Charles Westfield Coker (born May 10, 1933) is the former president and CEO of Sonoco Products Company of Hartsville, South Carolina, United States. He also served as a director of Bank of America, Sara Lee Corporation,

HanesBrands Inc. Hanesbrands Inc. is an American multinational clothing company based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It employs 65,300 people internationally. On September 6, 2006, the company and several brands were spun off by the Sara Lee Corporation. Han ...

, Springs Industries, and

Carolina Power & Light Company Carolina Power & Light (CP&L), later doing business as Progress Energy Inc., was an electrical generation, transmission, and distribution utility based in Raleigh, North Carolina. The company was founded on July 13, 1908 as the result of the merge ...

(now

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), and as chairman of the board of Hollings Cancer Center at the

Medical University of South Carolina The Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) is a public medical school in South Carolina. It opened in 1824 in Charleston as a small private college aimed at training physicians and has since established hospitals and medical facilities acr ...

. Along with being initiated into the South Carolina Business Hall of Fame, Coker has been granted South Carolina's highest philanthropic honor, the Order of the Palmetto. Coker is the son of Charles W. and Elizabeth Howard Coker and the great-grandson of S.C. Business Hall of Fame honoree Major James Lide Coker, who founded Coker College and Sonoco after the Coker farm was destroyed in March 1865. Founded as a paper mill, Sonoco is now one of the world's major producers of different types of commercial and consumer product

packaging Packaging is the science, art and technology of enclosing or protecting products for distribution, storage, sale, and use. Packaging also refers to the process of designing, evaluating, and producing packages. Packaging can be described as a co ...

. When Charlie Coker succeeded his father as president in 1970, Sonoco had annual sales of $125 million, there were 6,000 employees, and its operations totaled 61. By 1998, when he moved from chief executive officer and chairman of the board, Sonoco had annual sales of $2.56 billion and its 16,500 employees were stationed at more than 275 locations in 85 countries on five continents. After attending Woodberry Forest School in Orange, Virginia, Coker received an A.B. in history from Princeton University in 1955 after completing a 164-page senior thesis titled " Coleman Livingston Blease – South Carolina Demagogue." He later received an M.B.A. from

Harvard Business School Harvard Business School (HBS) is the graduate business school of Harvard University, a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. It is consistently ranked among the top business schools in the world and offers a large full-time MBA p ...

. Coker is married to South Carolina civic leader Joan F. Sasser, and they have six children: Charles, Ellen, Howard, Carrie, Margaret, and Thomas, and 20 grandchildren.

References

Sara Lee Corporation - Board of Directors
Retrieved on 13 April 2006

Retrieved on 7 February 2007

Retrieved on 7 February 2007
Forbes Bio
Retrieved on 7 February 2007 {{DEFAULTSORT:Coker, Charles W. 1933 births Living people Princeton University alumni Harvard Business School alumni American chief executives Woodberry Forest School alumni