The son of a Toronto businessman, Albert W. Austin was in his late 40s when he and his son Albert E. arrived in St. Louis for the 1904 Summer Olympic golf tournament for the second (and final) time that it was held, two of only three Canadian competitors in a field of 72 other American golfers (the other Canadian was eventual gold medal-winner George Lyon). Both he and his son were affiliated with the Lambton Golf and Country Club of Toronto, which had been founded by the elder Austin. With a score of 230, nearly 50 more strokes than was acceptable to qualify, he finished in 73rd place, ahead of only Lee Jones’ final result of 240 and Charles Cory, who withdrew after the first qualifying round. He did not, however, have to rely on his athletic prowess to earn his fame. He arrived in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1880 and quickly decided that something needed to be done about the traffic congestion on Main Street. Within a year he had borrowed the idea of the horse-drawn street railway system from his home town (which had been in place since the 1850s) and founded The Winnipeg Street Railway Company in 1881. The company began operating the following year but, by 1888, Austin realized that his vision would soon need to encompass electric street cars. He was at the forefront of the movement that developed the first electric street car manufactured in Canada that, in 1891, became part of the first commercial electric street railway system in the nation. He later became president of the Toronto-Dominion Bank, which his father had founded in 1871, as well as chair of its board of directors, and also maintained a fruit farm in Port Dalhousie, Ontario. He died in July 1934, after suffering from illness for nearly two and a half years.
Canada