William Alexander Hewitt was born in San Francisco, California, on August 9, 1914, to a prosperous family that had arrived from England in 1883.
William's father, Edward T. Hewitt of San Francisco, operated the Hewitt-Ludlow Auto Company, which manufactured trucks, tractor-trailers, and fire engines until 1930.
[6] In 1937 Hewitt graduated from the UC Berkeley as a member of Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, with a Bachelor of Arts in economics and a minor in political science.
Then, promoted to lieutenant commander, he served from 1942 to 1946 aboard the battleship USS California as a combat information center radar officer.
In 1955, the couple moved to Moline, Illinois, where Hewitt became chief executive officer of Deere & Company after working for them in San Francisco.
Her charity work focused on the Red Cross during and after World War II and later on environmental, social causes, and civil rights.
"Active in charitable organizations, she sought to fight AIDS, to help disabled children and to ease the plight of American Indians.
"[12] She held meetings for civil rights leaders in her home and organized volunteers and provided disaster relief for families and farmers across the country.
[3][15] During Hewitt's early administration the company made an aggressive move into international markets, which ushered in a time of growth.
Competitors were expanding abroad, but Deere & Company had a less than dozen manufacturing entities in the United States and one in Canada.
He started cautiously in the 1960s, but by the 1970s he had pushed hard to make the Deere plant in Nigel, Gauteng a model for moving black workers into management.
[3] Hewitt hired architects Eero Saarinen[6][11] and Kevin Roche to design a new Deere & Company headquarters in Moline, Illinois, first occupied in 1964.
[19] Hewitt established the Deere corporate art collection, starting with commissioning a mural painted on the factory display showroom walls.
[24] Under Hewitt's leadership Deere received the Sierra Club Iowa Chapter Industrial Development Research Council Award for Distinguished Service in Environmental Planning.
Deere shared the Roll Over Protection System (ROPS) patent with other equipment manufacturers to improve safety for all farmers.
In 1959 Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, paid an impromptu visit to Deere & Company, bringing out the press in droves.
[17] During the Great Depression, Deere & Company used its financial leverage to aid many of its customers and employees even as its own sales plummeted.
[26] In 1958 Hewitt donated the capital stock it held in Moline National Bank to the John Deere Foundation for charity.
The John Deere Foundation, the philanthropic organization funded by the company, has provided hundreds of millions in grants worldwide since it was founded in 1948.
After the death of William and Patricia Hewitt, their children Alexander, Anna, Adrienne, and board members continue the philanthropic work through the Rock River Trust Company.