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CHAPTER 1
THE RIGHT PLACE, THE RIGHT TIME AND THE RIGHT INGREDIENTS
Life is a question of fate and circumstances. If you are in the right place at the right time with the right ingredients, a lot of great things can happen.
I immigrated to Canada in 1954 with nothing more than a suitcase, a few hundred dollars and a dream to build a better life.
I sailed on a one-way ticket from Rotterdam in late April of that year on an old Dutch freighter named Groote Beer, together with hundreds of other young Europeans, all of us hungry to build a new life for ourselves in North America. We bunked four to a cabin. I was 21 years old, and I can still recall, as if it were yesterday, my anxiety and sense of anticipation as the ship pulled away from the dock, its horn blasting. At one point, I even thought of diving off the deck and swimming back to shore before the ship sailed too far from the harbour and out toward the vast expanse of ocean. But I had read and heard too many stories about young men and women who went to the New World and hit it big. I wanted to be one of those people.
It was early in the morning when the ship arrived in Quebec City about nine days later. As we sailed up the St. Lawrence River I could see the low-rising hills along the shores still dotted with patches of snow, and I remember thinking how massive and imposing the terrain looked. I thought, This is how Christopher Columbus must have felt. When we finally docked, I was so relieved to feel the solid ground beneath my feet. We filed into long lines, and a Canadian immigration officer stamped my passport and handed me a railroad ticket to Montreal. I arrived at the downtown train station a few hours later. I had never seen anything so large in all my life. I didnât know which way to turn, or where to exit. Clutching my small suitcase, I began walking the streets of what was then Canadaâs biggest city, feeling alone and full of wonder about what my future might hold.
I had just one thought on my mind: finding room and board. I only had a few hundred bucks, and I would have burned through my cash pretty quickly if Iâd stayed in a hotel. I knew enough English to get by and I looked for signs that read âRoom for Let.â I knocked on door after door and asked if they had a room. But I had no luck. Perhaps it was because I was seasick for most of the voyage to Canada, and I looked ragged and run down, or perhaps some people didnât want to rent to an immigrant fresh off the boat. But after about an hour or two of walking the streets and banging on doors, I finally found a room.
Early the next morning, I started searching for work. I looked for factories, because factory work was what I knew. I was willing to do anything. I knocked on the doors of around thirty companies. After several days of coming up empty-handed, I began to worry and went to an unemployment office. One of the workers there told me that a golf course was looking for someone to retrieve golf balls at the driving range and he gave me the address. I got on a bus and rode for the better part of a day, searching in vain for the golf course. Little did I know that golf courses are not on public bus routes! I was young and athletic, and I sometimes wonder, had I found that course, whether I might have ended up becoming a pro golfer.
I was worried and frustrated. After two weeks, my money was dwindling. I talked to other immigrants and none of them had found jobs either. The country was in the midst of a recession, and the people seemed a little edgier, a little tenser than back home. I didnât know anybody. And there was no work. I hadnât eaten in a day or so, and I had lost a lot of weight since I arrived. As far as I was concerned, it was the end of the line. So I took what little cash I had and bought a Greyhound bus ticket to Kitchener, a small city located halfway between Detroit and Toronto. I had the address of a fellow I knew from Weiz, a toolmaker named Max Windhager who used to work at the factory where I had apprenticed.
Kitchener had a strong German heritage and a large pocket of German-speaking immigrants. It was at one time known as Berlin, but in World War I, when Canadian soldiers were fighting in the trenches against the Germans, the government of the day renamed the city after a popular British general. I got off the bus in the main square and spent the better part of the day wandering around town, tired and hungry. Itâs a lot different being hungry because you want to lose some weight than being hungry because you canât afford to buy food. Those kind of experiences leave lasting scars. I kept pulling the slip of paper with Maxâs name and address out of my pocket, and thinking, I hope the guy still lives here, because if he doesnât, I donât know what the hell Iâm going to do.
I was beginning to get desperate. I remember thinking: So this is the capitalist system? Maybe my left-leaning father was right. Here I was, a skilled tradesman itching to work, but I couldnât find anything. Itâs not my nature to ask anyone for help. But I had reached the point where I was ready to beg. I knocked on Maxâs door. He opened the door, smiled and said, âHello, Frank. Good to see you again. How are you? Câmon in. You look hungry.â They were welcome words.
A few days later, I got my first job: washing dishes and peeling potatoes and carrots in the basement of a hospital. I scoured and scrubbed from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., with one day off per week. I made $80 per month and got room and board at the hospital. Here I was, a young buck, rinsing plates all day with a bunch of sweet old ladies.
On Saturdays, I would head out for a night on the town at Club Berlin. There was a lot of slow dancing in those days, and sometimes the girls I was dancing with would ask me what I did for a living. âI work in a hospital,â I would say. And the girls would usually say, âYour hands are so smooth. Are you a surgeon?â Sometimes I would play along, but I would always eventually tell them the truth, that I was really just a dishwasher. When I said that, most of them didnât want to dance as close anymoreâafter all, what girl wants to go out with a dishwasher? But those that stayed closeâthat was true love!
After a few weeks, Max helped get me a job as a machinist at a plant that made components for the ill-fated Avro Arrow fighter jet. I worked there about seven or eight months and then got laid off. So I drove to Oakville, just west of Toronto, where Ford Motor Company had recently built a massive new vehicle assembly plant and was hiring toolmakers. I filled out some applications and was interviewed by someone who told me that I looked awfully young, that I couldnât have too much experience and that my chances of being hired by Ford were next to nil. Nowadays, I occasionally meet with the CEO of Ford Canada, and I sometimes joke that if I had been hired back then, I might now have his job.
After failing to latch on with Ford, I hitchhiked to Toronto. I asked the guy who gave me a ride to take me to one of the cheaper hotels in the city. He dropped me off at the corner of Jarvis and Dundas streets, right across from the Warwick Hotel. I had a beer and a hamburger in the basement tavern. It was a pretty rowdy joint: blue-collar workers, hookers and some rough characters. People were getting drunk on cheap draft, hollering and laughing. After weeks of washing dishes in the hospital basement, Toronto was a refreshing change, a wild and raucous town. I got a room for ten bucks but didnât sleep too well, what with all the coming and going, the shouting and slamming of doors. A few weeks later, some of my friends from Kitchener came to Toronto to visit me, craving a taste of big-city life. They said, âHey, Frank, whereâs that rowdy hotel you told us about?â So we got in the car and drove around for hours looking for the Warwick, but try as we might, we couldnât find the notorious landmark.
I followed up on a few ads in the paper and found work at auto parts manufacturer A.G. Simpsonâat the time, one of the biggest in the country. It was my first job in Canada as a toolmaker, and I bought a toolbox along with some basic drills, files and gauges. I was hired together with a handful of other toolmakers for some rush orders the company needed to fill. After about three or four months of working at A.G. Simpson, I got laid off. One afternoon the foreman came up to me and said donât bother coming back the next dayâjust like that.
What happened next was a turning point for me. I found work with a small tool shop in downtown Toronto, located in a rundown block with a lot of old brick factories, not far from the Riverdale Zoo. I started in the spring of 1955 and worked there until the end of 1956. Altogether, there were around ten of us, mostly Austrians, including the owner. It was not long before the owner made me manager of the operation, and it was then that I got my first real taste of what it would be like to run my own business. Not long after, the owner offered me a partnership. His proposal was a bit vague and wishy-washy, but still very appealing. We never got around to hammering out an agreement. It wasnât his faultâwork got busy, time rushed by. But by then something had changed: I started gaining confidence. I starting thinking that itâs not such a big deal to set up your own shop. Thereâs nothing to it, being in business for yourselfâI can do this. My appetite was whetted, and my dream of starting my own business was, for the first time, within grasp. From that moment onward, there was no looking back.
Three years after arriving in Canada at the age of 21, I had finally scraped together enough money to open my own small tool and die shop. It was located inside an old one-storey building known as the Gatehouse, in the heart of Torontoâs manufacturing district. The shop had battered wooden floorboards and was the size of a four-car garage. I bought a used drill press, a small lathe and milling machine, a band saw and surface grinder. The total price for the equipment was around $12,000. I put down $3,000 of my own money and made payments on the balance. I opened a bank account and a line of credit at the Bank of Nova Scotia on St. Clair Avenue, not far from the factory. The bank manager was a fellow named George Hitchman, who would years later serve on the board of directors of Magna International. George was an old-school banker, somewhat stern but fair. âHow much do you intend to deposit?â he asked gruffly. I gave him $3,000 cash and he approved a $1,000 overdraft. Once all the paperwork was signed, he shook my hand and said, âIâm going to keep a close eye on you, young man.â
Within that old garage I had everything I needed. To save money, I would buy off-cuts, lower-priced leftover pieces of metal. I kept a small drafting table and desk over in one corner for sketching tool designs and scrawling out invoices. I had a toilet and a sink, a little fridge and a hot plate. In the mornings, I filled a can with warm water and soap and used a sponge to wash myself.
I worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, and slept on a small foldaway cot that I kept next to my lathe. I remember getting out of bed some nights to go to the washroom, tiptoeing in my bare feet over the jagged metal shards that lay on the floor near the milling machine. I usually worked until about 10 or 11 p.m., and once in a while, after shutting down the machines, I would meet some friends at a tavern or café just to clear my head and have a few laughs. For dinner, I often cooked some canned food on the hot plate. Just a few hundred yards down the road from my shop was an Italian deli. It had huge wheels of cheese on the floor that small kids from the neighbourhood would stand on while their moms picked up cuts of meat at the counter. Once I bought a chunk of sausage and some fresh-baked bread and brought it back to the shop. I left the sausage on my bench for a minute and went to wash my hands. When I came back, I saw a rat scurrying away with the meat. I threw a piece of steel at the rat as it scampered down a hole in the wooden floorboards.
I called my shop Accurate Tool and Die, but not long after I started I got a letter in the mail from a lawyer representing a company called Accurate Mould. They said I would have to change the name or they would sue me. So I changed it to Multimatic.
In those early years, I had only one desireâto become economically free, so that I would never be hungry again and never have to crawl from anybody.
I was determined to make my new business a success. I hustled and went knocking on doors looking for orders. One of my first jobs was for American Standard, the large U.S. firm that makes bathroom and kitchen products such as tubs, toilets and faucets. They needed a complicated bracket to hang a sink tub and said to me, âSee what you can come up with. If you solve that, we might have some more work for you.â I went back to my shop, sketched out some prototypes, and three weeks later came back with a machined tool that punched out brackets. I made $3,000âabout four times what I would have made working at a tool shop for someone else. My newest customer was happy with the work and ended up giving me more business.
I would go into nearby factories and speak to the foreman to try to drum up some orders. I won new business by promising my customers that I could solve their problems and I backed up my promise with an ironclad guarantee: if the customers were not satisfied, they would not have to pay me. That can-do attitude has never changedâmore than fifty years later, we ask Magnaâs customers in Detroit and Frankfurt and Tokyo, âWhat are your problems? How can we help you?â And then we go straight to work to find a solution.
Those early days were tough. I did everything from sales and bookkeeping to machinery maintenance and product delivery. One time I was sweeping the floor in my oil-stained overalls when a man walked in and asked if I would take him to meet the boss. âYouâre speaking to him,â I said.
I got a lot of contracts, and sometimes I underestimated how long it would take to do the job. I once worked seventy-two hours straight through without stopping. But it wasnât for the money. It was because I had made a commitment and wanted to keep my word. I once got an order from an auto parts supplier north of the city to make a tool used to manufacture tire jacks. It was a rush job, and I worked forty-eight hours around the clock to fill the order. It was a snowy winter day, and on the way up to my customerâs office I fell asleep at the wheel and drove my Chevy into a ditch. Luckily, I wasnât hurt. With my heart racing and now wide awake, I managed to deliver the tools on time, as promised. It was a trait that over the years became deeply rooted in the Magna culture: we did whatever it took to deliver the goods on time.
I hired my first employee after one month. He ended up becoming a general manager at one of our factories, Hy-Prod, ten years later, and he stayed with Magna for over thirty years, right up until the day he retired. That first year, I made around $20,000âa very good wage. I kept bringing in new orders and hiring more and more people. After about eight months, with some savings tucked away in the bank, I moved out of the garage into a bachelor apartment to make room for more equipment and machines. By the end of the year, I had ten workers on my payroll. Every single one of them ended up becoming Magna plant managers.
Joining me at the shop on most weekends was an old friend from my hometown of Weiz, Anton Czapka. Tony had arrived by boat like me, landing in Montreal. He showed up at my door in Kitchener one day, the same way I did at Max Windhagerâs place, and slept on my couch until he was able to get work.
Tony was very down-to-earth and never put on airs. He also had a big heart. When I first told him about my plans to open my own shop, he enthusiastically encouraged me: âDo it, Frank.â He gave me a wad of bills, $5,000 in total, and said, âTake it. Put it in the bank.â He completely trusted me and had confidence that I could make a go of it. His chunk of cash was working capital and gave me the resources I needed to strike out on my own sooner than I would have been able to otherwise. I could never have done it without him. Tony not only became a partner, he became my closest and most trusted friend.
One of my first customers was an auto parts plant in Ajax, close to the shore of Lake Ontario, just east of Toronto. The manager was a tall, lanky and easy-going American named Burt Pabst who had a real flair for marketing. Burt was from Detroit and sent a lot of his tooling to my shop in Toronto. After a while, Burt eventually joined my growing business, driving into Toronto on weeknights to help out. We were making so many tools for the production of auto parts that we started thinking, Why not make the parts as well? That way, weâd make profits on both the tooling and the parts.
By the end of the first full year of business, the hard work began to pay off: the new company had approximately $150,000 in sales. We plowed most of the money we made during the first year back into the business to buy materials and pay off the loan that we had taken out to buy used machinery. I loved those days, often working late into the night with the guys. Iâd go buy a bucket of fried chicken and a case of beer, and weâd all pitch in to get the job done.
We worked hard and we worked long hours, but we always had a few laughs. I remember, for instance, the very first day on the job for a certain new hire, a young guy from Germany. When we broke for lunch, he went to the store and bought a can of what he thought was meatloaf. He started gulping down forkfuls of the meat, and said, âGeez, the meat looks so delicious in the photo on the can, but it tastes like crap.â The guys around the lunch table burst out laughing, and then one of them began barking, âWoof, woof.â After a while, even the new guy joined in the laughter.
It was during the second full year of operations that an event occurred that forever changed our course. In 1959, we landed our first auto parts contract: an order from General Motors to produce metal-stamped sun visor brackets. I would take turns with the other employees, working long into the night on a single punch press to meet a shipment deadline the next day. I then delivered the parts to the General Motors assembly plant in Oshawa early the next morning in my used 1955 Chevy. We packed so many boxes of metal brackets into the car that the tires looked as if they were flat.
In total, we produced several hundred thousand brackets at a price of around 40 cents per part, pocketing a few pennies on each piece we made. The total contract was worth about $80,000. We built the tool, put the tool on a punch press, fed the sheet metal in and ran it through the punch press, and out came the sun visor brackets. We made deliveries three times a week, shipping batches of about 5,000 brackets at a time. The presses were thumping day and night, and we were practically climbing over each other in that bustling shop.
More contracts from General Motors soon followed, as well as contracts from Ford and Chrysler. These were the glory years of the North American car industry. Detroitâs âBig Threeâ were booming, and we started feeding them the parts they needed to meet North Americaâs insatiable d...
