Negatives Fuel Forward Momentum

“felt that Harrison was making a bad mistake. Harrison finally decided to go for it and to use $30,000 of his inherit- ance in the venture. In his interview with Downey, he said that when he left Irving Oil to start a business, he was “working full time with- out pay for myself.” Although he had talked at length about going into business with his brother Wallace, “I wasn’t representing the two of us. I paid my own bills, he wasn’t paying half. I looked after myself.”27 Still, Harrison did tell Wallace what he planned to do and asked if he wanted in the business. Wallace responded, “You go ahead and start and we’ll see how it goes. I’ll help you all I can, I’ll put some money in and see if it’s big enough for the two of us, and I’ll see what I’m going to do.” Harrison’s response: “No, no, come right now. Come right now. Don’t fool around, just make up your mind.”28 Wallace then became the second McCain to leave an Irving business. He gave six months’ notice, and during that time Harrison and Bob laid the groundwork for the new business. They visited large frozen- food producers in the United States and tried to identify potential dis- tributors in Canada. Still Harrison later reported that everyone felt that “we were stupid. It was the wrong thing to do, but I think the more negatives we heard, the more positive we became that we wanted to go into it.”29 Initially the thinking was that each of the four brothers should invest”

“told him that he was crazy. The money the brothers had invested wouldn’t, however, get them far. Nor did they have access to the expertise they so sorely needed. It certainly did not exist anywhere in Carleton County or, for that matter, in Canada. All they had was the raw material – potatoes. However, the quality of the local potatoes was in question, at least when compared to Idaho potatoes, which were considered more suited to the frozen food business. Nor was there yet a market in the three Maritime provinces for frozen food, and the large markets were thousands of miles away. Then there was transportation to consider, a daunting problem in the late 1950s, especially for moving frozen food. The transportation infra- structure and industry in New Brunswick in the late 1950s were both lacking on many fronts, particularly when it concerned frozen food. They also lacked financial resources.”