Growing up poor, becoming rich

My Horatio Alger storybook life

I was born almost 80 years ago when my family lived on a small farm in Avonmore, Ontario, close to the town of Moose Creek where my grandparents and their ancestors had lived since fleeing the potato famines and oppression by the British in Ireland. This is the only photo I have from those early days, showing myself and my late older brother - two ragamuffins by any standard.

My dad had served as a wireless operator/air gunner (WOP/AG as it was called) on Ansons and Hudsons in various theatres of war, completing over 800 flying hours under constant enemy fire. His crew sunk a U-Boat in the Mediteranean Sea in 1943. He returned to the Ottawa valley and started his farm, but it was seized by the CIBC when he failed to make a monthly payment on a $3,000 loan, a result of low milk prices at the time. He then re-enlisted in the lowest rank of the RCAF - Air Craftsman Second Class - and became a carpenter. With a wife and by that time three children, he was raising his family on a salary of $138 a month. We were poor by any standard, but didn’t know we were poor since pretty well everyone we knew lived just like we did.

There were many times we had no food in the house as payday approached and we lived without indoor plumbing, as did our neighbours in the various places we lived. We moved about every three years as Dad was posted from one area to another, a commonplace event in the post-war RCAF. I went to high school in France and was by most accounts a terrible student. Disinterested, short, small, and often bullied, I was a loner. But in grade 13 I decided I better pull up my socks so I made an effort and got good grades on the then Provincial exams.

Homelife wasn’t perfect. Mom came down with schizophrenia and was erratic, Dad was away a lot, my younger brother had problems and eventually committed suicide, my older brother left home at 16, my sister was unhappy much of the time despite her terrific mind and talents, and, we didn’t have a car, a television, or much in the way of resources. But it wasn’t all that bad either.

We returned to Canada in 1964 and my family was posted to Western Canada (Cold Lake, Alberta) but I was “grown up” by our standards and remained in Ontario working on a farm in the Ottawa Valley for a wartime pal of my Dad’s who was dying of cancer. I was paid $15 a week and received room and board. My work was scheduled to end at the end of the haying season in late August. My parents, brother and sister were heading West and Dad dropped by the field where I was working in his second hand Mercury with the family in the car, rolled down the window, offered his hand as said “good luck” son and drove off. On that day, I became an adult. I had no complaints, it was what I expected. My older brother, Keith, had left home at sixteen and never looked back. Years later, Keith put himself through university as a mature student, became a lawyer and won the Order of Canada for his charity work in Manitoba. My sister became a lawyer with a PhD in law, became a published author of crime fiction books and is now a realtor in Ottawa. While my younger brother didn’t make it, my other siblings demonstrated the honesty, hard work, perseverance and solid life skills they learned at home despite our poverty.

I had applied to University of Toronto under the Regular Officer Training Program (ROTP) to study maths, physics and chemistry and while accepted by U of T heard nothing from ROTP and (unsurprisingly) had no money to pay tuition, etc.

About a week after my parents drove away, my Aunt Helen, the oldest of my Dad’s seven siblings (she lived until 105 years old), drove up to the field where I was working and told me to get in the car. She said “your going to college”. A telegram arrived that had gone from Royal Military College of Canada (RMC) in Kingston to France to Cold Lake and eventually to Helen to deliver to me offering me the chance to go to RMC, but I had to be in Kingston that day to accept. Helen drove me to the train station, gave me $20 and put me on the train. No one in my family had ever been to university at that time, so I had no idea what to expect.

RMC was challenging. I registered to study Engineering Physics, a demanding discipline, and made a few rules for myelf. Never go to bed with an outstanding assignment, and never let anything pass that I didn’t understand - go to the library, get a tutorial or ask others but don’t let the course foundation be weakened by failing to master every concept as soon as it arose. I was terrified I would fail and disappoint my seven aunts and uncles who were proud that I was going to university, the first in our family to do so.

I learned that to get an A average I needed to get an A in physical education which required participation on a rep sports team each term. At 130 pounds, I was too small for football or hockey but had taught myself to play tennis in France so tennis was a shoe-in for one term, but that was it. Boxing was mandatory and I decided to try out for the boxing team to fill the other term. By 1967, I was Ontario InterCollegiate Athletic Association featherweight boxing champion.

After three years of engineering, I found the course work tedious and repetitive and decided to switch into arts and study history and economics. That meant having to pick up a few year’s work I had missed while in engineering. I achieved my A average, graduated with the History Medal and the highest grades in the faculty of Arts. What I lacked in natural ability, I made up in effort.

Post-graduation I trained as a pilot and spent the rest of my RCAF days flying high performance fighters in Air Defence Command. I left the military in 1974 to take a Master’s Degree in Business Administration at Western.

McKinsey & Company, Inc. recruited me from Western and I worked as a consultant until 1978 when I left McKinsey and joined Canadian General Electric Company Limited (CGE) as a planner. Three years later, I was made Vice President, Corporate Development. In 1984 I resigned from CGE and started my own firm, called The Enfield Corporation Limited, augmenting my own $100,000 investment in common equity with $4.8 million comprising $100,000 common equity from Helix Investments Limited (“Helix”), a venture capitalist; $200,000 common equity from The Pagurian Corporation Limited (“Pagurian”) controlled by financier Chris Ondaatje, and $4,500,000 in preference shares issued to Helix and Pagurian. With another $9 million bank debt and some vendor take-back debt, Enfield purchased a factory in Cobourg, Ontario that made plastic parts like pen barrels and hula hoops. The factory, owned by CGE until the Enfield purchase for $15 million, made a few hundred thousand dollars a year and the price was far higher than the past earnings could support.

I caused the factory to enter the automotive parts business making the Cowl Vent Grille for the GM J-cars being assembled in Lordstown, Ohio. It was an immediate success. From that base, I grew through acquisiton causing Enfield to purchase a controlling interest in Federal Pioneer Limited, an electrical manufacturer; Consumers Packaging, Inc., a glass container company; Domglas, Consumers’ only competitor in Canada; and, Numac Oil & Gas Ltd. an oil & gas company. Enfield grew profitably and rapidly into one of Canada’s most profitable companies, as set out in the following clip from Enfield’s 1988 annual report. In its third full year of operations, Enfield earned net income after taxes of $63 million, largely from investment income from the corporate investment portfolio I created and managed internally. In the 1987-1988 period there was a global market crash (on October 19, 1987) and subsequent recession. In those two fiscal years, Enfield earned over $183 million of investment income on its approximately $150 million investment portfolio. Gains on investments provided funding for acquisitions.

Enfield redeemed all of the founders preferred shares in 1985 but went public in 1986 and issued not only common equity but also preferred shares to fund growth. Helix sold its $100,000 investment in Enfield common equity in 1986 for $42 million. Pagurian sold its holdings in 1989, and the acquirer with support from others took control of Enfield in 1989 and I was thrown out.

In October 1989, I acquired for $19 million control of Algonquin Mercantile Corporation which had a wholly-owned subsidiary Dominion Citrus & Drugs Ltd. (“Citrus) and another subsidiary Austin Health Care (“Austin”) which operated dispensaries and health and beauty aid counters in Woolco stores. Algonquin sold those drug-related assets to Woolco but instead of exiting pharmacy altogether created the modern Rexall Drug Store chain in 1991. Algonquin sold the Rexall chain (by then, 36 stores) to Katz Group in 1996, acquired a small automotive parts outfit called Automodular Assemblies Inc., and renamed itself Automodular Corporation. In 1996 Automodular operated two leased facilities in Pickering. A few years later Automodular spun-off Citrus as a stand-alone public company.

Over the remainder of my career, I was CEO of Automodular and oversaw the construction or acquisition of assembly factories in the Oshawa area, in Oakville, in Pontiac and Lansing Michigan, in Wilmington, Delaware and in Lordstown, Ohio. During my tenure, Automodular paid out $46 million in dividends, much of that to my account.

In a nutshell in a few short years I went from being an underprivileged kid to a college graduate to an RCAF pilot to McKinsey associate, a GE Vice President and a successful private businessman. My story is a true Horatio Alger story.

I retired in 2011 and live in Collingwood, Ontario. I have had a great life.