K.C. Irving: Competing with Giants

This is the story of K. C. Irving, the man who refused to be stopped. When a railway raised his shipping costs, he bought a ship. When oil suppliers tried to squeeze him, he built a refinery. Whenever someone told him no, he found a way. From his father’s general store in a small New Brunswick town, he built an empire of roughly 300 companies. How do you beat competitors with more money, more people, and a head start? You’ll see how he won customers the big companies ignored, why he kept expanding during the Great Depression, and why a man who owned ships and a refinery still cared about clean bathrooms and one customer’s cold house. Shane Parrish tells the story of how Irving built his businesses and what it took to keep them in his hands. But the bigger he got, the bigger the fights became. He spent his life making sure no one could push him around. Eventually he got so big governments wanted to rein him in. ----- Chapters: (00:00) Introduction (02:40) Thrown Out of Town at Fourteen (07:52) How a Caterpillar Almost Destroyed Everything (10:56) The Hole in Front of the Store (16:01) The Great Gasoline War (21:18) The Year Ford Nearly Ruined Him (25:05) The Question He Asked for Sixty Years (27:10) How He Scaled Up During the Depression (36:05) The Insult That Pushed Him Into Politics (41:08) The Operational Secret to Unmatched Control (49:27) How K. C. Taught His Sons Business (53:27) Don’t Argue with Your Coat On (59:09) Why Winning 96% Wasn't Good Enough (1:08:32) The Four-Word Answer That Shocked BP (1:30:30) The One Project He Couldn't Control (1:35:20) The Man Who Owned Every Newspaper (1:39:25) Mr. Irving Goes to Ottawa (1:45:16) Too Expensive to Die in Canada (1:50:00) The Verdict (1:58:02) Epilogue ------ Newsletter: The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it’s completely free. Learn more and sign up at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠fs.blog/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------ Follow Shane Parrish: X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/shaneparrish⁠⁠ Insta: ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/farnamstreet/⁠⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/shane-parrish-050a2183/⁠⁠ ------ Thank you to the sponsors for this episode: + See how Stripe can power what’s next for your business at ⁠stripe.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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  It's a winter Sunday in New Brunswick, Canada, sometime in the 1960s. Inside a big white house on Mount Pleasant Avenue, the telephone rings. A man interrupts his meeting to answer. "You Irving, the oil man?" the caller says. "Yes, sir, I am." "Well, this is Mulrooney of St. Patrick's Street. Where the hell's my oil?" Mulrooney had a cold house and an empty furnace and a reasonable suspicion that someone at the oil company had forgotten about him. And he decided that somebody important is going to hear about it. He has no idea how spectacularly he has succeeded. "Well, sir, I'm very sorry to hear that," the oil man replies. "And it's a cold day, too, isn't it?"

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  He wrote down the address, hung up and called the oil yard. Then he called Mulrooney back to tell him the truck was coming. About half an hour later, he interrupted his meeting a second time and called Mulrooney again to confirm the oil had actually arrived. The second call tells you a lot about the man. Plenty of people would have apologized, ordered the delivery and went on their way. But he needed to know the problem was solved. Mulrooney had reached the owner of the company, a man whose businesses included delivery trucks, the refinery, ships, forests, mills and newspapers, roughly 300 companies. And he was interrupting his Sunday meeting to make sure that one house on St. Patrick's Street had its oil. One of the richest men in the country ran a complaints department

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  out of his own home, staffed by himself. Most Americans have never heard the name, even though nearly a fifth of the gasoline America imports today flows out of his refinery. Canadians know the name well. In the east of the country, it's hard to drive more than 10 minutes without seeing it. This is Outliers. I'm your host, Shan Parrish, and this is the story of Casey Irving.

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  Half a century before that phone call, Casey was a lanky 14-year-old chasing another boy through the streets of Bucktoosh. The boy he was chasing was one of two who had beaten him badly the previous day. Casey had gone home, recovered overnight and returned the next morning to even the score. When a teacher interrupted the rematch, Casey began throwing stones at her. His father's judgment was swift. Casey would leave Bucktoosh and live 60 miles north in Millerton with his older half-sister Jen and her husband, a minister. Casey had grown up in a lumber town on the tidal river in a province covered largely by forest. Nearly every local dollar began, in one way or another, as a tree.

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  His father, James Durgaville Irving, known simply as JD, owned the sawmill that processed many of these trees. He also owned the general store, which supplied local farmers and carried them on credit when they could not pay. The mill supplied the wages and the store recovered some of those wages. JD occupied several positions in the town's economy at once. He was employer, merchant and creditor. He was a stern Presbyterian and one of the first men in the county to own an automobile. The machine spent its nights in a covered pigpen in a barn beside the family's cows. JD's first wife died young. The housekeeper he eventually hired, Mary Elizabeth Gifford, was a young orphan who had taught herself bookkeeping.

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  And in time, he married her. On March 14th, 1899, Mary gave birth to a son. They named him Kenneth Colin Irving. Most would simply call him Casey. Mary adored him and he adored her right back. "No child," his half-sister Jen would say, "could be as adored as he was and not love his mother." Mary ran their household the way her husband ran his mill relentlessly. One relative remembered it as terrifyingly neat. Nothing was to be wasted and liquor was forbidden. Two rules that Casey would adopt for life. Mary was also Casey's first business partner. When Casey started selling vegetables from her garden,

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  rather than tell him to stop, she made the garden bigger. They counted his earnings and placed them inside a large clock in the dining room. Soon, Casey had a four-wheeled pull cart and another way to make money. He went door to door, offering to clean out neighbor's cellars in exchange for whatever he could salvage, mostly bottles. Properly washed, he discovered these bottles could be sold for a neat profit. Before long, two older boys were working for him. One was his cousin, Lee Stevenson. "We might get four cents out of us for every 10 cents that he made," Stevenson recalled. "He got more than both of us put together, but we didn't mind it one bit. It just seemed like the thing to do at the time. He owned the pull cart and he ran the show."

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  That would pretty much explain Casey's next nine decades in business. Not everything came naturally to him. When a traveling couple arrived in Bucktoosh to teach music, JD bought violins for his children and Casey learned to play it, more or less, and then abruptly quit. "I wasn't a natural," he explained. The failed lessons gave him a phrase that he would use for the rest of his life. When he saw someone attempting work beyond their abilities, he said the person couldn't play the violin. He applied that judgment to others, but to no one harder than himself. And it wasn't long after that he quit the violin that the fighting started. In a lumber town like Bucktoosh, fighting was practically a pastime.

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  Sellers drank at the town's hotels and then battled it out on the streets. Being good with your fists was a mark of distinction. One Irving employee recalled stopping his horse to watch young Casey scrap. He'd urge him on and then hoist the battered boy up onto the wagon and preach to him about his behavior. The preaching didn't take. "You had a certain amount of energy," Casey explained later. "You had to get rid of it somehow." By his own count, he won about half of his fights. But the fight that ended with him throwing stones at a teacher was one too many and his father had finally had enough. That was how he ended up living with his half-sister in Millerton for a year. On the first morning, at his new school, the principal called him to his feet before the class. "Kenneth, stand up.

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  You've come to learn. I'm going to teach you. I'm the boss. If you fight for one minute, it's going to be too bad for you." The principal quizzed him and discovered that the new boy was far behind his classmates. He was assigned extra lessons. So at night, Jen's husband tutored him by the light of a kerosene lamp. And slowly, something began to change. Jen, who had never liked how transfixed he had been by money, quietly went to work on him, too. "I doubt that he earned a penny that year," she later recalled. By gosh, Casey remembered, "I got to like school." 70 years later, by then, one of the richest men alive and the top entrepreneurs the world had ever seen,

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  Casey called that year without earnings probably the best thing that ever happened to me. When Casey returned to Bucktoosh, World War I had begun. He wanted to enlist. And once again, what Casey wanted would put him at odds with his father. At 16, he was too young to enlist without his father's permission. And that didn't prevent him from finding an enlistment doctor and arguing until the doctor finally relented on one condition. "He would approve Casey," he said, "if he got his father's signature." The next morning, Casey brought his father the form. "What is it?" "I've decided to enlist." "You've what?" His father growled at him. "Get yourself to school." Casey liked to finish the story by adding somewhat sheepishly,

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  "His boot just missed me." His father won that round. Casey remained in school and eventually went to university. But university meant following other people's plans. And he was not prepared to do that for long. In 1918, at 19, Casey was sitting in a Latin class when the instructor called on him to read aloud. Instead, he simply closed his book and said, "Not today, sir." And he walked out and enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps. After training as a pilot in England, he was awaiting his posting when one morning he heard shouting in the streets. "The war was over. We were disappointed not to see action," he later recalled. "But we knew we were lucky to be alive." He returned home in the summer of 1919 and did something

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  no one would ever associate with him later in life, very little. He fished and passed the days with friends. In the evenings, he traveled to dances all over the county. "By the end of the summer, I danced myself right down to skin and bones and I had to stop and go to work before the loafing killed me," Casey recalled. It may have been the last easy summer of his life. While Casey had been away, two unlikely forces had begun to undermine Bucktoosh's economy, a caterpillar and a catalog. The caterpillar was the spruce budworm. A single budworm was insignificant, barely longer than a fingernail. An outbreak of them, however, was not. They came in the billions, stripping the trees that the sawmills depended on.

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  Across the county, mills had begun to shut down. JD's was on borrowed time. As usable timber dwindled, workers lost hours and wages. A town that had lived by cutting trees had no easy answer when the forest could no longer feed its mills. That wasn't the only threat he faced. The other one came through the mail. The Eaton's catalog offered rural Canadians hundreds of pages of clothing, furniture, tools, equipment and household goods at prices a village merchant struggled with. You can think of it like the Sears catalog. Eaton's didn't need to construct a store or employ people in every small community. The catalog turned the post office and railway into its own distribution network.

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  For customers, it meant greater selection and lower prices. However, for JD, it threatened the survival of his general store. By the time Casey's summer of leisure ended, there was plenty of work waiting for him. Casey's business education began behind the counter of his father's general store. The store bought and sold whatever nearby farms grew, and in the fall, that meant potatoes. With his father away, Casey began buying from an excellent harvest. He kept buying until the potatoes occupied nearly every inch of the building. Then the market collapsed. The large buyers in Montreal stopped placing orders. When JD returned, he found his store packed with potatoes that were losing value by the day.

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  "You've even got potatoes stuck between the joists," he told his son. "They're going to sprout. Get rid of them." Desperate to get rid of them, Casey fired off a flurry of telegrams to buyers down the American East Coast. Two orders came in, then several more. American demand seemed inexhaustible, so he raised his prices. Soon, he was shipping nearly the whole stock to New York City at $18 a barrel, considerably more than he had paid for it. More than a year passed before he learned the reason for his good fortune. Frost had wiped out the American crop. While luck had rescued his potato gamble, the next opportunity he seized came from foresight. Automobiles were beginning to appear more frequently on the dirt roads.

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  To many people, they're a rich man's toy, but Casey saw opportunity. The Eaton's catalog, like this year's catalog, could sell a farmer almost anything his father's store did that wasn't perishable: clothes, tools, even a plow. But it could not deliver gasoline. A farmer who owned a car had to buy that locally. So without permission, Casey signed up his father's store as an agent for Imperial Oil, then Canada's largest oil company. At 6 o'clock one summer morning in 1920, while the village slept, he was outside the store digging a hole for a 250-gallon gasoline tank. When his father asked what he was doing, Casey answered over a shovel, "I'm darn sure we're not going out of business."

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  The problem with selling gasoline is that there were still too few customers. To Casey, the solution was obvious. He would sell cars. He signed a deal with the Ford Motor Company to become his county's official car dealer. Ford supplied the cars, and Casey earned a commission on each one he sold. Soon, he was on the road every day of the week, intent on putting a car in every farmyard in the county. Each morning, dressed in a suit and freshly shined shoes, he knocked on farmhouse doors and tried to persuade men who had spent their entire lives behind horses to buy a machine that they had never owned before. His father thought the whole endeavor would be the ruination of the countryside.

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  He feared his son was selling machines to farmers who would soon have no money left for anything else. That concern was not unfounded. Many of the farmers lacked enough cash to buy a Ford in the first place, so Casey accepted whatever they could offer: horses, harnesses, cattle, and produce. And then he sold these things, too. It was a very peculiar automobile dealership. Casey later said that his years selling cars to farmers taught him more about business than anything else in his entire life. The job required him to know more than just how to sell a car. "You had to have things to say," Casey remembered. For most of his customers, this was their first experience with an automobile, and the Model T had its quirks.

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  To start one, a driver stood in front of the car and turned a crank by hand. If the engine kicked backward while his thumb was wrapped around the handle, the crank could break his wrist. Casey taught customers how to avoid this by keeping the thumb alongside the fingers, never curled around the crank. His responsibility did not stop with a sale either. Whenever a customer's truck stalled, Casey would drive out to discover exactly what was wrong. "You had to have happy customers," he said. "You didn't leave people in a lot of trouble." One morning, a local storekeeper named William Graham had a truck that wouldn't start. So Casey came over and got it running. And after that, Graham began calling him whenever he heard someone might be thinking

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  about buying a car. "Mr. Graham kept calling me with tips," Casey remembered. "He helped me sell perhaps five cars. Sometimes he'd even go with me when the crops were in." Casey made about $105 on every Ford that he sold. In one year, he earned $20,000. The following year, he made $22,000, which works out to roughly $350,000 today. It was an extraordinary income for a man in his 20s operating out of a small village. When Casey later spoke fondly about those years, it was the people he remembered, though, not the money. "I never enjoyed anything more than talking to those farmers," he said. At this point, Casey was selling the cars, servicing them, and supplying the gasoline

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  that kept them moving. But the gas belonged to Imperial Oil, and they were about to remind him of that. Casey's car sales were booming when a neighbor arrived with bad news. Imperial Oil had quietly purchased a lot in town and hired its own full-time agent. The company was preparing to cut him off without warning. The explanation when he finally got one was simple. The area's other merchants had complained to Imperial that the only place to buy gasoline was from the Irving store, which competed with them and everything else. Casey was angry, but he understood the business logic, saying later, "From Imperial's standpoint, the move made sense, but he might have told me what he was going to do." Imperial was not a small local supplier.

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  The company was controlled by the Standard Oil Empire, and they were not fond of competition. They expected him to stick to selling cars. Instead, he went looking for a new supply of gasoline. He found one in Tulsa, Oklahoma, nearly 2,000 miles away. He wired the money south and arranged for the gasoline to be shipped north in a railway tank car. Solving that problem created another. When the gas arrived, Casey needed somewhere to store it, so he ordered a 10,000-gallon tank, 40 times the size of the one he'd buried a few years earlier. In Bactouche, the neighbors were soon saying Casey Irving would be skinned alive by the giant Imperial Oil. The battle between them became visible in a very unexpected way.

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  Imperial was building its own filling station and also needed a storage tank. And by coincidence, the company and Casey had ordered identical 10,000-gallon tanks from this same manufacturer, and they arrived aboard the same train on the same day. People came from miles around to watch the two massive tanks get unloaded. The steel cylinders, each nearly the length of a small school bus and taller than a person, swung off the flat cars while the crowd watched. After his tank was installed, a fire marshal informed Casey that it stood too close to the surrounding buildings, and so he had to move the entire thing and begin again. Once the tank was finally in place, he built a garage and service station across from the family store.

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  He invited his father and half-brother to join the venture. Both declined, presumably because they thought, too, that Imperial Oil would quickly put them out of business. "All right," Casey said, "I'll do it alone." He hired a carpenter, but drove a good share of the nails himself. Operating with a $2,000 bank loan and one month of credit, he needed to sell gasoline quickly, or he would go under. The family home sat on the same stretch of road as the store, and his mother encouraged him, but had one complaint: her son's new garage now spoiled her view of this street. And that was no accident. Casey had positioned it where motorists could see it from as far down the road as possible.

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  The same emphasis on roadside visibility would eventually become a hallmark of the Irving oil stations, with their broad canopies appearing across the region. But visibility would not be enough. To compete with Imperial, Casey knew that he had to have a better product. So he took his Tulsa gasoline and blended his own recipe, one that could fire faster in cold engines. And then he pitched that to every farmer who had ever cursed while cranking their engine on a freezing January morning. He even out-named the competition. He gave it a name that challenged his competitors directly. Imperial sold a gasoline called Premier. Another rival sold one called White Rose, so Casey combined the names and called his

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  gasoline Primrose. Soon, he had the name painted on the trucks that drove across the county each day. Casey had borrowed the names of the companies he intended to beat and wanted to make sure they knew it. Before long, he was doing 95% of the gasoline business in Bactouche. When asked years later whether Imperial Oil had, in effect, created Irving Oil by cutting them off, Casey dismissed the suggestion. "No, I think it would have just been a matter of time before I went into business for myself, anyway." Casey made the decision sound inevitable. He saw cars coming in relentlessly and knew they'd need gas. "It was just common sense," he said. By 1925, Casey Irving had another problem. You might even call it a good problem. Bactouche was getting too small for him.

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  The family store was doing well again, helped along by the gasoline business, but Casey's ambitions were much larger. He didn't like taking direction from anyone except his customers. For example, Casey treated the sales territory that Ford had given him as nothing more than a starting point. Having sold many cars in Bactouche, he started looking further away. Eventually, he pushed 30 miles west into Moncton, where another Ford dealer already held the territory and complained. Ford told Casey to stay in his own territory. But Casey did not like being told what to do. "It's open territory," he said. Ford disagreed, but instead of fighting him, they came up with a better solution. They offered him a much bigger territory, St. John, the largest city in the province.

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  For the first, and perhaps only, time in his life, Casey hesitated. "I didn't think I could handle it," he remembered. "I said I'd have to take a look." So he went to St. John and took a look, and then he came home and made up his mind. And at 26, Casey Irving left Bactouche.

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  St. John called itself the loyalist city. It had been founded by Americans who took the king's side in the Revolutionary War and fled north when they lost. Its people were proud of their pedigree and its doors were hard for newcomers to crack. Casey was young, unknown, and in one biographer's words, "an obscure outsider who needed St. John more than it needed him." His Ford showroom stood at 300 Union Street. The franchise itself cost him nothing. Ford just wanted an aggressive young salesman in its biggest local market. His mandate was simple: Sell more Ford Model Ts. Casey moved into a room at the Royal Hotel and worked day and night. One of the first problems he faced was with a bank. Casey arrived

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  with about $5,000 in cash and five years of borrowing behind him without a missed payment. When he asked the bank for a line of credit, they said yes on one condition: his father had to guarantee it. Casey knew that his father would have signed it, but he refused anyway. Not long afterward, the manager of a rival bank walked into Casey's showroom. He was an old family friend who had finished with J.D. and then he was offended. "How could you do it, Kenneth? How could you come into St. John and not do business with me?" Casey said he'd be happy to. There was just one condition: his father's name stayed off the loan. By the next morning, he was sitting with the bank's regional supervisor, a man who would rise to run the whole bank as Casey rose alongside him. Casey got his

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  credit, on his own signature. Years later, his view of banking remained fairly simple. "I always borrowed a lot of money," he said. "I don't really know of a bad bank." In 1927, he went home to Bucktoosh, just long enough to marry Harriet. She had come to work in the Irving Family Store and eventually took charge of the books for Casey's business. Every dollar in and out passed through her hands. Casey had first made his intentions clear at a church basket social. In these things, the women packed lunches and the men bid on them. The winner got lunch and the company of the woman who made it. Another man bid on Harriet's basket, but Casey luckily had outbid him. Soon after the wedding, they were back in St. John. Ford, meanwhile, kept giving Casey more to do. First, another dealership

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  in Halifax, then the tractor franchise for the region, and then Ford nearly put him out of business. In 1927, Henry Ford stopped making the Model T and shut down his factories to retool for the replacement, the Model A. The new car was slated for spring, but when spring came, there was no Model A. Then summer, and still nothing. For month after month, Casey Irving was a car dealer with no cars. Sure, he had a showroom of beautiful pictures and salesmen armed with brochures, but no actual cars. To stay alive, he scraped together whatever leftover Chryslers he could find. The Model A finally arrived in the fall and it sold well. But Casey had spent the better part of a year paying for

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  another company's mistakes, and he never wanted to be that exposed again. That year, he turned back to selling gasoline. He didn't quit Ford. He'd sell Fords for another 25 years, but from that year on, the car dealerships were the side business. Around this time, a lawyer called him about buying a service station in St. John, and Casey was more than interested, so he bought in alongside the lawyer and the station owner, a businessman named K.B. Reed. This station was profitable from the start. The partners waited for their share of the profits, but nothing came. Casey had taken every dollar of profit and put it back into the business. Casey Irving, the lawyer said, "doesn't like to pay dividends."

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  Before long, Casey bought both partners out, but he offered Reed a job. Reed would take it, and he worked for him for the next six decades. In 1929, he turned 30 and officially incorporated the Irving Oil Company Limited, the company that carries his name to this day. To fund the expansion, he raised $300,000 by selling shares. But Casey smartly kept the right to buy them back, and as the profits came in, that's exactly what he did. Before long, the company was his alone. He had learned something about money that he repeated for the rest of his life. The minute you make money, people spend all their waking hours trying to get it out of you. And he never again sold the public a share of his companies.

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  With money in his pocket, he went hunting for service stations. Reed was his scout and auditor, and within a year, one Irving station had become a network across New Brunswick, and then he pushed into Nova Scotia, the next province. The build-out ran on sweat and improvisation. In Halifax, the station operator told Casey the truth. He just paid to install storage tanks for one of the big oil companies. He had no money left to install anyone else's. So Casey came back a few days later, wearing overalls, a pipe fitter beside him, and put the tank in himself. When a dealer in Nova Scotia didn't like the contract that Casey offered, Casey told him to write his own. The man did, and they did business under

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  that contract for years. "A big company wouldn't be bothered with them," Casey said of these small deals. "But that's all there was for someone in my position." And as the Irving gas stations multiplied, Casey Irving began to appear in his dealers' yards without warning. He always opened the conversation with the same two words: "How's business?" While it sounded like small talk, it wasn't. It was a question that, asked of an Irving oil man, was expected to be answered truthfully, and the follow-up questions would come blazingly fast. "How many gallons have you sold? Which accounts have you won? Which have you lost? Which have you broken? What needs fixing?" Casey asked, and more importantly, he remembered, he would ask the same opening question for the next 60

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  years, in service stations and shipyards, on the decks of ships and the floors of mills to thousands of Irving employees. Casey Irving, though, picked an unfortunate year to go all in on himself. In October of 1929, the stock market crashed and the Great Depression started. It was difficult to imagine a worse business than the one he had chosen. Not only did people stop buying cars, many stopped driving the ones they owned. Traveling around New Brunswick, Casey began seeing a strange sight on the roads: automobiles with their engines pulled out of them and teams of horses hitched to the front. It kind of makes sense when you think about it. After all, gasoline costs money. Well, horses could eat grass.

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  His competitors looked at the situation and did the seemingly sensible thing. They cut back, postponed expansion, and hunkered down, waiting for better times. Casey did the exact opposite. He started expanding, faster than ever. His response to the Depression was to act as if it wasn't happening. One man who joined Irving Oil in 1930 later tried to remember how his new boss talked about the Depression. He couldn't. Casey, he said, "never mentioned the Depression at all." Years later, Casey offered an explanation. "Bad times," he thought, "had one considerable advantage. Fewer people were now trying to grow. There was less competition," he said. "You had to use your head and your ingenuity.

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  You couldn't sit around sucking your thumb." I'm reminded of John D. Rockefeller's saying, "That the strong feed during depressions." And Casey Irving intended on being strong. So while other companies struggled to survive, Casey went on the offensive. He stayed on the road three or four days a week, looking for stations and businesses to buy. He often needed a chocolate bar for lunch, worked until the people he was visiting went to bed, and then drove on to the next town and found a hotel. Looking back on those years, he said something that would have sounded insane to almost anyone else who had lived through them. "I've never been happier. Expanding during the best of times is hard, but it's even harder in the Great Depression. You

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  needed money." And Casey didn't have enough of it, so he borrowed. A lot. His reputation helped him here. By now, bankers had learned that Casey Irving paid in full, on time, every time. Because of this, he could borrow against one business, buy another, improve it, then borrow against the larger operation and build the next. His rivals watched him doing all of this and came to the same conclusion. As one manager at a competitor put it in a staff meeting, "He'll be gone in two years." Instead, two years into the Depression, Casey went to the motor show in Montreal and bought the nicest Cadillac he saw. It was black and cost $11,000. When asked why he didn't buy a cheaper car, he said, "I didn't want a Lincoln. I wanted a Cadillac." And he drove

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  that car everywhere, and because it was so extravagant, it attracted crowds wherever he parked it. None of what Casey Irving did was for show. He wasn't that kind of person. So the most reasonable interpretation of this purchase was that he wanted to tell everyone during the Depression that he believed in the future. After all, you don't spend that much money on a car during the Depression without believing in tomorrow. And at the time, there was no better advertisement for Irving Oil. Decades later, Casey's son, Arthur, compressed his father's thinking in the Depression into a simple rule: Never be worried, but be concerned. If you're concerned, you can do something about it, but being worried,

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  on the other hand, is what you do when you've already decided you're helpless. And one thing we know about Casey Irving is that he would never be helpless. In 1931, Casey put up a five-story building in downtown St. John for about a quarter of a million dollars. He named it the Golden Ball. He stuffed the building with new ventures, many of which were terrible. The parking garage failed almost immediately, gold mining went nowhere, and so did an early newspaper venture. Then he tried finance and discovered that trading stocks and bonds was another violin he couldn't play. "I always had more ideas than a dog has fleas," he said. It's easy to look back and say he was some master strategist,

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  but the truth is, he had a lot of ideas. He tried nearly all of them, and most of them failed, and his energy went into the ones that worked. And the ones that worked had an interesting thing in common. You could touch them. They were tangible: cars, gasoline, trees, buses, lumber, and ships. Very early on, Casey realized that running a business was nothing more than solving problems. For example, consider buses. Casey had bought a bus company, and new buses were expensive to buy, and they had to be brought in from far away, so he found a cheaper alternative. He bought used Ford cars, sawed them in half, and stretched the frames and turned them into buses. If you're wondering why he got

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  into the bus business, it's because they consume a lot of gasoline. It was the very beginning of his vertical integration, and it would be a model he would perfect. It began sort of as a necessity, but once he tasted that kind of control, he never let go. Just a year later, in 1932, though, somebody tried to squeeze him.

• 32:27Speaker 00

  It was the railway, but not just any railway, Canadian National Railway, or CNR for short, which belonged to the government. In the depths of the depression, it raised the rates on Casey Irving's oil shipments, while leaving those of his competitor, Imperial Oil, untouched. Casey demanded to know why everyone wasn't treated fairly. He was told that Imperial Oil was different because they had a refinery. It was an answer that he would never forget. And it exposed a part of the value chain that he didn't own: transportation. Casey might own the gasoline and the stations that sold it, but every gallon still had to travel over someone else's trucks on terms they could set and change whenever they wanted.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  He argued with the railway for two years. Finally, he gave them an ultimatum: lower the rate or lose his traffic. Now, CNR must have laughed at this request. It's kind of like an airline passenger arguing over the price of a ticket and saying, "Fine, I'll buy my own airplane." I imagine that CNR's reasoning went something like this. They know he needed to get his gasoline, and the only two possible ways to do that was CNR or tanker ship. And he did not own a tanker. And nobody was stupid enough to go buy a tanker just to move a little gasoline during the depression. So he had nowhere else to go. Now, we've all dealt with some version of this. The company knows you need them. They know you have no alternative, and they take advantage of you.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  Casey offered them a fair deal and told them to take it or leave it. They left it, thinking he'd come crawling back. Instead, he bought a coastal tanker and built his own wharf just one mile away from the railroad's regional headquarters. When the tanker arrived with its first load of gasoline for Irving stations, he turned it into a public event. A crowd gathered at the new wharf. In the Depression, the opening of anything was practically a local holiday, but this one had another purpose. Casey wanted the railway watching as its former customer brought in his own gas. The tanker, loaded with gasoline for Irving Oil stations, rode the tide up the muddy river toward the dock. And then something went wrong.

• 34:41Speaker 00

  At the moment the engine should have gone quiet, someone on board accidentally sent them full speed ahead. And the crowd watched in astonishment as the ship drove itself stern first into the riverbank and stopped dead. This was no stunt. Casey had invited the public to watch him break the railway's hold. Instead, they watched him bury his new ship in the mud. The guests went home, the tide went out, the tanker stayed where it was. The humiliation here is almost too perfect. He had staged a victory parade, and the float had broken down in front of the enemy's headquarters. What would you do? Well, we know what Casey did. Casey picked up a shovel. And for the next several hours, he dug beside his crew,

• 35:24Speaker 00

  all of them covered from head to toe in mud. At 2:30 in the morning, the returning tide finally lifted the ship free. On the next tide, it came back upriver and docked without flaw. CNR had looked across the table and seen a small dealer with nowhere else to go. And they had badly misjudged the determination of the man sitting there. The railway's hold on him was finally broken. And because he didn't feel like he was treated fairly, he started a shipping company. At first, it was just for him, but it would eventually carry oil all around the world. But Casey Irving had not forgotten why Imperial got the better rate. They had a refinery. This wasn't the first time political powers were used against him.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  In 1931, he sent an employee to the province's premier, JBM Baxter, to ask whether Irving could bid on government work. A premier is kind of the equivalent of an American governor. And Baxter knew the Irving name well. Casey's dad had spent years raising money for the opposing party. "No, there'll be no business for Mr. Irving," Baxter said. "No business whatsoever." He couldn't bid on government contracts because his dad was raising money for the other party. Casey never forgot it. "Baxter pitchforked me into politics," he later said. And because of this slight, he began raising money for the Liberal Party. When they eventually returned to power, business began flowing his way.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  There was an irony here that would follow him for the rest of his career. Casey entered politics because he hated seeing political connections decide who got the business. So his response to this was to build political connections of his own, and they became very good connections indeed. It wouldn't be long before politicians on both sides of the aisle were grumbling that no government could buy a roll of toilet paper without Casey Irving's approval.

• 37:27Speaker 00

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• 38:02Speaker 00

  There was a far more dangerous threat on the horizon than politics. In June of 1933, Casey's father died. JD had never made peace with Casey leaving the family business. And now Casey came back to buy it. He bought out his mother and his siblings, and he took control of the old sawmill and its 7,000 acres of timberland. He was buying into disaster. The spruce budworms were still eating through the forest, and the Depression had crushed lumber prices so badly that every sale was at a loss. The obvious thing to do was lay people off, stop cutting, and wait. And while that's what all of his competitors did, that's not what Casey did.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  He kept cutting, but stopped selling. That first year, his crews went into the woods, cut the timber, and stacked it. The next year, they did it again. For six straight years, Casey kept the crews cutting. But in only three of those years, did he actually sell any of the wood that they produced. The rest just piled up, waiting for better days. This is how Casey Irving did things: by thinking for himself without a whole lot of consideration for what other people thought. Piles of timber, though, cost money. Men had to be paid, equipment had to run, and the wood had to be stored while Casey waited for a market that might or might not come back. The only question was whether lumber prices would recover before the bank called his loan.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  The bank lost its nerve first and called his loan, said to be close to $2 million at the time. Not only did they want the $2 million back, during the depths of the Depression, they wanted it back immediately. The order hadn't come from Casey's local banker. It had come from the head office in Toronto. And for the rest of his life, Casey would believe that his competitors had pushed for it, hoping to catch him with his money tied up in piles of unsold lumber and knock him over. Either way, the timing of the loan call couldn't have been worse. His local banker was embarrassed to deliver the news. Casey didn't panic. He knew for all the years he had borrowed money, he had never missed a single payment.

• 40:10Speaker 00

  Another lender took the bet, and the called loans were paid off in full. And he kept cutting. Finally, in 1939, six long years after he had taken over the timberlands, lumber prices rose. Now, the very thing that had made him look crazy worked in his favor. While other lumberyards began to slowly increase production, with increased costs, Casey was already sitting on years of inventory that were cut and stacked when Depression-era costs were low. The lumber that had nearly buried him was now worth a fortune. If his competitors had forced the bank to call his loan, their plan had backfired. Instead of breaking Casey at the worst possible moment, it gave the banking world a front-row seat

• 40:54Speaker 00

  as he weathered the pressure without missing a single payment. The bankers learned their lesson, with one saying that "the time soon came when Casey didn't go to the banks, you went to him." By the time World War II began, Casey was 40 years old. On his desk sat radio equipment that could connect him to employees across all of his operations. When someone asked whether he really had to oversee everything himself, Casey said, "You do if you want to stay in business." When asked why he delegated so little, "Because I can't sand to see other people make mistakes." His employees put it this way, "When your boss knows more about your job than you do, it keeps you on your toes."

• 41:36Speaker 00

  One of his biographers later wrote that New Brunswick was a province where all the things Kenneth Cole Irving did were judged to be more remarkable because they happened here, and until he did them, no one thought they could be done. In 1939, the remarkable things were just beginning. His still-small oil company was standing up to the giants. His shipping business existed out of spite for a government railway. His buses were built by sawing automobiles apart, and thousands of acres of forest had somehow survived the budworm and the depression. Then, on September 1st, Germany invaded Poland, and the world went to war for the second time in his life. The first war he had missed, and this one would make him.

• 42:19Speaker 00

  The first part of Casey Irving's business to be transformed by the war was a small veneer company he had purchased the year before. Canada Veniers had been started by a group of St. John businessmen in 1933. It made veneer, which is wood shaped into sheets thinner than cardboard, which it turned mostly into orange crates. By 1938, the company was struggling, and Casey had stepped in and took control. He bought it because it was cheap, and he thought he could fix it. The war changed the company's fortunes overnight. In England, the aircraft company de Havilland was designing a bomber made largely of wood. Metal was already scarce, and the war was making it even scarcer.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  The plane was called the Mosquito, and it was built almost entirely from plywood. Thin sheets of veneer stacked and glued together until the wood became both light and remarkably strong. The crews called it the Wooden Wonder. For a good stretch of the war, it was about the fastest thing in the sky. It could fly from Britain to Berlin, photograph targets or drop bombs, and get home untouched. Yellow Birch was especially well-suited to making plywood for the plane, and New Brunswick had it in abundance, and Casey already owned a plant that could turn it into veneer. So when Britain called for every sheet of aircraft plywood the empire could produce, Canada Veniers suddenly found itself making something the war badly needed.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  The little plant that had nearly gone out of business in 1938 was soon running seven days a week, with 500 people working around the clock. More than 6,000 mosquitoes were eventually built, riding on the sheets of wood like those coming out of Casey's plants. Casey never pretended he had seen any of this coming. Too many successful businesspeople clean up the story afterwards until eventually every lucky break looked like foresight. Casey didn't do that with Canada Veniers. He had bought a broken company because it was cheap and he thought he could fix it. Then the war came and saved it. But the war work pouring into Canada Veniers was not reaching much of the rest in New Brunswick. Most of Canada's big wartime factories were going to Ontario and Quebec, where most of

• 44:30Speaker 00

  the country's people and their votes were. The maritime provinces had fewer of both, and much less war work was coming their way. So Casey went to the nation's capital, Ottawa, to ask for some for his province. He was turned away. So he went back. He was turned away again, and he kept going back until he finally came home with a contract to build invasion supply barges. Casey put the work in Bucktoosh, his hometown. He built bunkhouses on the old family farm for the workers to sleep in. His shipyards would eventually turn out more than 1,000 barges, and after D-Day, many of them carried supplies that kept the invasion moving. The warriors handed him his next deal, too.

• 45:11Speaker 00

  In 1942, a bankrupt pulp company in upstate New York owed Casey Irving some money. The company was Dexter Sulfide. Its debt had ended up in the hands of a United States federal agency, which was now trying to sell the business. Several companies were interested, and most of them were offering around 10 cents on the dollar. Casey offered something very different. He would pay the full amount with interest. There was, however, one condition. He wanted four years to do it, which only made sense if he could take the broken pulp company and get it earning money again. Those earnings could then pay for the company. To the government employees reviewing his bids, that sounded naive.

• 45:53Speaker 00

  At one point, an official pulled Dexter's lawyer aside and asked him, "Where did you find that huckleberry?" When the remark got back to Casey, he was puzzled. A huckleberry? Why did he call me a huckleberry? A huckleberry meant a country bumpkin, someone foolish enough, in the official's eyes, to pay full price when everyone else was offering much less. It was meant as an insult, but Casey adopted the nickname with delight. He saw himself as the underdog. He took over Dexter in May of 1942, put more than 600 people to work, and paid the mortgage off with interest before the four years were up. One of the people who helped this remarkable turnaround was Frank Lang, an Austrian-born

• 46:35Speaker 00

  engineer who soon became one of Dexter's key operators. Casey's verdict on Lang was simple. He knew what I didn't, and vice versa. And Lang told a story about his new boss that I think is particularly indicative of Irving. There was a serious problem at the mill one day, serious enough that Lang wanted permission to shut the whole operation down while they found the cause. Casey listened and then asked about one particular valve. Had someone checked it? Lang insisted it had been checked. Casey asked again, gently, "Mr. Lang, I wonder if you would check that valve?" Lang did, and it turned out Casey was right. Fixing it avoided the shutdown entirely. That was the strange thing about Casey Irving.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  His businesses stretched across industries and countries, but his attention could still zero in on a single valve. If you're wondering why a man who was already successful would buy a dying mill in another country and spend years turning it around, you weren't alone. People would ask Casey Irving some version of that question for the rest of his life. His answer had very little to do with money. "I like to see wheels turning," he said. Years later, he put it another way. "I've always enjoyed what I did. If you're busy, you get interested. It's like the fiddler at the dance. You'd almost play for nothing." As the war increased the demand for veneer and lumber, Casey began buying timberland on a scale he never had before.

• 48:01Speaker 00

  He needed yellow birch for Canada Veniers and lumber for the barges, and by now, his instinct was familiar. If raw material mattered enough to the business, he would rather own the source than depend on somebody else for it. The biggest opportunity came with a defunct railway that still owned nearly 700,000 acres of forest, an area almost the size of Rhode Island. Before Casey bought it, he needed to know what was actually there. He could have hired a timber expert, read the report, and made his decision from the office. Instead, he hired an expert and put on his snowshoes and went into the woods with him. For days, they walked through the property, counting trees. At night, back at camp, Casey compared his count with the inspector's.

• 48:45Speaker 00

  If the numbers disagreed, they went back into the woods and counted again. Only when the two counts matched was Casey satisfied enough to write the check. While Casey used experts, managers, accountants, and reports throughout his businesses, he refused to outsource his own judgment. He wanted to see and understand things for himself. The same habit brought him to his companies after dark, often without warning to walk through them himself. Night visits, he said, are the best way to find out what's going on. His role was simple. If you know both ends and the middle of a business, you should be able to make the right decisions. That was his advantage. He knew the business from A to Z. While Casey's businesses expanded through the Depression and the war, his three sons

• 49:30Speaker 00

  were growing up. Home was a big white house on Mount Pleasant Avenue, and from its upstairs window, you could watch the Irving ships come into the harbor. The house ran on the patience of Casey's wife, Harriet. Late at night, with her husband still bent over the papers downstairs, she would call down from the bedroom, "Kenneth, it's after 11:00." No answer but the scratching of his pen. An hour later, she would try again, "Kenneth, it's midnight." "All right, honey," Casey would answer, "I'll be up shortly." She occasionally joined Casey on his night visits and waited in the car while he disappeared inside a mill. One night, a worker stepped outside for some air and found her sitting alone, knitting. Harriet rolled down the window and asked if he had seen her husband.

• 50:15Speaker 00

  "Yes," the man said, "Mr. Irving was still inside." What would he mind telling Kenneth that she thought it was about time he came home? That was Hattie. The fortune changed almost everything around her without changing her very much. The same thing could be said for Casey. She still gave friends homemade jams and preserves for Christmas, and when someone called her Miss Irving, she corrected them, "I'm Hattie." A friend who had known her before the money said it best. She was no different from when she worked in the store in Bucktoush. Casey and Hattie had three sons, Jim, Arthur, and Jack. And by the end of the war, the boys were growing up in one of the wealthiest families in New Brunswick, if not the country. And Casey understood the problem this created.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Making money had taken him most of his life. His sons were going to receive the benefits of it simply by being born. He could leave them a fortune, but the harder job was making sure the fortune didn't make them helpless or spoiled. Their business education began with 12 hens. The boys called their operation the Jim, Art, and Jack Farm. They sold the eggs, kept the books, and advertised around the neighborhood. It was a tiny business, but Casey treated it as seriously as he treated all of his other businesses. And the boys quickly learned that customers could teach them lessons that their father could not. When they eventually sold some of their hens, the buyer loaded the birds into his van

• 51:42Speaker 00

  and then counted out less money than he had agreed to pay. He was already preparing to leave when 12-year-old Jim climbed into the van and announced that nobody was going anywhere until the rest of the money appeared. The man paid up. Jim remembered the lesson for the rest of his life. Never do business with someone who's in such a hurry that he has the ignition on and his foot on the accelerator. Of course, Casey offered lessons of his own. One New Year's Eve, Jim came home from celebrating and went straight to bed. At half past midnight, his father woke him up. "Dad woke me up and I thought he was going to wish me a happy new year," Jim remarked. Instead, Casey wanted to know why there were eggs sitting on the kitchen table. Jim had forgotten to make his deliveries.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  He spent his first hour of the new year delivering eggs. As the boys grew older, their education moved from the chicken coop into the larger family businesses. None of the three finished university. Arthur left because he believed he would learn more working beside his father. Jim came home at 19 and told Casey he had quit as well. His father's response was simple. Get to work. And all of them did. Jim gravitated towards the forest and mills, and Arthur became one of Irving's oil's strongest salesmen. And Jack began on construction crews and stayed close to that side of the business. They were not simply waiting to inherit their father's companies. They were learning the different pieces from the inside out.

• 53:09Speaker 00

  By the 1950s, outsiders had begun to notice what Casey had built. A group of Montreal investors came to New Brunswick interested in buying Irving Oil. And Casey met with them for lunch and listened to their proposal, but he wasn't interested. "I have three sons," he told them, "and I want to keep this business for them." By 1948, Casey Irving had become difficult to ignore and strangely difficult to see. That February, Canadian Business put him on the cover and guessed his fortune at about $100 million. The cover was a sketch rather than a photograph because photographs of Casey were surprisingly hard to come by. A Montreal reporter who came looking for the man behind the number found Casey friendly enough, even talkative, but asked him about the inner workings of his company, and very

• 53:54Speaker 00

  little came back. "What he told me about himself," the reporter complained afterwards, "I could have put on the back of a postage stamp." There was another side to that $100 million estimate. In a province as poor as New Brunswick, a fortune that large rested on thousands of paychecks. And by 1948, paychecks had become one of the great arguments of the age. To understand what happens next, you need two pieces of context. First, a wave of strikes was rolling across North America. During the war, factories had run around the clock while wages were held down. When the war ended, workers across North America began demanding a larger share of the prosperity they had helped create. Unions were winning contracts in auto plants and steel mills, and the movement had begun

• 54:38Speaker 00

  reaching Casey's companies, too. Second, New Brunswick presented a particular problem for workers. There were usually more people looking for jobs than there were jobs available. That gave employers leverage. Casey did not need to pay what a factory in Detroit paid when there was often another man outside the gate willing to take the job at the New Brunswick rate. At one Irving Oil depot, about 40 laborers formed a union. They were working six days and more than 50 hours a week for roughly $30. They wanted shorter hours, more money, and real overtime. Bargaining dragged on for eight months. Eventually, the union set a strike deadline. Casey called the men together and told them exactly where he stood.

• 55:22Speaker 00

  Anyone who failed to report for work the next morning would be fired. The next morning, the picket line went up. Late afternoon, a car pulled up and Casey stepped out. At this point, he's 49 years old and probably the richest man in New Brunswick and perhaps in the country. And he walked over to the men, who were striking against him, took off his coat and offered to settle the disagreement with his fists. The president of the local union stood six foot four, and he looked down at Casey and grinned. Nobody swung, and eventually Casey put his coat back on and left. He later reduced the whole encounter to a single rule. It never pays to talk with your coat on. And of the six-foot-four union president, he was equally candid.

• 56:07Speaker 00

  He could have made mince meat of me. The following morning, one of Casey's executives tried to drive through the picket line and was turned back. That afternoon, Casey returned, this time with company officials, policemen, and three loaded oil trucks. The picketers allowed the cars through, but the driver of the first truck stopped. The man standing in front of him were his own workmates, and he would not drive the truck through them. So Casey climbed into the cab and drove the truck through himself. There is something unmistakably Casey Irving about this whole situation. The driver wouldn't do it, so the owner did. It was the same quality we've seen over and over again. When something stood between Casey and something he believed needed to be done, his instinct was to move toward the problem himself.

• 56:52Speaker 00

  That quality had helped build the empire, but at this moment, it took a different form. Behind Casey's truck, union members claimed that a company car struck several picketers and failed to stop. One man ended up in the hospital. The police did nothing. A few days later, a sheriff arrived with an injunction that prohibited picketing for 30 days, and the strike was effectively over. Casey had won, but notice what happened here. The same determination that had helped Casey stand up to the oil companies, railways, and banks was now directed at 40 of his own employees. They were earning roughly $30 for more than 50 hours of a work week. A foreman who had worked for Casey since 1928 offered a simple explanation.

• 57:35Speaker 00

  "I don't think Casey Irving likes anyone to tell him what to do." It would be easy to conclude that Casey Irving was simply anti-union, except he wasn't. Two years before the oil strike, Casey had taken over a worn-out pulp mill whose previous owner had refused to allow a union at all. Soon after the takeover, an employee showed up alone with a complaint. Casey's new manager asked where the union committee was. There wasn't one. The previous owner had forbidden it. "Then get one," the manager said. And a union formed within weeks. Its first contract raised wages 19 cents an hour, and its president later said it's the best thing that ever happened when Irving got the mill. Not long after the oil strike, leaders of the city bus union were summoned to Casey's office expecting another battle.

• 58:20Speaker 00

  Instead, Casey accepted their union, and they sued and received the biggest raise of their working lives. Casey wasn't asking whether unions were good or bad in the abstract. He was asking what they meant for the business in front of him. You could sum it up like this. Casey Irving wasn't anti-union, he was pro-Irving. And as he usually did, Casey learned from the fight, and the coat never came off again. 15 years later, in 1963, workers at the Irving refinery went on strike. This time, Casey stayed away from the gates. But he did pull clerks, bookkeepers, cooks, and employees from elsewhere in the organization into the refinery and kept the plant running with roughly half its normal workforce.

• 59:03Speaker 00

  The strike lasted into the following spring and ended on terms close to what Casey had offered at the very beginning. By the end of the war, Irving Oil had grown beyond the point where Casey could personally win every account. The company was spreading across the Maritimes, one station and dealer at a time. Some stations belonged to Irving Oil, but many more belonged to independent owners and merchants who agreed to sell Irving gasoline. By the 1950s, Irving owned roughly 300 stations and supplied another 700 dealers. That created a new problem. Casey had built the company through his own energy and persistence, but there was only one of him. If Irving Oil was going to keep growing, he needed people who would pursue accounts with the same intensity he did.

• 59:48Speaker 00

  One of the best of this was Harrison McCain. We did an outliers episode on Harrison, and we'll link to it in the show notes. McCain was young, ambitious, and already known to Casey's sons, who told their father he was one hell of a salesman. Casey offered him a job, and McCain named his price. "Give me 10,000 bucks and a big car, and I'm your man." Casey gave him both. McCain noticed that Casey rarely gave direct orders to his senior people. Instead, he would mention over lunch that a certain account would fit in just exactly with Irving's plans for an area. McCain understood the translation. "Get your ass out there and get the account." Casey told you what mattered and kind of left you to figure out how to get it done. One large account took McCain 18 months to win.

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  When he finally got it, he called Casey expecting congratulations. Casey simply asked whether he had gotten the lubricating grease business as well. McCain hadn't. The grease amounted to only about 4% of the total business. He had won the other 96, and Casey wanted to know about the 4% that he had missed. McCain would never forget that moment. Years later, when asked what he had learned from Casey, he reduced it to one sentence. "Don't ever be satisfied." McCain would eventually leave Irving and build McCain Foods into a giant of its own, but he continued to talk about Casey as one of the great influences of his career. When McCain tried to explain how Casey managed people, he compared him to the conductor of an orchestra.

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  Casey trusted you to play your own instrument, but he expected you to play to the tempo he was setting. While Casey could no longer make every sale or visit every customer, he could make sure the people doing the work understood what was expected and knew that he would notice if they missed anything. One young entrepreneur working at a service station once gave Casey's car the full treatment. He pumped the gas, washed the windows, and then wiped down the headlights and bumpers while Casey watched. When he was finished, the young man asked Casey for some advice on getting ahead in business. Casey looked at him and said, "You'll need to work a lot faster if you ever want to be successful."

• 1:01:55Speaker 00

  Casey's reputation in this sense did a lot of work for him. Harrison McCain believed the fearsome legend around Casey was intentional. It was a reputation that could win fights before they even started. "Christ," McCain said, "when Casey Irving walked in to negotiate a business deal, the competition was ready to give up and say, I can't compete with this guy." By the mid 1950s, the network that had begun with two gasoline pumps had grown to roughly 3,000, and Irving Oil was selling about as much fuel in the Maritimes provinces as Imperial Oil itself. Casey had built almost his entire empire inside one small province, which meant that sooner or later, his businesses and the government were going to become difficult to separate.

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  Early in his career, the balance of power had been obvious. An elected leader who disliked the Irving family's politics could simply refuse to give Casey government business. In the years after World War II, that relationship had changed. New Brunswick was poor, and the young people were leaving for jobs in Ontario and the United States. Politicians were desperate for anyone willing to put money into factories and create jobs. One man who spent his career in the New Brunswick government described those years this way. "They would do almost anything to get industry. A dollar bill looked as big as a horse blanket." And nobody in New Brunswick was creating more jobs in the province than Casey Irving. Sometimes the government even helped him.

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  In 1951, he announced a $20 million expansion of his pulp operation in St. John. It was exactly the kind of projects government wanted. A large private investment in a poor province with hundreds of jobs attached to it. Casey also knew how badly they needed it and used that leverage in negotiations. He negotiated 25 millions of gallons of water a day for the mill at a special reduced rate. He had its tax bill frozen at a low level for decades, and he secured the power to expropriate land. And then he gets something more unusual written into provincial law. No court order or neighbor's lawsuit could stop the mill because of its noise, smoke, or what it discharged into the river.

• 1:04:05Speaker 00

  His biographers could find no comparable protection given to any other Canadian industrialist. The mill's smell made one part of that bargain impossible to ignore. Casey was candid about it. Nobody, he said, had figured out how to build a pulp mill that didn't smell. In his view, complaints about that smell should not be allowed to shut down the factory and the jobs it provided. Casey's own home and office were in St. John as well, and his family lived there too. For years afterwards, when the wind blew across the city, residents could smell the compromise their government had made. A woman who worked in a local dress shop put the bargain more plainly. "They put bread on the table. I can even stand the smell of the pulp mill." Such favors soon fed the province's politics.

• 1:04:50Speaker 00

  Casey had become valuable enough to New Brunswick that it was hard to tell where ordinary bargaining ended and power began. Irving was such a big part of the economy that people started saying they controlled the government. And once that chatter started, it never stopped. In fact, it still continues to this day. One former minister remembered hearing that Irving could snap his fingers and make the government jump, and said he thought it was probably true. But then, in the same breath, he admitted all he was going on was gossip. Another man who had spent his career working with New Brunswick premiers insisted on the opposite. Casey, he said, made darn few demands. In his view, the concessions governments gave him were the things they would have offered anyone prepared to invest that much money and create that many jobs.

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  That was difficult to square with the legal protection Casey's biographers had found so unusual. By then, his companies had sold much of the province's gasoline, cut enormous amounts of his timber, made its pulp, and employed thousands of people. There's an unusual form of power in that. The government needed jobs and investment. Casey controlled the businesses that supplied both. That gave him a powerful position before he ever sat down to negotiate. And much of the empire that gave him that power depended on something he was consuming at an extraordinary rate: trees. Casey owned the forests, the mills, and the ships, but there was one problem with trees that even he could not solve. They took too long to grow.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  When Casey was a child, the spruce budworm had helped hollow out the forests around Bactus and threatened his father's sawmill. Now, decades later, Casey owned pulp and lumber operations that were consuming trees faster than they could grow. Somebody had to grow new ones. So in 1957, at 58 years old, Casey Irving went to a stripped ridge in northern New Brunswick and started planting spruce trees. The experts, including government foresters, thought he was wasting his time because the trees wouldn't grow there. Rival companies agreed. Even some of his own employees thought he was living in a dream world. An American paper company chairman pointed out the problem. Even if the trees did grow, Casey was already 58. By the time they were large enough to harvest, he might be dead.

• 1:07:05Speaker 00

  What's the point? But the most confident skeptic in all of this was Barry Flinger, a forestry professor who told Casey point-blank the trees would not grow there. He was so certain that he made him a bet. If those trees grew, he would eat his textbooks. Casey accepted the wager. The first 3,000 seedlings went into the ground at a place called Black Brook, with Casey's eldest son Jim behind him. When the people asked why he was doing it, Casey's answer was simple. "It had to be done if we wanted any forests at all." His one regret, he said, was that he hadn't started 20 years earlier. And this wasn't a project Casey funded from his office and forget about.

• 1:07:48Speaker 00

  By now, you know that's impossible for him. Here's a story that any founder or entrepreneur will relate to. Fishing had been about the only recreation that Casey Irving allowed himself. And now, when gas arrived at his fishing lodge and went out in their canoes, he headed uphill to the plantations and pruned the trees until dark. One brutal day, the flies came in clouds, and his woodsman finally begged him to stop. "Mr. Irving, they're going to eat us alive." Casey didn't say a word. He just kept moving down the road. He was planting trees for the future of his mills, but in the oil business, he still depended on other companies for every gallon of fuel he sold. One piece was missing, and he had wanted it for more than 20 years.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

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• 1:08:47Speaker 02

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• 1:09:16Speaker 00

  Here's. The missing piece was a refinery. Casey had wanted one since 1932, when the government railway gave Imperial Oil better freight rates and told him why. Imperial had a refinery, and Casey didn't. Casey was not a man who forgot someone using power over him to put him in his place. 23 years later, Irving Oil had thousands of stations and dealers, but every gallon was refined by somebody else, and that was about to change. British Petroleum came to St. John with an offer to build one with him. The talks went so well that Casey, who normally kept his business to himself, announced the deal before it was finished. "We had the price of crude set. We had the grade set. We had it all worked out."

• 1:10:00Speaker 00

  Then came the final papers. BP added two conditions. They wanted the refinery built somewhere other than St. John, and when Casey retired or died, they wanted the right to buy Irving Oil. Casey had three sons. He intended to leave them the business, and BP wanted the right to buy it when he retired or died. And that second condition killed the deal. "There's no way," Casey said. He failed to change their minds and walked away. BP accused him of wasting their time. Casey pointed out that they were the ones asking for things that they had never agreed to. But the argument about St. John was more interesting. British Petroleum couldn't understand why Casey was so determined to build the refinery there. Halifax made way more sense.

• 1:10:44Speaker 00

  It was closer to the major markets, better positioned for ships bringing in crude. Finally, one of British Petroleum's senior men asked him the obvious question. "Why St. John?" "Because I live there," Casey said. And that was it. A few months later, another oil company arrived in town. Standard Oil of California had a problem that fit neatly with Casey's. It had more Middle Eastern crude than it could easily sell on the East Coast. Casey had thousands of customers and nowhere of his own to refine the gasoline they bought. The two sides began working on a deal. And then, only weeks before they were supposed to sign it, the Suez Crisis began. Britain, France, and Israel attacked Egypt. The Suez Canal was blocked. Standard's crude came from the Middle East, which left Casey wondering

• 1:11:29Speaker 00

  whether the refinery they had just spent months planning could even get its oil. "We have an agreement," he said, "but how are we going to get our crude now?" The answer came from a change already underway in the oil business. The tankers were getting enormous. The new super tankers could carry so much crude that it became economical to sail the long way around Africa. Many of them were becoming too large for the Suez Canal anyway. There was a catch. Ships that large needed deep water, and St. John had very deep water. Its harbor also stayed open through the winter. Casey signed the deal. Standard would own the larger share of the refinery. Casey would retain control of Irving Oil. He called it about the best deal I could have

• 1:12:14Speaker 00

  made. Standard's chairman, himself known as a hard negotiator, described the experience from the other side. To negotiate with Mr. Irving is quite an undertaking. Standard would own the larger share of the refinery, but Casey would retain control. He called it about the best deal I could have made. Standard's chairman, himself known as a hard negotiator, described the experience from the other side. To negotiate with Mr. Irving is quite an undertaking. Construction began in 1958, and it was the biggest investment Casey had ever made. And if he was going to spend all that much money on something, people were going to see it. The original plans called for five enormous storage tanks.

• 1:12:55Speaker 00

  According to a story Casey never confirmed or denied, he looked at the drawing and asked for six. If you're wondering why six, so was I. Six tanks, one enormous letter on each. I R V I N G. When the refinery opened in July of 1960, St. John took the afternoon off. A parade rolled through the rain to the gates. The premier turned the ceremonial valve. In Casey gave a short speech and then more enthusiastically began explaining to anyone who would listen how the refinery actually worked. And as the ships grew, St. John's deep water became more valuable. In 1970, 10 years after the refinery opened,

• 1:13:38Speaker 00

  Irving opened Canaport, a deepwater terminal capable of receiving the largest tankers in the world. The refinery could now take advantage of the enormous cargoes those ships carried. Making the location work had taken investment, construction and years of effort. But when British Petroleum had asked why he was so determined to build in St. John, Casey had given them a much simpler explanation. Because I live there. Irving Oil had become too large for Casey to stand over every part of it himself. His answer was to make every station look and behave as though he might walk in at any moment. Each Irving gas station carried the same red, white and blue Irving Diamond.

• 1:14:18Speaker 00

  The choice of colors was intentional. Imperial Oil used red, white and blue too. Casey had dressed his stations in the champions colors and set out to beat them. Inside the stations, the rules got very specific. For instance, the bathrooms had to be meticulously spotless. Well, that sounds like a strange thing for a man building a refinery and buying ships to obsess over. He understood why people pulled off the road. They needed gasoline, a bathroom or both. And once they stopped, they often bought something else. Irving stations were also among the first in the region to offer separate bathrooms for men and women. Casey realized that while he couldn't make his gasoline all that different from

• 1:15:01Speaker 00

  anyone else's, he could make everything around it different. He chose the locations with the same attention. When Irving entered a new town, his people looked for two things: the post office and the church. Those were the places that people already visited week after week. There was no need to create traffic if you could simply put the pumps where the traffic already was. He was equally careful about the places that Irving avoided. Montreal and other big cities were crowded with major oil companies all fighting over the same customers. Casey preferred the small towns. They barely noticed. And one by one, Irving took them all. Today, if you drive through New Brunswick or any of the maritime provinces,

• 1:15:42Speaker 00

  for that matter, you can't help but notice a constant stream of Irving stations, all with spotless bathrooms. The same insistence on control that shaped the stations ran through the companies behind them. By the end of the 1950s, the empire had grown past easy counting. Roughly 10,000 people worked somewhere inside the Irving businesses, and one estimate put the group's value at around 200 million. And yet, the whole thing remained private and firmly under Casey's direction. Casey sold no shares to the public. He paid out almost nothing in dividends. All the profits went back into the companies, and he kept control of anything that mattered. That gave him an enormous advantage. A decision

• 1:16:24Speaker 00

  that might take a public company months of meetings could take Casey one phone call. You can take a calculated risk, he explained, if you only have to account to yourself. For 30 years, that freedom had helped Casey build faster than almost anyone around him. By 1964, the question of what that freedom cost everybody else was becoming harder to ignore. In the spring of 1964, McLean's Magazine, Canada's closest thing to Time Magazine, sent journalist Rolf Allen to figure out Casey Irving. Allen had interviewed Fidel Castro and later admitted that he was about as nervous to meet Irving. The reason became apparent before the two men ever sat down together. The Irving name met him at the airport, painted

• 1:17:09Speaker 00

  10 feet high across the hangar. It appeared again on the first gas station he passed, and then on the six enormous refinery tanks outside St. John, which looked to Allen like giant stacks of silver dollars. A local businessman offered a simple description of the province. Irving's got a piece of everything that goes down here, and if he hasn't got it, it doesn't go. It was an extraordinary position for one man to occupy in one of the poorest parts of Canada, although you can probably guess how it happened. Again and again, somebody had put him at a disadvantage, and Casey had responded by removing the dependency. Irving cut off his gasoline, so he soon found his own. The government railway charged him more because Imperial had a refinery, so he bought a ship and eventually built

• 1:17:55Speaker 00

  a refinery. Whenever something important sat in somebody else's hands, Casey had a habit of finding a way to put it in his own. But after 40 years of those decisions, Allen had arrived in a province where remarkably little seemed to happen without touching an Irving company. That made it easy to imagine him as some sort of industrial monster. But the stories that Allen collected made it harder. A taxi driver told Allen about running out of gas in a blizzard and being rescued by Casey Irving himself, who stopped his car, helped push the cab to an Irving station, filled the tank and then paid for the gasoline. Yet other people talked about him as though he were something closer to a force of nature.

• 1:18:37Speaker 00

  One critic asked, in a depressed area, how in the name of God could one man pile up half a billion dollars? Another answered with a line that captured the resentment gathering around him. New Brunswick is proud, poor and patriotic. Who keeps it that way? Irving. Allen found that even the people who really disliked Casey tended to agree on one thing. The man obsessively knew his businesses. The premier told Allen that they could drive past any one of Irving's thousands of filling stations, and Casey could tell him how many gallons it had sold the previous month. Allen assumed that man meant that figuratively. No, no, the premier corrected him. I'm speaking literally. Irving's office

• 1:19:20Speaker 00

  had become the physical expression of that. A private radio network connected his desk to plants, stores and ships and airplanes. And Allen watched as Casey swiveled toward it and called the family store back in Bucktush. Golden ball to Bucktush store. How are you, Mr. Smothers? It's nice to hear from you. While the empire had sprawled across the province, somehow the line still ran back to one man. One Irving manager told Allen there was nothing mean or dirty about him, but added that Casey knew the rules, expected everyone else to know them too. And if you don't, you'll get bruised. With him, business is a contact sport. His lawyers knew the bruising part particularly well. When one of them advised Casey to settle a difficult case and offered his view of the likely outcome,

• 1:20:04Speaker 00

  Casey replied with perfect courtesy. I don't believe I asked you for a verdict. I was inquiring whether you'd care to represent me. But none of that answered the question hanging over Allen's trip. How big had this thing actually become? So he asked Casey how many people worked for him. Casey couldn't tell him. That figure will take a couple of days to obtain, Casey said. When the answer came back, it was somewhere between 12 and 13,000. In practical terms, 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. That was the problem Allen

• 1:20:47Speaker 00

  kept running into. New Brunswick had spent decades desperate for exactly what Casey Irving supplied. Money, jobs, mills, ships, investment, and somebody willing to bet on the province when much of the outside world wouldn't. Casey had done all of that on a scale that no one else came even close to matching. People told Allen that Casey Irving was the greatest thing that had ever happened to New Brunswick, and the province could use four or five more like him. Then came what Allen called the yes, but syndrome. Yes, Casey had built all of this. Yes, thousands of families depended on him. Yes, New Brunswick was richer because he had. But, as one person put it, it would be much greater for everybody

• 1:21:28Speaker 00

  if there were a few other Irvings to cut him down to size. For years, Casey had worked to make himself less dependent on other people. Now, New Brunswick was asking what happened when so many people depended on him. In December 1965, Casey Irving sat inside the New Brunswick Legislature waiting to speak. People near him noticed that he was shaking with anger. Five years earlier, the man whose government had brought him there had stood beside him at the St. John refinery opening. Louis Robichaud had turned the valve on one of Casey's greatest investments. They had looked like partners in this same project, dragging New Brunswick into the modern world.

• 1:22:14Speaker 00

  And now Casey believed that Robichaud was preparing to break the promises that had made those very investments possible. Louis Robichaud had become premier in 1960. He was 34 at the time and came from the same overlooked part of New Brunswick that had produced Casey. At first, the two men got along. They agreed that New Brunswick had been poor for too long and ignored by the rest of Canada. They both intended to change that, but they had very different ideas about who should do the changing. Casey built with businesses. He borrowed money, put his own capital at risk, and expected the agreements behind those investments to hold.

• 1:22:55Speaker 00

  Robichaud, on the other hand, built with laws and taxes and public institutions. He had been elected to serve the whole province, including counties that could not afford the services available in wealthier places. Each man had something real to kind of point to. In wealthier parts of New Brunswick, local governments collected taxes from industry and spent roughly twice as much on each student as poorer areas could. The same inequality appeared in hospitals, roads, and other public services. Robichaud called his solution "equal opportunity." A child in a poor country, he argued, should have the same quality of teachers and hospitals as a child in a rich one. To accomplish that, he needed to rebuild the province's tax system,

• 1:23:40Speaker 00

  and that brought him directly into conflict with Casey. Robichaud saw a system tilted towards municipalities that were already rich enough to attract industry. But perhaps more importantly, he saw one generation of politicians signing agreements that prevented the next generation from governing freely. And Casey saw something else entirely. When a town asked him to build a mill or refinery to create jobs, he was risking millions of his own money. In return, they would promise certain costs would remain fixed for a period of time. And without these concessions, the investments often wouldn't make sense. Casey had put down the money, hired the workers, and kept his part of the bargain.

• 1:24:24Speaker 00

  Now, after the money was in the ground, the government wanted to change the terms. To Robichaud, the agreements were privileges created by politicians who were no longer in office. And to Casey, they were contracts. Buried inside the equal opportunity legislation was a proposal allowing the government to cancel the old industrial agreements without compensation. And while the proposal did not mention Casey Irving by name, it didn't need to. No businessman in the province had invested more in the strength of those agreements, and no businessman stood to lose more if they disappeared. That was why Casey had come to the legislature. When his turn arrived, he stood and called the proposal a breach of faith.

• 1:25:07Speaker 00

  The government, he said, was claiming a power morally wrong, if not illegally seized. Then he warned the politicians sitting before him. "Gentlemen, you cannot get blood out of a stone, nor can you find food in an empty cupboard." A young opposition member watched Casey take possession of the room. "The committee was stunned," he later recalled. "This legendary figure overwhelmed us." Within days, the government promised to honor the existing agreements. Casey had won the immediate argument. Robichaud, nevertheless, carried equal opportunity forward and tried to transform the province's schools, hospitals, and tax system. But there are victories that end fights and victories that begin them. And this was a victory that began a much larger fight.

• 1:25:51Speaker 00

  Robichaud had watched one businessman become powerful enough to make an elected government blink. Casey had witnessed a government come within inches of rewriting a bargain after his money was already in the ground. Each man emerged from the confrontation, confirming their darkest suspicions of the other. Robichaud wondered whether Casey Irving had accumulated more power than any private citizen should possess. And Casey wondered whether a government that could discard yesterday's promises could ever be trusted with tomorrow's investments. Five years earlier, the two builders had stood together at the refinery. Now they had fought over the promises that helped get it built. And the next time a Robichaud government arrived with a grand industrial plan, Casey was in no mood to trust it.

• 1:26:36Speaker 00

  The fight over industrial development had begun before the confrontation in the legislature. In 1964, the government announced plans for an industrial complex at Dorchester Cape, northeast of St. John. The centerpiece would be a new fertilizer plant. Around it, the government imagined other factories arriving, thousands of people going to work, and an overlooked part of New Brunswick entering the industrial age. It was precisely this sort of grand project that both Casey and Robichaud claimed to want. But Casey thought it was a terrible idea. The province was already supporting another large fertilizer plant that didn't have enough demand to sustain it. Now they found themselves proposing to build another one.

• 1:27:19Speaker 00

  And the location was chosen more for politics than economic viability. Casey's ships had worked the Bay of Fundy for years. He knew that silt carried by the nearby rivers would settle in the shipping channel, gradually filling it. Keeping the channel open would mean dredging it constantly. At one meeting, a young government official presented the projections. The plant, he said, would make millions of dollars almost immediately. And Casey asked him whether that was before or after depreciation. "Before or after what?" the official replied. "Depreciation." "You know what depreciation is, don't you?" the young man assured him that he did. So Casey asked this question again. "Were the projected profits before or after

• 1:28:03Speaker 00

  accounting for the cost of wearing out and eventually replacing the plant that produced them?" There was a pause. "I'm not sure," the official admitted. "I don't think I checked on that." "Well, thank you for that information," Casey said. "Tells me a lot." It was a small exchange, but it was indicative of the tension then and now between business and government. For Robichaud's government, the project promised jobs in a part of the province that badly needed them. Casey, on the other hand, wanted to know whether it could keep paying those workers once the construction money had been spent. Casey took his objections directly to Robichaud. The meeting did not go well. Casey later said the premier gave him the gosh darnedest lecture you ever heard.

• 1:28:47Speaker 00

  Robichaud became, in Casey's telling, mad as a porcupine. His face turned red and he slammed his hand on the table. Robichaud denied that version of the meeting, but there was no disagreement about the decision. The plant was going ahead. As tugs nudged the first cargo ship into place, it scraped the bottom slightly. The captain refused to tie up, and the very harbor problem that Casey had warned about was now real. By then, the disagreement between Casey and Robichaud had grown far beyond the fertilizer plant. The premier and the industrialists had become symbols of two competing sources of power. One of Robichaud's advisers reportedly told supporters, "We're going to get that bastard Irving."

• 1:29:30Speaker 00

  Robichaud called an election and carried the feud into the campaign. He didn't use Casey's name. He didn't have to. "If there is a man who wants to run this province," Robichaud declared at one rally, "let him present himself to the people." Then he carried the challenge into Bakhtoush, the village where Casey had been born. "This man who has a home not far from here," Robichaud told the crowd. "This man who wants to run the province." Casey Irving stayed silent. His son, Arthur, openly supported the opposition, and Irving money entered the fight. A family that had supported the Liberals for generations had turned conservative. Then there were the newspapers. Casey owned most of them.

• 1:30:15Speaker 00

  And while he insisted that he had never told the editors what to print, his critics would argue that an editor did not need instructions from the man who signed the checks. That argument was coming, but not just yet. For a moment, Robichaud was asking voters who should govern New Brunswick, the man who owned so much of it, or the people they elected to represent him. When the votes were counted, Robichaud's Liberals won. But elections didn't revive the plant. In October 1968, it closed. The project was meant to revive that region had left the government counting heavy losses. Years later, Robichaud conceded the point. In the final analysis, he said Casey Irving was right. It was a failure. Casey's warnings had been vindicated,

• 1:31:00Speaker 00

  but his family had backed the losing side, and Robichaud had kept his government. And the fertilizer plant was only one of their many disputes. At another project, Casey had millions of dollars and his own money tied up in a hole in the ground. The hole was in the hills of northern New Brunswick. It was part of the Brunswick mining project built around one of the largest deposits of lead and zinc ever found in the region. The ore was incredibly valuable, but the lead and zinc were tangled so finely through the rock that processing it was difficult. The question was whether the smelter they planned to build could do it at a profit. Louis Robichaud had promised the people of northern New Brunswick that the deposit would be developed.

• 1:31:45Speaker 00

  He argued the mine would create jobs and the smelter would create an entire industry. And for a region desperate for hope, the project carried the promise of something larger than profit. In 1961, before the two had become enemies, Robichaud had sent the prospector behind the discovery, James Boylan, to see Casey Irving. Casey heard him out and agreed to put millions of dollars into the project. His involvement helped raise millions more, and Irving's engineering company took on much of the construction, while other Irving companies supplied the materials, equipment, and services. But there was one important difference between Brunswick and the other businesses Casey was used to running. He did not have control.

• 1:32:29Speaker 00

  When the consortium was formed, Casey's interest was roughly 20%. Boylan held the largest block of shares. Casey would increase his stake as the project grew more desperate, but he never quite gained control. "I never had control of Brunswick," he would say for the rest of his life. At first, that did not appear to matter. The most difficult question at the center of the project, how to process the ore, was believed to have been answered. A British laboratory had tested the process. The experts said it would work, and so construction began. But the material used in the test was not representative of what would eventually come out of the Brunswick mine. The smelter was being designed before its processes had been proven on the material

• 1:33:12Speaker 00

  it would actually have to handle. As the plant was designed and redesigned during construction, its estimated cost rose from $25 million to over $70 million. Everyone had a reason to continue. Robichaud had promised northern voters a smelter. Boylan had spent years trying to develop his discovery. The experts had endorsed the metallurgy, and even Casey's construction companies were earning money from the project. But Casey kept returning to a basic question: would the economics work? By 1963, he was warning that construction had begun too early. The plant was being redesigned while it was being built, and he asked Robichaud to slow

• 1:33:55Speaker 00

  the project down until the technical questions were settled. Otherwise, they were just wasting money. The premier, of course, refused. He had promised the North a smelter. The province had guaranteed millions of dollars in loans, and the agreements required the project to meet a deadline, delaying construction risk looking like abandonment of the entire development. Casey pressed him again, but the answer remained no. Experts assured both men that the problems could be solved, and Casey eventually backed off. At a public ceremony for the project, he stood before the crowd and said that a dream was about to be fulfilled. Then the smelter opened.

• 1:34:37Speaker 00

  It could not process the Brunswick mine's output as planned. For months, they adjusted, experimented, and spent millions trying to make the plant do the one thing that it was supposed to do. The mine itself was good. There was valuable ore in the ground, and the company could make money by digging it out and selling it to other processors. As one senior mining executive later put it, Brunswick could have been a prosperous company if it had never built the smelter. By 1967, the company was approaching bankruptcy and needed tens of millions of dollars to survive. Casey assembled a rescue plan worth more than $60 million. Accepting it, however, would have placed control of the project in his hands, and

• 1:35:21Speaker 00

  Robichaud couldn't allow his government to do that. They chose Noranda instead. The Toronto Mining Company agreed to supply the money, pay down the debts, and finish the project. In return, it received the one thing Casey never possessed at Brunswick: voting control, 51% to be precise. And I'm sure that number was not lost on Casey. While Casey's money remained inside the company, his influence over it diminished. The smelter continued to disappoint. At a later shareholders' meeting, Casey Irving rose from his seat as the largest minority shareholder in the room. "What I predicted would happen," he said, "and what I attempted to prevent from happening has happened."

• 1:36:06Speaker 00

  Brunswick had reinforced Casey's oldest conviction: if something mattered, control it. Having millions invested was not enough if someone else could decide what happened. But control feels different when the thing being controlled is a newspaper. Casey had acquired New Brunswick's newspapers slowly. In 1944, he bought the company that published St. John's two daily papers. Four years later, he acquired control of the two Moncton papers. And in 1968, the Ervings bought Frederickson's Daily Gleaner, the last English-language newspaper in New Brunswick they did not already own. Newspapers had come up for sale, and he had bought them just as he had bought sawmills, ships, and hardware companies.

• 1:36:49Speaker 00

  They were businesses that could be improved, connected to others, and protected from outside influence and control. A newspaper even fit the closed industrial loop, the vertical integration that Casey had spent his lifetime assembling. At one end were the forests: the trees fed the mills, the mills made pulp and paper, and at the other end sat a printing press, turning that paper into something people bought every morning. But a newspaper was not simply another product. It decided which stories people saw, how those stories were framed, and what an entire province discussed. Casey gave his publishers one standing instruction: publish good newspapers, the best you can, in the interest of the people of New Brunswick.

• 1:37:34Speaker 00

  Rolf Castello, publisher of the St. John's paper, later repeated that instruction under oath. He testified that Casey had never called to stop a story before publication or complained about one afterwards. Casey took no salary from the newspapers. In fact, for 25 years, he said, they paid him no dividends. The profits remained inside the papers, paying for better journalism and presses and equipment. To Casey, this proved his motives. To his critics, motives were not the point; power was. They argued that an editor did not need a telephone call from Casey Irving to know who owned the newspaper. Ownership could exert pressure without the owner ever saying a word.

• 1:38:16Speaker 00

  Power is found in the stories that were printed, but also in the ones that were omitted. Critics pointed to a story the Irving dailies had missed. The chairman of the New Brunswick Water Authority, the very agency responsible for enforcing pollution laws against pulp mills, had also served as secretary, treasurer, and general manager of the pulp and paper industry's provincial lobbying organization. None of New Brunswick English-language dailies reported the conflict. Investigators found no evidence that Casey, who owned a pulp factory, had ordered anyone to ignore the story. In fact, there was no evidence he even engaged with anyone on the issue. That was precisely what made the question difficult.

• 1:38:58Speaker 00

  Did the man who signed the checks need to give an order for his power to do the work for him? The question lingered. When Casey was later asked whether the newspapers treated him more favorably than other businessmen, he said the opposite was true. "I would say a little worse. Why? I think they lean over backwards to put me in black ink, just to keep their skirts clean." His publishers testified they left him alone. The papers sometimes disagreed with one another and occasionally criticized Irving companies. But an owner could leave his editors alone and still influence what they felt free to investigate. The absence of a telephone call did not settle the question. New Brunswick itself complicated the question. A reporter could hardly cross the province without encountering someone connected to

• 1:39:43Speaker 00

  Casey. People were for him, they bought from him, they sold to him, or they had relatives whose paycheck came from one of his companies. Casey had not set out to become bigger than a province. He had spent 40 years removing every important dependency from his business and reinvesting every cent back into the province. The result was a province increasingly dependent on him, one man now controlled an unprecedented portion of the economy. Charles McElman knew exactly how much power Casey Irving possessed. He had helped Louis Robichaud fight him. McElman had been one of the premier's chief political organizers during the war over the equal opportunity. By 1969, he was a Canadian senator.

• 1:40:26Speaker 00

  Senators, I should point out, are appointed, not elected. In March, he rose in the Senate and declared the province's newspaper situation cries out for corrective action. He called upon the federal government to investigate.

• 1:40:41Speaker 00

  McElman never pretended to be neutral about the Irving empire. He admitted that Casey was courteous and almost gentle, but he still didn't like him. The Irving empire operated, McElman said, with the power of a lion, the appetite of a vulture, and the grace of an elephant, the instincts of a barracuda, and the principles of an alley cat. With that, federal investigators descended on the Irving newspapers. They searched offices and homes of senior executives. They searched Casey's house and carried away thousands of documents. Then a Senate committee summoned him to Ottawa. The night before his testimony, Casey sat on the edge of his hotel bed, working past midnight on his statement.

• 1:41:24Speaker 00

  At the time, he was 70 years old, and for a quarter century, he had said almost nothing publicly about his newspapers. And now he would have to explain why he owned every English-language daily in New Brunswick. And one of the men listening would be Charles McElman. The hearing room was packed. Casey began with the facts he believed mattered. He had never taken a salary, fee, or anything else from the newspapers. In 25 years, they had paid him no dividends. The profits stayed inside the business. He made no apology for owning them, nor, he said, would he apologize so long as they were operated properly by people who cared about New Brunswick. The Senator Harper Prowse began assembling the rest of Casey's empire around the newspapers.

• 1:42:08Speaker 00

  The Irving group had a vast network of gasoline stations and dealers, but had a refinery, shipyards, a home builder, deep-sea vessels, a pulp mill, millions of acres of forest, and roughly 13,000 employees. Each piece was connected to another. Nearly every piece was connected to New Brunswick. Prowse began with a question that sounded harmless. Was it fair to say that anything that hurt New Brunswick would in one way or another hurt Casey Irving's interests? "Yes," Casey answered. Then Prowse turned the question around. If anything that hurt New Brunswick hurt Casey Irving, was the reverse also true? Did anything that hurt Casey Irving's interests hurt New Brunswick? "Yes," said Casey.

• 1:42:54Speaker 00

  And there it was. Casey had spent his entire life making businesses indispensable to New Brunswick. Now, in two answers, he had accepted the consequence. His private interests and the interests of the province had become difficult to separate. A government could be elected, but it could not govern without considering the thousands of families drawing Irving paychecks. A customer might dislike Casey's power, but avoiding his companies was becoming increasingly difficult. And Casey, unlike a politician, could not be voted out. Prowse pressed the point. At that moment, the hearing room went dark. The lights failed. For a moment, the senators, lawyers, and reporters and spectators sat together in the blacked-out room. When the lights came on, he resumed.

• 1:43:39Speaker 00

  If an attack on the Irving interests was an attack on New Brunswick, he suggested, then Casey had become something larger than a businessman. His private interests had become entangled with the public interests of an entire province. Casey resisted this characterization. "I'm not sure of your reasoning," he said. "I think we're kind of grasping at straws here." He retreated to the narrower point he believed he had been making. When New Brunswick prospered, everyone in the province prospered, including him. The committee returned to the newspapers. Casey explained that he regarded them as good businesses. He had bought them as he bought other companies, partly because he did not want them falling into outside hands. The chairman asked when concentrated newspaper ownership would begin to trouble him.

• 1:44:25Speaker 00

  Casey said he would be concerned if one person owned every newspaper in Canada while living somewhere like Toronto. A distant owner might not care about the communities those newspapers served. The committee's lawyer saw an opening. Would Casey be concerned if one person owned every newspaper in Manitoba or Ontario, just as he owned every English-language daily in New Brunswick? That, he said, would depend on the owner, on their motives. Now, I want to pause here just for two quick beats. First, this question is actually more relevant than ever today because journalists' salaries are increasingly subsidized by governments. So if you were listening to this and you sort of reson-- that argument resonated with

• 1:45:08Speaker 00

  you, that one person shouldn't have so much power, that's the argument that the Irving's critics made, that he didn't need to exercise his power to shape what was covered, how it was covered, and what was omitted. And this should concern you, as newspapers are meant to oppose political power, no matter who is in charge. Increasingly, newspapers in the Western world are becoming subsidized by government. As their subsidies grow, this same argument is actually taking place. The very reason the government challenged him was you don't have to exercise that power to have it, is the exact same thing happening now, except the person with the power is government. Second, I don't think this hearing was ever about newspapers.

• 1:45:53Speaker 00

  It was about putting a successful man in his place, and there's nothing more Canadian than that. Okay, let's get back to our story. While Ottawa debated what Casey might do with all that power, Casey kept doing what he'd always done: building. At 70, he announced another $40 million expansion of the St. John refinery. At 71, he opened Canaport, a deep-water terminal where the largest oil tankers could unload beyond the reach of the harbor's tides. Other men his age were long retired while Casey Irving was planning for the future. Then, in December 1971, everything arrived all at once. The federal government charged Casey Irving limited with criminal offenses under the Combine's Investigation Act.

• 1:46:38Speaker 00

  After years of investigation, the argument over whether Casey had become too powerful was moving into a courtroom. His wife Harriet was ill, her heart was failing, and her doctors advised a warmer climate. And the tax laws changed. The federal government was ending its estate and gift taxes. A new capital gains tax would apply to increases in asset values from 1972 onward. Those gains could be taxed at death, even if the assets had never been sold. New Brunswick intended to impose succession duties of its own on top of this. For Casey, the problem was where his wealth was held. His fortune was not sitting in a bank account.

• 1:47:18Speaker 00

  It was inside refineries, pulp mills, ships, forests, trucking companies, and newspapers, nearly all of which was tied up in private companies controlled by the family. The taxes, of course, would have to be paid in cash. If Casey died while legally a resident in New Brunswick, his estate might have to raise an enormous sum. There was no public market where his sons could simply sell a few shares. They might have to sell businesses or bring in outside owners to raise money. A large tax bill could put the family's control at risk. The government had finally found a way to dismantle the Irving empire. It could leave the family with a tax bill so large that dismantling it was the only way to pay. Casey, of course, could not accept this.

• 1:48:03Speaker 00

  For more than 50 years, he had followed the same rule: keep control. He had borrowed money but resisted surrendering ownership. He had poured the profits back into the companies and communities in which they operated and spent decades preparing his sons to inherit them. He wanted to leave those businesses together, and now death itself could pull them apart. His sons, Jim, Arthur, and Jack, were in their 40s and had spent most of their adult lives learning the businesses. Friends were already telling Casey that it was time to step aside. But he had never been very good at stepping aside. On the other hand, Harriet was ill, the criminal case was advancing, and then new tax rules would take effect on January 1st.

• 1:48:46Speaker 00

  So the richest man in New Brunswick, and likely the country at that time, decided it would be too expensive to die in Canada. And so he left. And he wasn't the only one. On December 23rd, 1971, Casey and Harriet flew to Bermuda. His sons remained in St. John to run the companies. There was no farewell ceremony or public announcement. The departure was so sudden that Harriet's knitting remained unfinished at the family home. The telephone began ringing. Reporters wanted to know where Casey had gone. Businesspeople wanted to know whether the rumors were true. Even the mayor called. For three weeks, Casey said nothing. Then a reporter found him and Casey issued a short statement.

• 1:49:31Speaker 00

  "I'm no longer residing in New Brunswick. My sons are carrying on the various businesses. As far as anything else goes, I do not choose to discuss the matter further." While it sounded like retirement, it wasn't. Casey had not sold the companies or abandoned them. He had simply changed his residence. To his critics, the meaning was simple. The richest man in the province would rather leave than pay his taxes. I think Casey saw a different choice. He had invested every moment and penny he had into building his empire in the province. He had created industries, employed people, and reinvested all profits into the very province now coming after him. Staying meant a tax bill for his sons they could not pay off by selling parts of the

• 1:50:14Speaker 00

  businesses, not only dismantling his empire, but risking thousands of jobs. Once he became a resident of Bermuda, he had to count his days carefully. He could still return to St. John, but now he counted those visits, marking his days in Canada on a calendar. He wanted no doubt about where he legally resided. By January 1974, with so many people fleeing the province, New Brunswick had suspended its succession duties. Casey did not move back. While he had beaten the tax deadline, the criminal case followed him. At trial, the judge found that the newspapers had complete editorial autonomy.

• 1:50:54Speaker 00

  Their circulation had increased, their facilities had improved, and there was no evidence whatsoever that Casey had interfered with their journalism or harmed the public. He also found the whole thing was motivated for political reasons. And then he convicted the company anyways. The judge believed that concentrating so much ownership in one company justified a presumption of harm to the public. The appeal courts would disagree. The companies were fined $150,000 and ordered to sell two papers. Asked whether the experience had discouraged him from buying more, Casey replied, "Why, that would just be like tossing raw meat in front of a hungry dog."

• 1:51:36Speaker 00

  When the judge died the following year, his family asked Casey to serve as the honorary pallbearer. He accepted. And the wrongly convicted man became an honorary pallbearer for the judge who had wrongly convicted him. The appeal courts overturned the convictions unanimously. A monopoly, it ruled, was not automatically a crime. The government had to prove that Casey's ownership had harmed the public or was likely to do so. It had not. In 1976, all nine judges of the Supreme Court of Canada agreed. Altogether, 13 judges had heard the case, 12 had sided with the Ervings. The court had not declared a concentrated ownership harmless, however.

• 1:52:20Speaker 00

  They had required the government to prove that it 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. But while Casey fought to keep control in the family, his sons were taking on more of the work he had once insisted on doing himself. They were now running the empire. The public learned that Casey had stepped aside through the signature on a contract. In 1972, Irving Oil entered an exploration agreement. Arthur Irving signed it as chairman, president, and chief executive officer. There was no announcement. "There was no need to brag about it," Arthur later explained. "The brothers divided the empire.

• 1:53:04Speaker 00

  Jim took the forest, mills, and shipyard. Arthur took the oil business. Jack took the properties, hardware, and steel. They ate lunch together, argued, and settled disagreements by majority vote." Casey claimed he stayed out of their way. "When I quit, I quit." His sons had learned the business from the ground up. While much less ferocious than their father, they were every bit as competent. What came next surprised everyone. The sons grew the empire faster than its founder had. They acquired complete ownership of Irving Oil, removing its final outside shareholder. They brought on another newspaper mill. The shipyard won the contract to build Canada's new naval frigates, work that became one

• 1:53:48Speaker 00

  of the largest shipbuilding programs in the country's history. The most important inheritance Casey left his sons was not the empire itself, but the habits that had built it. A reporter saw those habits in 1989, when three of Canada's richest businessmen picked him up in a green Ford van. The brothers wore old coats, rubber boots, and beaver-skinned hats. They stopped for lunch at an Irving gas station. Sitting at the table, Arthur pointed to the ketchup. "Heinz," he said. "The other guy doesn't use Heinz." Then the coffee cream. "18 percent," he said. "The other guy uses 12 percent." Then the napkins. "Big napkins." "The other guy uses small ones."

• 1:54:31Speaker 00

  That, Arthur explained, was the secret. Better ketchup, richer cream, and better napkins. It sounds ridiculous until you remembered that their father had built an oil empire partly by keeping service station washrooms cleaner than anyone else's. The smallest details matter. While the empire had changed hands, the religion was still the same. Casey had spent his life fighting anyone who tried to take his money. He was also giving away more of it than almost anyone knew. His generosity followed the same rule as his businesses. Casey made the decision, if you pressured him, he'd give you as little as possible. But if you left him alone, he might give you a lot more than you imagine.

• 1:55:14Speaker 00

  A fundraiser once cornered him about financing a curling rink. Casey agreed to buy one share, just like everyone else. On the other hand, sick employees sometimes found themselves aboard an Irving plane bound for a Boston clinic. Children of longtime workers discovered that Casey had quietly paid their university tuition. When representatives of the new university came asking for $25,000, Casey consulted his sons and returned with an offer of half a million. He refused to discuss his gifts. He also refused to put his name on his building. Years later, a group restoring St. John's Capitol Theater approached Arthur Irving. They hoped to name it the Casey Irving Theater. "They want to do what?" Casey asked.

• 1:55:58Speaker 00

  "Name the theater after you," Arthur explained. "Do they want some money?" "Probably. We'll give them some money on the understanding that they keep my name off of it." Casey wanted money to do something. He did not need it to tell the people who had done it. Harriet died in 1976 after 49 years of marriage. Without her, the man who had always known exactly what to do appeared lost. His voice caught when he spoke about her. None of what he had accomplished, he began telling people, would have been possible without her. Age altered almost everything around Casey Irving and almost nothing inside him, the same as his fortune. Near his 90th birthday, he visited a mill with his son Jim.

• 1:56:40Speaker 00

  When Jim pulled a long strip of toilet paper from the roll to clean his glasses, Casey watched in alarm. "Jimmy, Jimmy, what are you doing? You're being a bit extravagant, aren't you?" Jim Irving was 60 years old and ran some of the largest businesses in the country. He rolled the toilet paper back and used two sheets. Forbes later estimated Casey's fortune at $8 billion. When a reporter told him the figure, Casey smiled with a boyish grin. "Is that all?" At 91, he had spent six weeks in intensive care in St. John. One morning, he telephoned Arthur. "Art, I want to get out." Arthur started to answer. "Today, Art, get me out of this place." And a plane was in the air within an hour.

• 1:57:23Speaker 00

  Casey checked himself out of the hospital, and by nightfall, he was back in Bermuda. He wanted control to the end. The following December, Casey returned to St. John for Christmas. He stayed in the apartment above the Irving headquarters at 300 Union Street. 67 years earlier, his automobile showroom had stood on the same ground. He died there on a Sunday morning in December 1992. He was 93. His sons and grandchildren held the companies. There was no outside partners left. The succession had worked, and Casey's preferred definition of ownership had finally been achieved across the empire 100%. The next day, the Telegraph Journal devoted eight pages to him.

• 1:58:08Speaker 00

  Its obituary ended with the simplest possible description. "Casey Irving, dead at 93." He was a builder. The crowds overflowed the church at his funeral. The prime minister called, the premier attended. Some of the strongest tributes came from the men who had fought him. Louis Robichaud said, "The admiration for Casey had never left him. We had our ups and downs, but I never lost my admiration for his courage and determination." Their rift had never healed. "Casey," Robichaud explained, "had a memory like an elephant." They buried him beside Harriet in Bermuda, an ocean away from Bactouche. The empire remained together for years. Eventually, it changed shape.

• 1:58:51Speaker 00

  The forest, mills, and shipyard went one way, the oil company went another. Casey had prevented outsiders from breaking his empire apart. He could not prevent time, family, and competing ambitions from rearranging it. Casey was a fierce man who wanted control and almost never backed down. He could be stubborn, unforgiving, and utterly convinced that his judgment was better than anyone else's. Those qualities created enemies. They also allowed him to keep going when almost anyone else would have quit. He borrowed when banks doubted him. He built when larger companies ignored New Brunswick. He risked his own capital, reinvested the profits, and prepared his sons to carry the businesses forward.

• 1:59:32Speaker 00

  He gave money away quietly and refused to put his name on the gifts. When the province's politicians came to see him as a threat, Casey fought them. When its tax laws threatened the ownership of his companies, he left, but left the businesses, the investment, and the jobs in New Brunswick. The province had helped create Casey Irving. Then it became afraid of what it had created. Casey, in turn, came to distrust the government of the place he never stopped considering home. Still, he kept betting on it. People rooted for Casey not because he was always right. They rooted for him because he was never halfway committed. Whatever the project demanded, money, work, reputation, he gave it everything he had.

• 2:00:15Speaker 00

  And part of that wager was still growing at Blackbrook. In 1957, 58-year-old Casey had planted spruce seedlings on land where experts said they would not grow. One expert even promised to eat his textbooks if they survived. By 1986, the program had planted 200 million trees. At 87, Casey put the 200th millionth seedling into the ground himself. The planting continued after his death. 60 years after the first seedlings entered the soil, the count passed 1 billion. I wonder if that professor ever ate those pages that he promised. In the end, Casey Irving gave New Brunswick his money, his energy, and nearly his entire working life.

• 2:01:00Speaker 00

  The one thing he would never give it was control. That refusal had built an empire, and it created enemies. Eventually, it drove him out of his home. It also persuaded a 58-year-old man to plant something he knew he would never live long enough to harvest.

• 2:01:23Speaker 00

  And that is the story of Casey Irving. Thanks for listening to Outliers. Give us a follow, and I'll see you next week.