Clairtone

"Through a cousin of mine, we hired a bunch of guys from Hungary who had worked in some electronic factory and who were all part of the 56 exodus. Once we went to a trade show at a hotel in Houston with six or eight Hungarian guys in three Clairtone trucks. The unions from Chicago wanted to stop us unloading and setting up our displays on the weekend. These American union guys came out and said, “You're not supposed to move products. That job belongs to one of our state unions.” And the lead guy, Bertie Hahn, said, “You just try and stop us.” The Hungarian guys were water polo players, all at least six feet tall. No one was going to get in their way, either Saturday or Sunday. We were the only stereo and hi-fi display in the whole weekend trade show. Those guys would die for Canada. They hated Hungary. They hated Russia. In Canada they had a job, they had profit sharing, they had stock options. And we all made money. It was a fantastic time!"

"Every time there was a serious crisis Peter would phone at one or two o'clock in the morning, and wed talk for an hour. I didn’t tell him what to do because I didn’t know anything about the electronics business. But I said, “Look, there is simply no way that you have to lose this if you tackle it the right way. You have to find somebody who can help you financially.” Munk listened to Schaeffer very carefully. Schaeffer goes on: A couple of months later I learned, from the newspaper like everybody else, that Clairtone was going public. The rest is history. From there on it was up, up, up."

"You thought it was tough going from dealer to dealer for Clairtone every single summer, signing for the new models, competing against Admiral and RCA and so on. Try doing it with car dealers ... Clairtone has only six hundred dealers; Studebaker has eleven hundred. So it ain’t for me, Peter. I’m well off. Why should I waste my life? We're on top of the heap. I’m young, and there’s no way I want to do this for the next five years. You've got my backing if you want to go through with it, but you're on your own, kid. It’s your decision, but it’s also your pain.”"

"Munk set about getting all the basic pieces assembled in a credible form. By the time we went out to raise the money, we had Project Planning Associates working on the Master Plan, we had the Foundation Company of Canada for the civil engineering, we had American Airlines with landing rights, and a deal for our first hotel. We had the Fijian government. Believe me, I needed all that. Because when I first went down to Wood Gundy, the investment house, to raise the $4 million, they could hardly contain themselves laughing. They thought that Peter Munk must have lost his mind because of the setbacks. The last time they heard of me I was being fired from Clairtone and facing all the insider-trading publicity, and then suddenly I reappear as a resort developer in Fiji!"

"“Peter, I think that this is a brilliant move, but I just hope you understand what it means.” I said, “Of course. It’s going to make us the biggest industrialists in Canada, and eventually maybe in the world.” And David replied, “And it’s also going to make you the slave of every fourth-rate car dealer you have to suck up to when they’re signing up an order for the next model—which I have done for six years of selling Clairtone sets. It's not my idea of a good way to spend the rest of my life."

"I had the prospectus of Roberts Realty, so we knew where their sales office was in London. David was articulate, smart and elegant; he looked rich, and he talked rich. He went to the Roberts office and got all the sales information we needed. That was tremendously helpful to me back at Prince Arthur Avenue when I designed the sales program. With the Roberts information as a model I knew what to do: the prices, how to structure the lots, the size of the lots, plus of course Project Planning information about design, and information about the marketing from Gilmour. After the second time he was at the Roberts sales office he asked the salesman out for lunch and got out of him the commission structure, the overhead structure, the whole marketing approach. It only took us a week. We got the whole Roberts structure. I was working with Cochran, Murray. It was very rough going. They could have raised $2 million. That would have been a wild gamble; but $4 million was the minimum. I could not do it for less. I could not take a chance, after what I'd gone through with Clairtone, to be short a million bucks. I just couldn’."

"The Move to Gold pressures. Clairtone, the hotel days, then Egypt. The Viking disaster. Those were very heavy times in my life."