David W. Friesen had little more than a Grade 10 education and the inspiration of 19th-century rags-to-riches books by Horatio Alger, which he avidly read in the dead-flat prairie town of Altona.
He set up a confectionary store in the Manitoba town in 1907, began a print shop with zero knowledge of printing, and … well, a great deal of business history later, the company he founded, still firmly rooted in Altona, is a North American printing giant with annual revenue of more than $80 million.
About 15% of Friesens Corp.’s business is in British Columbia, where there are four Friesens representatives. While many other publishers, distributors and writers have fallen on harsh times, Friesens has prospered, printing, on its state-of-the-art presses, trade books and “keepsake books” – school and university yearbooks, and hard-cover, often voluminous local histories, almost a Friesens monopoly. (A professor once complained that the company printed “history by the pound.”)
Latest high-profile job hereabouts: The tome begun by the late Chuck Davis, The Vancouver Book, selling briskly. The company is proud of pioneering the printing of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on 100% recycled paper, claiming author J.K. Rowling then insisted that all future Harry Potter books worldwide be printed “tree-free.”
The Friesens are Mennonites in a town of about 4,000 that D.W.’s grandson, David G. (for Glenn) Friesen, estimates is 90% Mennonite, with scores of Friesens in the phone book. The Mennonites are apparently thrifty with names: David G.’s father was also a David. Most prominent of his several early businesses was the Altona (later Red River Valley) Echo. In early days the family lived in the back of the print shop.
The present David has “an abiding memory of my father sitting at his Royal typewriter, typing with two fingers, a pack of du Maurier cigarettes on his left and a Coca-Cola on his right.”
David G., like his parents and grandparents, was born in Altona (he just turned 65), worked after school hours melting the lead that fed the newspaper’s typesetting machines, took a University of Manitoba degree in economics and returned home where he turned his hand to reporting and selling advertising. He rose to become president and CEO, stepping down in 1986. Today he’s chairman of the Friesens board.
Sounds like the familiar rise of the son up the family ladder. Not so. Friesens is not a family business. It’s an astonishingly successful co-op, its shares entirely owned by its more than 500 employees, making “everyone responsible” for its success, David says. Friesens seeks out “young men to drive the company” whatever their ties. (Thus the current president, Curwin Friesen, is a Friesen – but not related to the founding Friesens.)
It would appear that Altona was David’s inescapable destiny. Not so either. Along life’s way he acquired an Irish wife, Eveline.
“I came from a town with one pub and a dozen Mennonite churches,” he says. “She came from a town with one church and 17 pubs.” And Eveline also brought with her an Irish heart and soul – sorely pinched by Manitoba’s penetrating winter cold and winds. After 34 years she still hadn’t begun to appreciate them.
“It’s fair to say that she never warmed up to the prairie winters,” David drily and tactfully puts it.
Instead Eveline loved rain. Rain! And where could she find her climatic heart’s desire, the soaked sod reminiscence of the Auld Sod, if not in the home of wet, the duchy of damp, the city that never seeps – yes, our very own Vancouver, enfolded in the Pacific Coast rainforest?
So several years ago David, encouraged by a business and personal friendship with Michael Burch of North Vancouver’s Whitecap Books, acquired a holiday condo in Kitsilano.
In 2009 David and Eveline swallowed the real estate differential and moved permanently to the Greater Tiddlycove area of West Vancouver, where David is much amused by the twee names of South Piccadilly, Pilot House Road, The Highway and The Dale.
No regrets: David loves the water views and the almost country-like area, yet proximity to the city. A fresh-faced and congenial man whose looks belie his attainment of old age-pension status, he keeps his prairie roots nourished by flying to board meetings once or twice a month. Golf and travel are his leisure interests.
Friesens is sharply aware of threats to its business, obviously from low-wage China and from Internet competition.
To meet the latter, it established an Internet subsidiary, FriesenPress, in Victoria. Its staff helps customers to edit and even market their electronic books – distribution always being the hardest part of self-publishing and indeed mainstream publishing.
These are difficult times. Just to be safe, it might be a good time to look up D.W. Friesen’s Horatio Alger books. •
