Charles E. Moore II was born in San Bernardino, California, to Charles Edward Moore, a Canadian immigrant, and E.A.M. Kinkaid. His father established the jewelry firm of Moore & Lewis. After completing the eighth grade, Moore entered the workforce, working as a machinist at the Santa Fe Railroad. At age 18, he became a “boomer”, the machinist's name for a drifter. He traveled all over the U.S. and Mexico until the age of 21, at which time he set his sights on working at a certain machine tool company. As legend has it, Moore's ambitions were thwarted by the owner who told him that he didn't have the education to succeed. “I was horribly insulted” he later said, “but then I calmed down and realized that he was right.” So he enrolled in high school as a 6-foot-6-inch, 285-lb freshman and finished four years' work in one. Moore entered the U.S. military, serving as a lieutenant in the Coastal Artillery. After leaving the military, Moore again applied to work at the machine tool company. He was hired and quickly moved into more responsible positions. In 1927 he bought the company, renaming it: “The Moore Machinery Company”.
World War II
Moore ascribed to “a fundamental policy of never selling a machine that we wouldn't take back if the customer didn't like it”. It was this policy that eventually led to Moore's purchase of the Joshua Hendy Iron Works in Sunnyvale, California. He visited the plant in response to a complaint from the owner. Seeing the plant's vast largely-untapped potential, he and his partners purchased Hendy for $500,000 in November 1940. In seven years through World War II, largely under Moore's leadership Hendy grew from 60 employees to over 11,000. During the war, the Hendy work force, "The Iron Men and Women of Hendy", produced an astounding 754 Triple Expansion EC-2 Engines at the rate of one every 40.8 hours. The engines weighed 137 tons and were 24 feet tall. Moore became known as "America's No. 1 'Can Do' Man". In mid 1942, Moore and his partners also bought the Crocker-Wheeler Electrical Mfg. Co. in New Jersey, for $3,200,000. After the war, Moore sold his interest in Hendy to his partners, and spent much of his time traveling as a technical advisor on heavy machinery for the government. In 1941 he had traveled to The United Kingdom for the US office of Production Management, Harriman Commission, to advise tool manufacturing plants there. Following the war he was an industry consultant in Greece for the State department. He went to Italy in 1947–49 as a Marshall Plan consultant.
Moore became involved in the Boy Scouts of America, as VP and chairman of the Boy Scout Memorial Foundation Board. In 1954 a building in Santa Clara was dedicated as "The Charles E. Moore Memorial Boy Scout Building" at the corner of Park & Newhall.
