My mother moved from a small town in Southern Alberta to Vancouver shortly after World War Two as a teenager. She graduated from an East Side High School with a nondescript group of peers, including a quiet, nerdy boy named James.
Some 40 years later, in 1986, Vancouver hosted Expo '86, a worldwide celebration of transportation and communication technologies that would put the city on the map for good. This grand event came off magnificently, and was not eclipsed until the 2010 Winter Olympics brought an even wider showcase to the Lower Mainland.
In the months leading up to Expo, the event appeared to be on the brink of monumental failure. Construction unions were in constant conflict with a disorganized management team, and huge cost overruns, lengthy delays and every imaginable pitfall seemed to predict the worst. The whole world was watching, and we all feared an impending embarrassment of crushing magnitude while they watched.
It was at this point that my mother's classmate, James, better known as Jim
Pattison came along.
Already a multi-billionaire at the time, Pattison took over the fair a year or so before it was to be launched, stemmed the cost overruns, and helped transform the project into a huge success, all for a salary of $1.
Early in his tenure, Jimmy (as he apparently like to be called) hired an outside contractor to inventory every single piece of capital equipment, from buildings and vehicles, right down to chairs and ashtrays. As a young business student, I was fortunate to be among the group of 20 or so kids who crawled around the city with our clipboards and rolls of numbered stickers marking every last stapler for inventory.
It was a pretty cool job actually. We had keys to all the forbidden places, normally reserved for people like Jimmy, and then-B.C. Premier Mike Harcourt. The inventory of their Expo offices included manuals analyzing the epic failure of the Montreal Olympics, the great success of the then-recent LA Olympics and every other major world event worth studying in the latter half of the century. I was lucky enough to thumb through these and
inventory them for Mr. Pattison.
I also inventoried the Royal Suite, preserved for the impending visit of Princess Dianna and Prince Charles. It was royal indeed. Everything in the room was posh, modern, and sparkled jaw droppingly. Even the royal potty throne was stunningly shiny and luxuriously comfortable. (I mean, it was really comfortable, if you catch my drift.)
A few days later, Jimmy himself, along with some political dignitaries, toured the royal couple through the Expo site with international media in tow. I watched in amusement as they sipped tea in the suite I had recently tended, and in my own blue-collar way, I knew I had made my contribution.
Pattison is Vancouver's Warren Buffet. And on a proportional scale, Prince George has a few like souls, who started with little more than a desire to get ahead, and ended up with an empire that bespeaks innovation, hard work, and perhaps a little good fortune. I've known my share of these men and women, heard their stories, and helped them with a few things from time to time in the iterations of my career.
I sometimes ask them a goofy question: "What is money for?" The response is pretty much universal: "To put clothes on my back, food in my cupboards and a roof over my head."
They're just like you and me in most ways.
They are that guy in your graduating class who surprised everyone and made a name for himself. The next one might be a friend of yours. Or maybe you.
Mark Ryan is an advisor with RBC Wealth Management, Dominion Securities (member CIPF) and can be reached at [email protected].
