K.C. Irving
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The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · K.C. Irving: Competing with Giants
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Why Did K.C. Irving Say It Was Too Expensive to Die in Canada?
Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving left Canada in 1971 because dying there had become too expensive, and a tax bill could have forced his sons to break the companies apart.
That December the federal government charged K.C. Irving Limited with criminal offenses under the Combines Investigation Act. His wife Harriet was ill, and her doctors advised a warmer climate. Tax law was changing at the same time. A new capital gains tax would apply from 1972 to increases in asset values, including at death, even if nothing had been sold, and New Brunswick intended to add succession duties of its own. Irving's fortune was not cash. It sat inside refineries, mills, ships, forests, and newspapers, nearly all
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Why Did K.C. Irving Turn Down British Petroleum's Refinery Deal?
Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving walked away from British Petroleum because it wanted the right to buy Irving Oil when he retired or died.
He had wanted a refinery since 1932, when the government railway gave Imperial Oil better freight rates for having one and he did not. British Petroleum offered to build a refinery with him, then added two conditions to the final papers. BP wanted the plant somewhere other than St. John, and when Irving retired or died, BP wanted the right to buy Irving Oil. He had three sons and meant to leave them the business. He said there was no way, and he walked away.
Halifax was closer to the big markets, so BP asked why the refinery had to be in St. John. Because
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Why Did K.C. Irving Keep Cutting Timber He Could Not Sell?
Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving kept cutting timber through the Depression and stopped selling it, while competitors laid people off and waited.
In June 1933 his father, J.D., died. J.D. had never made peace with Irving leaving the family business, so Irving came back and bought it, including the old sawmill and its 7,000 acres of timberland. Spruce budworms were still eating the forest, and lumber prices were so low that every sale was a loss. The obvious move was to stop cutting and wait. Irving kept the crews cutting and stopped selling. For six straight years they cut timber, and in only three of those years did he sell any of the wood. The rest piled up.
Piles of timber cost money, and
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Why Did K.C. Irving Buy a Ship When the Railway Raised His Rates?
Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving bought his own tanker after Canadian National Railway raised the rates on his oil and refused to treat him like Imperial Oil.
In 1932, in the depths of the Depression, the government railway raised Irving's shipping rates and left Imperial Oil's untouched. Irving asked why everyone was not treated fairly. The reply was that Imperial was different because it had a refinery. He owned the gasoline and the stations that sold it, but every gallon still had to move on someone else's tracks, on terms they could change. He argued for two years, then gave an ultimatum: lower the rate or lose his traffic. The railway could assume he had nowhere else to go. He did not ow
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Why Did K.C. Irving Keep Expanding During the Great Depression?
Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving kept expanding through the Great Depression because fewer people were trying to grow and there was less competition.
In October 1929 the stock market crashed. People stopped buying cars, and many stopped driving the ones they owned. Around New Brunswick, automobiles showed up with the engines pulled out and horses hitched in front, because gasoline cost money and horses could eat grass. Competitors cut back, postponed expansion, and waited. Irving did the opposite and acted as if the Depression were not happening. A man who joined Irving Oil in 1930 later could not remember the boss ever mentioning it. Years later Irving explained the advantage he saw in bad t
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Why Did K.C. Irving Start Irving Oil?
Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving started Irving Oil after Henry Ford's factory shutdown left him a car dealer with no cars, and he never wanted to be that exposed again.
In 1927 Ford stopped making the Model T and shut the factories to retool for the Model A. Spring came with no Model A, then summer, and still nothing. For month after month Irving had a showroom of pictures and salesmen with brochures, but no cars. He scraped together leftover Chryslers to stay alive. The Model A arrived in the fall and sold well, but he had spent the better part of a year paying for another company's mistakes. He did not quit Ford. He would sell Fords for another 25 years. From that year on, the dealerships
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Why Did K.C. Irving Refuse a Loan His Father Would Guarantee?
Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving refused a line of credit unless it stood in his own name, even though his father would have guaranteed the loan.
He arrived in St. John with about $5,000 in cash and five years of borrowing without a missed payment. Ford wanted an aggressive salesman, and the franchise cost him nothing. When he asked a bank for credit, it said yes on one condition: his father had to guarantee it. Irving knew his father would have signed, and he refused anyway. The manager of a rival bank, an old family friend, then walked into the showroom offended that Irving had come to St. John and not done business with him. Irving said he would be happy to, on one condition. His father's
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How Did K.C. Irving Get Gasoline When Imperial Oil Cut Him Off?
Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving went looking for his own gasoline after Imperial Oil cut him off and expected him to stick to selling cars.
Imperial was controlled by the Standard Oil empire and was not fond of competition. Irving found a supply in Tulsa, Oklahoma, nearly 2,000 miles away, wired the money south, and had the gasoline shipped north in a railway tank car. He then needed somewhere to store it, so he ordered a 10,000-gallon tank, 40 times the size of the one he had buried a few years earlier. Neighbors said Imperial Oil would skin him alive. His father and half-brother both declined to join. He said he would do it alone, hired a carpenter, and drove a good share of the nails hims
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How Many Trees Did K.C. Irving Plant?
Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving's spruce program passed one billion trees on land experts said would not grow them.
In 1957, 58-year-old K.C. Irving planted spruce seedlings where experts said they would not grow. One expert promised to eat his textbooks if the seedlings survived. By 1986 the program had planted 200 million trees. At 87, K.C. Irving put the 200 millionth seedling into the ground himself. Planting continued after his death. 60 years after the first seedlings entered the soil, the count passed one billion.
K.C. Irving gave New Brunswick his money, his energy, and nearly his entire working life, and he would never give the province control. The refusal built an empire, created
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Why Was K.C. Irving's Newspaper Ownership Not a Crime?
Shane Parrish says a monopoly was not automatically a crime. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled the government had to prove that K.C. Irving's ownership had harmed the public or was likely to do so. The government had not.
In 1976, all nine judges of the Supreme Court of Canada agreed. Altogether, 13 judges had heard the case, and 12 had sided with the Irvings. The court had not declared concentrated ownership harmless. Judges had required the government to prove that ownership had harmed the public or was likely to. Ownership alone was not enough. The government had tried to force the family to sell its newspapers and failed.
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Did K.C. Irving Take Dividends From His Newspapers?
Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving told a packed Senate hearing in Ottawa that he had never taken a salary, fee, or anything else from the newspapers, and that in 25 years they had paid him no dividends. The profits stayed inside the business.
Federal investigators had already searched the Irving newspapers, the offices and homes of senior executives, and K.C. Irving's house, carrying away thousands of documents. A Senate committee summoned him to Ottawa. The night before his testimony he sat on the edge of his hotel bed, working past midnight on his statement. He was 70, and for a quarter century had said almost nothing publicly about his newspapers. He had to explain why he owned every Englis
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Why Did New Brunswick Want More Than One K.C. Irving?
Shane Parrish says people called K.C. Irving the greatest thing that had ever happened to New Brunswick, and then said the province could use four or five more like him.
An ordinary New Brunswicker could wake up in a household heated by Irving oil, fill the car at an Irving station, read an Irving newspaper over lunch, and, in one working household out of 12, bring home an Irving paycheck. New Brunswick had spent decades desperate for money, jobs, mills, ships, and investment, and for somebody willing to bet on the province when much of the outside world would not. K.C. Irving had done all of that on a scale no one else came close to matching.
The yes-but came next. He had built the busine
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Why Did K.C. Irving Start Planting Spruce at 58?
Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving started planting spruce trees in 1957, at 58, because his pulp and lumber operations were consuming trees faster than the trees grew back. Somebody had to grow new ones, so he went to a stripped ridge in northern New Brunswick.
Government foresters thought he was wasting his time because the trees would not grow there. Rival companies agreed, and some of his own employees thought he was living in a dream world. An American paper company chairman questioned the point and doubted K.C. Irving, already 58, would live to see a harvest. Forestry professor Barry Flinger was sure the trees would not grow there and bet he would eat his textbooks if they did. K.C. Irvin
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What Did Harrison McCain Learn From K.C. Irving?
Shane Parrish says Harrison McCain reduced what he learned from K.C. Irving to one sentence: don't ever be satisfied.
K.C.'s sons told their father McCain was one hell of a salesman, and K.C. offered him a job. McCain named his price, $10,000 and a big car, and K.C. gave him both. K.C. rarely gave senior people direct orders. Over lunch he would mention that a certain account would fit with Irving's plans, and McCain heard that as get out there and get the account. One large account took 18 months to win. McCain called expecting congratulations. K.C. asked whether he had gotten the lubricating grease business as well. The grease amounted to only about 4% of the total business. McCain had wo
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How Much Was K.C. Irving Worth in 1948?
Shane Parrish says Canadian Business put K.C. Irving on its cover in February 1948 and guessed his fortune at about $100 million. By 1948, K.C. had become difficult to ignore and strangely difficult to see.
The cover was a sketch rather than a photograph, because photographs of K.C. were surprisingly hard to come by. A Montreal reporter who came looking for the man behind the number found K.C. friendly enough, even talkative. Asked about the inner workings of the company, very little came back. What K.C. told him about himself, the reporter complained afterwards, could have fit on the back of a postage stamp.
A fortune large enough for a national cover still came with almost no public acco
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Why Did K.C. Irving Count the Trees Before Buying a Forest?
Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving counted the trees himself because he would not buy a defunct railway's forest until his own count matched the inspectors.
The railway still owned nearly 700,000 acres, an area almost the size of Rhode Island. He could have hired a timber expert, read the report, and made the decision from the office. He hired an expert, put on snowshoes, and spent days walking the property counting trees. At night, back at camp, he compared his count with the inspectors. When the numbers disagreed, they went back into the woods and counted again. He wrote the check only when the two counts matched.
He used experts, managers, accountants, and reports throughout his businesses,
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How Did K.C. Irving's Veneer Plant Help Build the Mosquito Bomber?
Shane Parrish says the first part of K.C. Irving's business transformed by the war was Canada Veneers, a small veneer company he had purchased the year before. He bought it because it was cheap and he thought he could fix it. The war changed the company's fortunes overnight.
St. John businessmen had started Canada Veneers in 1933. It made veneer, wood shaped into sheets thinner than cardboard, mostly for orange crates. By 1938 the company was struggling and Irving took control. In England, de Havilland was designing a bomber made largely of wood. Metal was already scarce, and the war made it scarcer. The Mosquito was built almost entirely from plywood, thin sheets of veneer stacked and glue
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How Did K.C. Irving Handle a Missing Oil Delivery?
Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving handled a missing oil delivery by answering the call himself and phoning back until the oil was in the house.
On a winter Sunday in New Brunswick, Canada, sometime in the 1960s, the telephone rang inside a big white house on Mount Pleasant Avenue and interrupted a meeting. Mulroney of St. Patrick Street had a cold house, an empty furnace, and a reasonable suspicion that someone at the oil company had forgotten him. He wanted somebody important to hear about it. Irving said he was sorry, mentioned the cold day, wrote down the address, hung up, and called the oil yard. He then called Mulroney back to say the truck was coming. About half an hour later he interrup