Who is ep taylor

He was voted thoroughbred racing's man of the year in and the following year was elected to Canada's Sports Hall of Fame. In and he was named the winner of the Eclipse Award for Outstanding Breeder as the leading thoroughbred breeder in North America.

He was also a founder of the Jockey Club of Canada. Read times. Published in Inductees. This is not to say that E. Taylor is not rich, single-minded and powerful: total. But what did he do — if he is not demonstrably the richest, most powerful, despotic, sinister, or ruthless businessman in Canada — to make it as a folkfigure?

That is the first puzzle about E. There is a second puzzle. Most folk-figures collect around themselves a lively mythology of anecdote, quotation and imputed characteristic. Thus everybody knows. And they understand that any good drinking story can satisfactorily be attributed to Sir John A. But there is simply no E. Taylor legend. The closest thing to an anecdote in the public domain is the account of his being torpedoed in the Atlantic with the Rt.

Howe, on a government mission to England during World War II, and spending nine hours in a lifeboat without his pants. Not only is his image unshaded; it is almost faceless. Taylor is easily recognizable to most Canadians as he appears in countless newspaper photographs — which is to say in the same garb he wears on the cover of this magazine. The points of recognition are not his features but the silk hat, the carnation, the embonpoint.

These items, plus a horse's head in the background, are what identify The Capitalist as Taylor in a Duncan Macpherson cartoon. There is literally nothing personal in what the public thinks or says about him. To complete the paradoxes of symbol, stereotype and man no unanimity of opinion exists among those people who actually know him.

And most of the really important men inherited their basic wealth and consider him an upstart. On the other hand, his employees and close associates, almost to a man, like him wholeheartedly and consider him grossly misunderstood. Taylor did most of his racing at U. That year, he won the Plate with a colt named Epic, and that winter he announced he would move the centre of his attention to Canada.

Horses he owned in the black and white pictures here have won seven times, and horses he bred in the coppercolored pictures have won another four. As well, the bloodlines of his stable, with sires like Chop Chop who has four winners among these. Taylor's greatest single achievement as a breeder so far has been Victoria Park, a son of Chop Chop. An easy winner of the I Plate, Victoria Park went on to run with, and sometimes beat, the best three-year-olds in the world.

He was injured and retired before the peak of his three - year - old season, but is now' standing as the highest-priced stud in Canada.

But nobody wants to hear that And then there is the downright ambivalence of another ex-colleague. For these and other reasons it is more than normally hard for an outsider to make sense of Taylor. The visible details and circumstances that sometimes reveal character are, in his case, noncommittal. This is one reason for his being a noncommittal folk-figure.

He chuckles often, rather perfunctorily, grins genially but seldom laughs full out; his laugh has a curiously toothless look. He has been seen in downtown Toronto on a raw spring day in a green chauffeur-driven convertible Thunderbird with the top down. Put his house. Windfields, in the Bayview district of Toronto, is a conservative stone villa decorated pleasantly in a style that might be called exclusive-lady's club, with pastel Oriental rugs, chintzes, lounge chairs, glass-topped tables, masses of fresh flowers, and a lobe - shaped swimming pool down past the terrace.

When his home in Lyford Cay was being built Taylor told his wife he'd like the same sort of thing down there.

His wife, the former Winifred Duguid of Ottawa, is an ash-blonde with a vivid pointed face and unaffected warmth of manner. He has two married daughters and a son, Charles, who is a newspaper reporter. Taylor chides his wife that her albums of colored snapshots are an extravagance because the color fades in a year or two. He smokes Picobac tobacco, a workingman's brand, in Dunhill pipes, and has been smoking since he was twelve. He drinks every ordinary drink, including beer, except vodka, which he detests.

He says he has no politics. Besides travel, his work consists of digesting piles of reports, balance sheets and data; thinking; making decisions: and talking. He is bored by any encounter that lasts over an hour. His manner with people is smooth, affable — and utterly, unvaryingly appropriate. With women he is unobtrusively courtly, pulling out chairs and ottering non-filter cigarettes from a gold case.

At the racetrack, among the sporting fraternity, he is perceptibly democratic. In dealings with his employees he is pleasant, business-like and curt. When he is angry his face flushes and his lips set, but this is a rare occurrence. He has almost total recall of the names of employees' wives and offspring and their ailments, and does things like making Christmas calls, and visiting hospitals. Indeed, most of the anecdotes his associates proffer about Taylor tend to stress cither his.

This spring he dispatched some carnation cuttings to a garden enthusiast who had introduced himself at the Fort Erie racetrack and had admired Taylor's boutonniere.

He has created a sinecure for an aging employee on several occasions. It is hard to avoid the feeling that he has taught himself to bring the same efficiency to getting along with people as he does to a board meeting or a balance sheet.

Yet the impression he gives is not that of a man who is cynically using people but of a man who has found this the smoothest way of conserving his energy and anger and emotional engagement for something else. Thomas, an in-. He is, in his way, an artist and like an artist he just wants to be left alone to do what he wants to do. Once he sent over voluminous statistics which the British experts spent a month digesting only to have Taylor arrive on the scene and correct them on small points out of his head.

By Taylor had given holding company shares for the rest of it. He did this in a matter of weeks by floating more stock and bond issues mainly in England. Meanwhile, he helped persuade the Henry Conservative Government and the Hepburn Liberal Opposition to promise beverage rooms in the election. Hepburn won the election and beer went on sale. Taylor was out of the woods. He now set about making the beer business respectable. Taylor fired them and brought in a new type of salesman, keen young white-collar men with orders to become community leaders, join Kiwanis and Rotary, and help out in local charities and drives.

He set about reducing the number of brands until now there are six where once there were more than Old beer drinkers still curse him for killing off unprofitable brews such as Brown October Ale and Dominion No. Taylor merged some breweries within the larger merger, closing down others.

He was salesman, ad manager and director all rolled into one. He traveled from brewery to brewery in an old Packard sedan fitted as an office. He worked in his office to 7 p. Then be moved into soft drinks. The next day a process server walked into his office with a summons. Taylor walked uninvited into a Honey Dew board meeting. He wanted no part of the food business and intended to sell out. Instead the directors talked him into taking the chair as vice-president.

Two days later the ailing president died and Taylor was boss. He plunged with both feet into the soft drink business. He put in a pension plan for employees, cut the time of the rambling, discursive board meetings in half, and divorced Honey Dew from the parent soft drink company.

Periodically Taylor donned overalls and mixed up the red fluid which goes into the orange juice to give the drink its particular quality. The old-fashioned, white-tiled, orange-lighted Honey Dew shops were all but out of business when Taylor look over. Taylor, who believes the interior and exterior of every retail outlet should be changed every seven years, closed them up one by one. He reopened them on better, cheaper locations in a new fancy dress which eliminated the station washroom effect.

Taylor knew he had a winner. Honey Dew became the core of the food empire he built up during and after the war. He now has well over retail stores of various kinds not including the Dominion chain stores.

He was C. He lunched with Churchill and Beaverbrook, was torpedoed, floated nine hours in mid-Atlantic without his pants, traveled on the maiden voyage of the battleship King George V, saw the first top-secret Sherman tank demonstrated, and was categorized as a bishop for mess privileges in Admiralty wardrooms.

He managed to keep a close eye on his expanding industrial empire by flying home every second week end and working Sundays. Some think his outburst against King Taylor is still a Liberal delayed his CMG award which he did not receive until The company has since quadrupled in size and he now dominates the industry. His fans use this as an example of his constructive enterprise. Most Canadian margarine is made from Victory Mills oils.