W.S. Sr. was longtime chairman of the board of the old Women's Hospital on Lapeer Street and was the driving force behind the building of a new hospital, which he insisted be named after the hospital's head nurse, Margaret McLaren. In 1949, he turned the spade on the first shovel for the new hospital located on what the city renamed Ballenger Highway. He set up two trust funds that provided what is now McLaren Health Care Corp. with a financial foundation of what has become hundreds of millions of dollars. He was a director for more than three decades of Citizens Commercial & Savings Bank. He created and endowed two private parks in Flint --- Memorial Park in downtown Flint and Ballenger Park at the corner of Flushing Rd. and Dupont. Many years after his death, a statue of him was erected in Ballenger Park, the only statue in any Flint park, public or private. A longtime member of the Flint Board of Education, he made multiple bequests to what has become Flint Community Schools, and what is now Mott Community College named its field house after him. Except for his friend C.S. Mott, no man has bequeathed more, in as many different ways, as W.S. Ballenger, Sr. His son W.S. Jr. was head of the trust department for Citizens Bank and a member of its board of directors for many years, and was also president of the Michigan YMCA. So the Ballenger family has been in Flint for nearly 130 years.