From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

Laura (Mrs. A.D.) McCain
Mrs. A.D. was Florenceville’s leading philanthropist,
involved in a wide range of community activities, from
starting a Boy Scout troop to founding the Florenceville
public library. She collected used clothing at her house so
that anyone in need could drop by and choose an item. She
ran her own social housing program, renting out about a
dozen houses in the town at low rents.
“If someone in Florenceville needed help, she was the
one they went to,” says McCain Foods chairman Allison
McCain. “Maybe someone needed help with a mortgage;
the bank wasn’t interested in people who had no resources,
so they went to her. If people got let go at the factory, they
would go to her and say, ‘I really need that job.’
“Once when I was the production manager I fired a guy
– it was the right thing to do. The next day, when I walked
into the personnel manager’s office, he was on the phone.
‘The production manager just walked in and he was the
one who fired him, so you can talk to him,’ he said into
the phone before handing it to me. Turned out it was my
grandmother on the other end.
“The guy I had fired had gone to her. We didn’t end up
taking him back, but I do know of a couple of cases where
people did end up coming back to work for us because of
her intervention.”
Laura McCain was also well known for her driving.
“We used to be terrified,” recounts her grandson Andrew
McCain. “She insisted on giving us a ride home from school
if she happened to be there. It was absolutely terrifying
to be in the car with her going over the bridge. She could
barely see over the wheel, and she would be driving
almost a hundred kilometres an hour. But she always got
us home safely.”
The bridge in question is old and narrow. Mrs. McCain’s
car was big. “She waited until there wasn’t any traffic and then
scooted across down the middle of the bridge,” recalls retired
McCain food scientist Paul Dean. If a local resident happened
to be driving on the bridge in the oncoming direction, that
driver knew to back up and let Mrs. McCain pass.
She kept a close watch on her own children, not only
when they were growing up but also as adults. Joe Palmer,
former owner of Day & Ross and a friend of the McCain
brothers, sometimes received phone calls from Mrs. McCain
asking that he intervene to change some behaviour of
which she disapproved. As Palmer recounts in his biography,
Mrs. McCain would call, state the problem, and then
hang up before Palmer had a chance to reply and without
saying goodbye. A typical call would go like this: “Joe, this is
Laura McCain. I wish Wallace wouldn’t swear so much. He’ll
listen to you.” Then she would hang up.
Palmer estimated he received two dozen such calls about
Mrs. McCain’s four sons. “In twenty-four or twenty-five phone
conversations, I never once got a word in before she hung up.
She was a great woman, and I had a world of respect for her.”
TOP LEFT: Laura
McCain and family:
(left to right) Wallace,
Eleanor, Harrison,
Laura, Mr. A.D., Marie,
Bob, Andrew.
RIGHT: Mrs. A.D.,
the family matriarch,
was as famous for her
driving as she was for
her philanthropy.
could run ten thousand pounds per hour, the McCain
way would be to have it run at twelve thousand pounds.
Ten isn’t acceptable. It was an attitude of never saying
no. Never giving up. As a company, we have survived
for thirty-five years using that philosophy.”
Bud Cox made another contribution to McCain
Foods: he had nine children and all of them worked
for the company at one time or another. On one night
shift, his son Tony was working under his supervision.
During the shift, Bud fired and rehired him twice. As of
2007, six Cox offspring were McCain employees.
Cox and others who worked at McCain in the early
days had to be generalists. If a machine needed fixing,
you figured out how to fix it, even if you didn’t know
how to fix machines. Cox said: “We trained ourselves,
got a little manual, called the serviceman, who probably
didn’t know more than we did. If we were lucky we
bought a piece of equipment that would work and give the results we wanted. If we
bought a piece, put it in the line, didn’t get results, then we had to figure out what we
had to do to that piece to make it work.”
Sometimes innovative methods were employed. In one legendary incident, an engineer
and a production supervisor were trying to figure out what was wrong with
the freezing tunnel. To investigate, they donned snowmobile suits and rode through
the tunnel on the belt. On another occasion, when an underground pipe plugged and
attempts to unplug it were unsuccessful, someone decided to shoot a gun into the
pipe to clear it. It didn’t work.
The McCains knew they needed good people if their business was to succeed, and so
they went looking for them. They tried to lure an engineer named Carl Morris from
the Birds Eye plant just across the border in Maine. Morris declined. “I didn’t think
they were going to amount to much,” he explains. How, he thought, could such a
small company compete with the likes of General Foods?
McCain was packing some products under the Birds Eye label, and Morris had
met the two brothers during his visits to Florenceville to ensure its production was
16 From the Ground up
t he BeG inninG 17
TOP: Carl Morris (right) with
Dave Morgan, winner of a
1969 safety contest for his
suggestion to install Dutch
doors in the mezzanine of the
Florenceville building.
BOTTOm: Marilyn Strong,
1971. Strong joined McCain in
1961 as Harrison’s secretary.