K.C. Irving: Competing with Giants

The episode opens with a 1960s Sunday call from Mulroney of St. Patrick Street, whose furnace was empty. He had reached Casey Irving, owner of an empire spanning roughly 300 companies, including trucks, refineries, ships, forests, mills, and newspapers. Irving arranged delivery, then called back 30 minutes later to verify the oil had arrived. Shane Parrish presents this as the defining pattern of Irving’s career: even as one of Canada’s richest men, he personally followed problems to their resolution. The same attention later appeared in his stations, mills, ships, and customer relationships.

Born Kenneth Colin Irving in 1899, Casey grew up in Buctouche, New Brunswick, where his father J.D. owned a sawmill and general store. As a boy, Casey sold garden vegetables and bottles salvaged from cellars, employing two older boys while keeping most of the profits. After he fought a boy, returned for a rematch, and threw stones at a teacher, J.D. sent him to live with his half-sister Jen and her minister husband in Millerton. The school’s principal demanded discipline, while Jen’s husband tutored him by kerosene light. Casey later called that year without earnings “probably the best thing that ever happened to me” because he learned to like school.

Casey left university in 1918 to enlist in the Royal Flying Corps, but the war ended before he saw action. Returning in 1919, he entered a local economy threatened by spruce budworm and Eaton’s mail-order catalogues. His first major gamble was buying potatoes until his father’s store was packed, then rescuing the collapsing market by telegraphing American buyers; frost had destroyed the U.S. crop, allowing him to sell nearly the entire stock to New York at $18 a barrel. Seeing automobiles arrive on rural roads, he secretly made the store an Imperial Oil agent and dug a 250-gallon gasoline tank at six in the morning.

Because too few farmers owned cars to sustain gasoline sales, Casey became the county’s Ford dealer and sold Model Ts door to door. Customers often paid with horses, harnesses, cattle, or produce, which Casey resold. He taught buyers how to crank safely without breaking a thumb, repaired stalled vehicles himself, and insisted, “You didn’t leave people in a lot of trouble.” A storekeeper, William Graham, began sending him sales leads after Casey repaired his truck. Casey earned about $105 per Ford, making $20,000 one year and $22,000 the next—roughly $350,000 today—but said he valued talking with farmers more than the money.

Imperial Oil planned to replace Casey with its own local agent after other merchants complained that his gasoline business competed with them. Casey accepted that Imperial’s decision made business sense but objected that it had given him no warning. He found supply nearly 2,000 miles away in Tulsa, ordered a 10,000-gallon tank, built a garage and station, and blended gasoline designed to start more easily in cold weather. He named it Primrose by combining rivals’ names, Premier and White Rose. Despite predictions that Imperial would destroy him, Irving soon held 95% of Buctouche’s gasoline business.

After expanding his Ford territory into Moncton, Casey was offered the much larger St. John territory. He initially doubted he could handle it, then secured bank credit without using his father’s guarantee. Ford later nearly ruined him by stopping Model T production in 1927 and delaying the Model A for months. Casey kept the dealership alive with leftover Chryslers, but the episode convinced him never to depend so completely on another company. He continued selling Fords for 25 years, yet gasoline became the main business. In 1929 he incorporated Irving Oil, raised $300,000, bought the shares back, and resolved never again to sell public ownership.

Casey reinvested profits instead of paying dividends, bought service stations, and expanded from New Brunswick into Nova Scotia. When a dealer could not afford storage tanks, Casey returned in overalls and installed one himself; when another disliked his contract, he told the dealer to write a replacement. At surprise visits, Casey opened with “How’s business?” and followed with questions about gallons sold, accounts won or lost, and repairs needed. He used the same questions across stations, shipyards, mills, and ships. His philosophy was practical: know both ends and the middle of a business, and do not outsource your own judgment.

After the 1929 crash, cars were so expensive to operate that some New Brunswick owners removed their engines and hitched horses to them. Competitors cut back, but Casey expanded, buying stations and businesses while borrowing against improved assets to fund the next purchase. He often ate a chocolate bar for lunch and said he had never been happier. His $11,000 Cadillac became a public signal that he believed in the future. He summarized his attitude as “Never be worried, but be concerned”: concern allows action, while worry means accepting helplessness. His many failed ventures included parking, gold mining, newspapers, and finance; the successful ones were tangible businesses.

In 1932, Canadian National Railway raised rates on Casey’s oil shipments while leaving Imperial Oil’s rates unchanged because Imperial owned a refinery. After arguing for two years, Casey bought a coastal tanker and built a wharf one mile from the railway’s headquarters. At its public arrival, the tanker accidentally drove stern-first into the riverbank. Casey spent hours digging beside his crew until the returning tide freed it at 2:30 a.m.; the next tide brought it safely to the dock. The humiliation demonstrated the point: Casey would remove any dependency that let another institution dictate terms. He eventually built a shipping company and pursued a refinery.

After buying his father’s sawmill and 7,000 acres in 1933, Casey faced collapsing lumber prices and spruce budworm. Rather than stop cutting, he cut and stacked timber for six years, selling in only three of them. A bank called a loan reportedly close to $2 million during the Depression, but another lender refinanced him because Casey had never missed a payment. When lumber prices recovered in 1939, Casey already held low-cost inventory while competitors had to restart production at higher costs. The episode strengthened his reputation with bankers, who eventually stopped waiting for him to request loans and came to him instead.

World War II rescued Canada Veneers, a struggling company Casey had bought cheaply. Its yellow-birch veneer became plywood for de Havilland’s wooden Mosquito bomber, and the plant ran seven days a week with 500 workers. Casey repeatedly returned to Ottawa until he won a contract for invasion-supply barges, built in Buctouche; his shipyards eventually produced more than 1,000. He also bought the bankrupt Dexter Sulfite mill in New York, offering full payment with interest over four years rather than the competitors’ roughly ten cents on the dollar. Nicknamed a “huckleberry,” he restored the mill and paid it off early.

Casey bought timberland to supply his mills, including nearly 700,000 acres formerly owned by a railway, and inspected it on snowshoes, recounting trees until his numbers matched the expert’s. He planted spruce in 1957 despite experts saying the ridge was unsuitable; one forestry professor bet he would eat his textbooks if the trees grew. Casey also wanted a refinery after the railway had cited Imperial’s refinery as its advantage. British Petroleum demanded a site outside St. John and an option to buy Irving Oil after Casey’s death, so he walked away, explaining his insistence on St. John with four words: “Because I live there.” A later Standard Oil deal produced the refinery.

The St. John refinery opened in 1960 with six storage tanks spelling I-R-V-I-N-G, and Canaport followed in 1970 for the world’s largest tankers. Casey made stations distinctive through red, white, and blue branding, strategic locations near post offices and churches, and spotless separate bathrooms for men and women. He believed gasoline was interchangeable but the surrounding experience was not. To scale his sales culture, he hired Harrison McCain, offering $10,000 and a large car. McCain won 96% of a major account, but Casey asked why he had missed the remaining 4%, teaching him “Don’t ever be satisfied.”

By the 1950s, Irving had about 300 stations, supplied another 700 dealers, employed thousands, and negotiated major concessions for a $20 million pulp expansion, including cheap water, frozen taxes, expropriation powers, and unusual protection from lawsuits over pollution, smoke, and smell. Casey’s union stance was transactional rather than ideological: he threatened striking oil workers, drove an oil truck through the picket line himself, yet allowed a previously banned pulp-mill union that won a 19-cent hourly raise. His conflict with Premier Louis Robichaud became sharper when the government sought to cancel old industrial agreements. Casey called that a breach of faith and warned, “You cannot get blood out of a stone.”

Casey opposed Robichaud’s proposed fertilizer plant at Dorchester Cape because an existing plant lacked demand and the harbor would silt up. When a young official cited profits without checking depreciation, Casey concluded the omission revealed the project’s weakness. The plant opened in 1968 and closed that October, and Robichaud later admitted Casey had been right. Casey’s deeper failure was Brunswick Mining. He invested millions but held only about 20% and lacked control. The smelter was designed before its process had been proven on representative ore; costs rose from $25 million to more than $70 million, and the project approached bankruptcy. A $60 million rescue would have given Casey control, but the government chose Noranda, which took 51%.

Casey gradually acquired every English-language daily in New Brunswick, arguing that newspapers were businesses connected to his pulp-and-paper operations. Critics said ownership could influence coverage even without direct orders, citing a conflict involving the New Brunswick Water Authority and the pulp industry’s lobby. In Ottawa, Senator Harper Prowse established that anything harming New Brunswick harmed Casey, and anything harming Casey harmed New Brunswick. Casey resisted the implication that he had become a public institution. The judge initially convicted the company despite finding editorial autonomy and no proven public harm, but appeal courts and Canada’s Supreme Court overturned the convictions: concentrated ownership was not automatically criminal without proof of harm.

In 1971, criminal proceedings, Harriet’s illness, and new capital-gains and succession-tax rules converged. Casey’s wealth was tied up in private refineries, mills, ships, forests, and newspapers, so taxes due at death could have forced his sons to sell assets and break up the empire. On December 23, 1971, he and Harriet moved to Bermuda without a public announcement; Casey said only that he was no longer a New Brunswick resident and his sons were running the businesses. His sons divided responsibilities—Jim took forests and mills, Arthur oil, and Jack properties and construction—and later grew the empire, while Casey maintained that when he quit, he quit.

Casey died in 1992 at 93, after building a privately controlled empire that eventually employed 12,000–13,000 people. He gave quietly, paid employees’ medical travel and children’s tuition, and rejected naming a theater after him. He remained obsessive about details: his son once used too much toilet paper, and Arthur later judged ketchup, coffee cream, and napkins at a station. The spruce project he began at 58 ultimately planted more than 1 billion trees, after 200 million by 1986. Parrish’s closing portrait is of a builder who risked money, work, and reputation completely, but would never surrender control.