngest of eleven children of Washington Finley and Sally Webster Finley. He moved with the family back to the ancestral home in Queen Anne’s County, Maryland, while still a youngster – several years later moving back to Virginia, at Bloxom on the Eastern Shore.

After his high school days, Mr. Finley decided to attend Beacom Business College, Salisbury, Maryland. He responded to a year of bookkeeping and business administration so well that he went back for a second year – this time to take shorthand and typing.

In 1915 with two years of business school under his belt, the 19-year-old country boy got his first job as stenographer for the train-master and superintendent of the Baltimore, Chesapeake, and Atlantic Railroad, Salisbury, Maryland. His beginning salary was $30 a month, which wasn’t a lot of pay even in those days.

Following his sservice with the BC&A and later with the Pennsylvania Railroad at Cape Charles and Port Norfolk, Virginia, Mr. Finley in 1922 became private secretary to W. A. Gore, General Manager of the Virginian Railway, Norfolk, Va. – at the same time putting in two years at Norfolk Night Law School. He also served a year in the Army in 1918, entering service as a Buck Private and emerging as a 2nd Lieutenant.

In 1924 he left Virginia Railroad to accept a job as office manager for General Utilities Company, Norfolk, Virginia – specialists in heavy equipment – covering the states of West Virginia, Virginia, North and South Carolina.

During the following year, Mr. Finley became a salesman for the Norfolk firm and began calling on prospects and customers in eastern part of the two Carolinas. In 1929 he, H. A. Mooneyham and J. M. Gregory formed Raleigh Tractor and Truck Company.

Then in 1931 A. E. Finley thought he was ready to try it on his own. Only a man with an enormous amount of determination and an unflagging degree of optimism would think of starting a new business during the depth of a depression…and that’s just why Mr. Finley did it.

Back in 1931 when most of America was singing the blues, and for good cause, Mr. Finley rounded up $3,600 and established the North Carolina Equipment Company. He saw an opportunity to represent a first class line of motor graders and rollers, so he took advantage of it. The company still sells Galion equipment.

Located in Raleigh at 833 West Hargett Street, the new company boasted of a two-man staff: H. J. Midgette, office manager, and A. E. Finley, general manager. In addition to running the office, Midgette also operated the spare parts department. Mr. Finley, meanwhile, put in long hours on the road Monday through Friday, selling. Then he’d come back to town and spend Saturday and Sunday taking care of the week’s correspondence…typing the letters himself.

During its first year the new firm did $180,000 worth of business (compared with $25 to $30 million within 20 years). A. E. Finley built the company on his reputation as a crack salesman…not as the lind that talks fast but rather as the kind that speaks with confidence and conviction. Through sales manuals, some of them personally authored by him, and through sales meetings, at which he did most of the instructing, his knowledge of selling has been passed on to hundreds of salesmen who followed in his footsteps.

In less that 20 years, the Finley dream of a flourishing enterprise became an established fact. The parent company that drew its first breath of life in a small building on Hargett Street served as a springboard for the establishment of many companies in more that a half-dozen widely separated fields of business and industry. The network of companies which evolved from the one established in 1931 by 1951 covered five southeastern states – the largest equipment distributing organization in America and probably in the world.

After outgrowing its Hargett Street quarters, North Carolina Equipment Company in 1932 moved to 3116 Hillsboro Street in Raleigh. In 1936 a branch office was opened at Statesville and moved in 1942 to Charlotte. In 1940 North Carolina Equipment Company moved to its present facilities at 3101 Hillsboro Street.

In addition to the Charlotte operation, sales, parts and service installations were opened at Asheville, Greensboro, Wilmington and Greenville. In 1962 the Charlotte and Asheville branches were reorganized as the Western Carolina Tractor Company. At one time Mr. Finley and his key associates were operating a chain of about twenty Construction Machinery Distributing plants between Norfolk and Miami. When he felt it advisable to relinquish corporate responsibility, various corporations were formed to take over certain territories, each having their own President, General Manager and Secretary-Treasurer – Mr. Finley remaining as Chairman of the Board of all of them. Now after passing by several years the normal retirement age of 65 and spending 9 years railroading and 41 years Equipment peddling (as Mr. Finley calls it), he feels that one-half a century (41 years of it being at double time) is long enough for a man to get his old age security in shape and the men whose pictures and names are honored in his scrapbook, heartily endorse his feeling and have assured all the manufacturers represented by the various companies founded by Mr. Finley that their interests will be prosecuted to the fullest possible extent, as from 1931 – when the North Carolina Equipment Company was formed – to the present time no major account has ever been lost by them or any other Equipment Company established by Mr. Finley; however, certain segments of the business have been sold to younger official associates, solely at the discretion of himself.