Aviation pioneer whose name graces our airport was as down-to-earth and giving as the wheat fields that forged the family fortune
Montreal has Trudeau.
Toronto has Pearson.
Ottawa has Macdonald and Cartier.
Even Saskatoon has an airport named after a former prime minister: John Diefenbaker.
But this month when the federal government chose a "commoner's" name to grace Winnipeg's airport, the citizens' reaction was less than enthusiastic, at least, from those who answered a Free Press website poll.
An overwhelming 77 per cent of the 1,700 respondents said "No!" when asked if they agreed with renaming Winnipeg International to James Armstrong Richardson International Airport.
That, I would suggest, is because they didn't know who J.A.R. really was.
Perhaps this will change some minds.
* * *
The story of James Richardson that was told at the naming ceremony stressed, naturally enough, his contributions to Canada's early days of our still very wild blue yonder.
He was a visionary, they said.
He was the Canadian Aviation Hall of Fame's choice as "Father of Commercial Aviation in Canada," and the pioneering founder of what would become Canadian Airlines.
But that's not who he was.
James A. Richardson was born on Aug. 21, 1885, in Kingston, Ont. His mother was a descendant of United Empire Loyalists. His grandfather, the original James Richardson, who didn't have a middle name, emigrated to Canada from Ireland in 1823 and set up a tailoring business in Kingston. But when his customers began paying for their clothes with grain, he was left with only one option -- to begin selling it.
By 1857, he had created James Richardson and Sons Ltd., grain traders.
Fifty years later, his grandson, James A., would graduate from Queens -- the university he grew up across the street from -- and join the company.
He arrived here in 1912. He was 27, tall, handsome, rich and a bachelor in a city at the historic height of its prosperity.
James Richardson neither smoked nor drank.
Instead he preferred riding horses, hunting moose, fishing, curling, squash, tennis, golfing at St. Charles and Pine Ridge.
And watching his friends play cards while they smoked and drank.
In 1919, the same year he took over as president, he married Muriel Sprague of Belleville, Ont.
At a time when family business successions actually were expected to succeed -- as the name James Richardson and Sons suggests -- James represented the third generation of Richardsons to head the great grain company.
But he had more on his mind than grain. He had his eye on the horizon, where the big sky met the wheatfields that made his fortune.
In 1926, with James as president and Muriel as the figurative co-pilot and vice president, Western Canada Airways Ltd. began operation. The pioneer company grew into Canadian Airways, before being bought by Canadian Pacific, merging with Pacific Western Airlines into Canadian Airlines and finally being swallowed whole by Air Canada.
James Richardson not only personally financed and pioneered aviation that opened up northern mining, he also pioneered commercial radio on the Prairies.
The first station, CJRM, went on the air from Moose Jaw in 1926. The following year, CJRW began broadcasting across the Prairie provinces as a means of sending stock reports to Richardson's farm customers. News and weather reports were added later. Other stations were bought and sold until the family got out of radio in 1951.
Along the way, James Richardson would serve on a score of Canada's largest boards and America's largest boards of trade.
But, on reading his Free Press library file, what struck me most about J.A.R. -- as he was known in the grain exchange trading pit -- wasn't just how hard he worked.
It was how much he gave of himself and his wealth.
And how much he impressed people who knew or met him.
They talked about his integrity and accessibility, how he was unassuming and friendly, warm-hearted and generous and easy to meet and talk to.
"He was always there, always waiting to listen, always ready to do what he could," the Free Press reported.
His willingness to listen to and help people he didn't even know was legendary on the streets of Winnipeg.
He was the personification of the image we like to have of ourselves, as open, caring and giving Prairie folk.
"People used to line up to talk to him," recalled his daughter Kathleen, the youngest of his four children.
There is, for instance, a story about a university professor who couldn't afford the $1,000 it would take to publish his thesis.
"Why not see James Richardson?" another faculty member suggested.
"I don't know the man," the professor said.
"Well, go see him anyway," his colleague urged.
So he ended up seated outside Richardson's office on the 10th floor of the Grain Exchange Building, waiting his turn.
"Come in," the grain baron finally said, cheerily.
Soon thereafter, James Richardson rang a bell summoning his assistant. The $1,000, he directed, was to be drawn from his personal account.
Then there was the story of the young trader who fell on hard times and borrowed money from Richardson.
Within the month, he returned to Richardson's office to repay him. But in the course of taking the time to talk to the grateful trader, Richardson learned that the young man's wife had been sick.
He cancelled the debt.
There were times when Richardson didn't have time to see everyone who was lined up outside his office looking for his help. He had another train to catch.
"And there were some people," Kathleen said, laughing, "who got on the train to talk with him."
The train took him to meetings in the east, and more heaped-on responsibilities.
"What made his interest in Winnipeg the more amazing," wrote the Free Press, "was that the demands upon his time, his energy and his wealth were not confined to this city. They came from everywhere."
But his interests, were everywhere, too.
In the 1930s, within a decade of Lindbergh's first trans-Atlantic flight, he was plotting air routes to carry his wheat to China.
Still, Canada was where he lived and worked.
"He grew as Canada grew, and on her fortunes he staked his own," a Free Press reporter wrote.
But on March 31, 1931, as the Depression deepened, the aviation pioneer's fortunes -- and his fortune -- suddenly went into a steep decline. Halfway through its four-year contract, Ottawa cancelled the Trans-Prairie Air Mail service that Richardson's fleet of planes had been providing.
Richardson lost $3 million, roughly what his estate was worth on his death eight years later -- hundreds of millions in today's dollars.
Nevertheless the aviation industry continued to grow in the early 1930s.
Ottawa created Trans Canada Airlines, using Richardson's prototype and with J.A.R's personal assistance as an unwitting consultant.
Then, in 1937, during a slump in the mining sector, the Canadian commercial aviation industry crash-landed. James Richardson saw it coming and was quick to suggest remedies, but it was two years before Ottawa began to react to his recommendations.
About then, in late June 1939, James Richardson returned from yet another business trip to Toronto.
There is another story from around that time that suggests the pressure the tall, heavy-set Richardson was under.
"Boy," he told a taxi driver who was dropping him off at his Wellington Crescent mansion , "I would trade jobs with you any day."
On June 26, 1939, two days after he arrived home, James Richardson had a heart attack as he was getting out of bed at his home at 475 Wellington Cres.
Two hours later, he was dead at the age of 54.
On hearing of the tender-hearted tycoon's unexpected death, the Free Press lowered its flags to half mast, and Richardson's radio station extended the customary moment of silence into an entire day.
Agnes, the oldest of the four children at 19, hurried home from Vancouver at the news of her father's death. His oldest son, James Richardson, the future Trudeau cabinet minister, was 17. George, who would succeed his older brother as head of the company, wasn't quite 15, and Kathleen -- whose fondest memories of her father would be riding horses together -- had just turned 11.
James Richardson left his family an estate valued at just over $3.4 million -- most of it in shares -- and $1.6 million in life insurance.
His wife, Muriel Richardson, who would become the first woman to be inducted into the Canadian Business Hall of Fame, took over as company president for the next 27 years, until 1966 when her sons assumed control.
She would forever hold the federal government of the day responsible for her husband's early death.
He had financed personally the birth of commercial aviation in Canada, and Ottawa had not only failed to help, it chose to hinder, by cancelling contracts and then, with its unlimited resources and powers, it created a competing airline.
During the days that followed James Richardson's death, the paper was full of heartfelt and glowing tributes.
"He has done more for Canada than perhaps any one man," said a mining company executive.
"I have always regarded Mr. James Richardson as the outstanding citizen of this city, in fact as one of Canada's great men," said a fellow grain executive. "A leader not only in business but in many other philanthropic activities -- church, schools and charity."
"Whatever the future of the industry may be," the Free Press wrote "the history of commercial aviation in the last decade will always remain a monument to James Richardson's foresight, courage and good citizenship."
Thousands turned out for his funeral at Augustine Church, in Osborne Village. The heavens were a hazy blue as saluting planes flew over the church and graveyard ceremony at St. John's Cemetery.
Then there was the Free Press eulogy.
"The story of big Jim Richardson is the story of a simple man that can be told in simple words, for generosity is the key to Jim Richardson's career and the reason why no touch of rancour marked his life . . .
"Moving in the peak of financial circles, where no quarter is given or asked, working day and night to hold together the vast creation that was the Richardson interests, he never lost that quality of great humanity and unique figure in his business.
"He has been called the Midas of the West. To the man on the street, he was almost a mythical personage, but to thousands across the length and breadth of the Dominion he was a generous and warm-hearted friend who never failed them in their need. That was the striking characteristic of Jim Richardson."
I read that over the phone to Kathleen.
"That says it all," she remarked.
Not quite.
On hearing of Richardson's passing, Manitoba's lieutenant-governor of the day, W. J. Tupper, offered these prophetic words:
"Not only did he enjoy the respect and confidence of everyone who knew him, but his name will always be associated with those of our most enterprising and generous citizens."
It certainly will be now.
With the airport renaming honour bestowed by the federal government the Richardson family collectively has been granted the city's marquee naming right.
Not by buying it, as is the fashion today.
But by deserving it.
How old-fashioned.
How fitting for a family that has given so much to Winnipeg for so long.
gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca
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