In October 2006, Dr. Robert R. Archibald, president of the Missouri Historical Society, sat down with Jack Taylor, founder of St. Louis-based Enterprise Rent-A-Car®, to talk about Taylor’s early years, his business philosophy, and his approach to philanthropy. This is part one of a two-part interview, to be concluded in the fall/winter 2007-08 issue of Voices.

Introduction

	Jack Crawford Taylor, 2006. Courtesy of Jack Taylor.

In 1957, Jack Taylor founded Enterprise Rent-A-Car® (then called Executive Leasing) in the basement of a Cadillac dealership where he worked as a salesman in his hometown of St. Louis.  In the coming decades, as the rest of the rental car industry focused on serving airports, Taylor created the “home city” rental market.  By renting cars from convenient, neighborhood locations to meet a variety of customer needs, Enterprise became the industry leader by quietly but steadily developing a nearly $10 billion market that is now the largest and most hotly contested segment in the roughly $19 billion U.S. car rental industry.

A quiet and unassuming man by nature, Taylor founded his company on a simple philosophy that has been the company’s hallmark for half a century: “Take care of your customers and employees first, and profits will follow.”

Taylor has balanced his business accomplishments with community involvement. He is an Emeritus Trustee of Washington University in St. Louis and founder of the Enterprise Rent-A-Car Foundation, the company’s charitable arm.  The Foundation was established in 1982 to make donations—now totaling more than $10 million annually—primarily to not-for-profit organizations in the local communities where Enterprise employees work and live.

Taylor’s son, Andy Taylor, succeeded him as chief executive officer in 1991, and took on the additional role of chairman in 2001.

 

ROBERT R. ARCHIBALD: You grew up in Ames Place your first years.

JACK TAYLOR:  6604 Pershing in Ames Place, right.

Jack Taylor and his brother Paul spent their early childhood at 6604 Pershing in St. Louis. Photograph, ca. late 1920s. Courtesy of Jack Taylor.

RRA:  For how many, ’til you were how old?

JT:  I was about 13 when we moved to 34 Oakleigh Lane, and I lived at 34 Oakleigh Lane with my family. My grandparents, my maternal grandmother and grandfather, lived with us. Which was unusual, but it was a lovely household. And I lived there until I went I went in the Navy, and then I was married while I was in the latter part of my time in the Navy. And when I came back, I came back and lived in St. Louis, got an apartment in Manhasset Village, if you know where that was. It’s now been torn down. And lived there until I finally built my first house.

Jack and his family moved to 34 Oakleigh Lane when he was approximately 13 years old. Courtesy of Jack Taylor.

RRA:  What did your father do?

JT:  My father was a stockbroker.

RRA:  For a company here in St. Louis?

JT:  He was with a small company, which was later sold out to a larger company. And he was a really good guy. And I think a lot of my philosophies about how I feel about business and things like that I got from him. He was never terribly financially successful but he always made a good living and was just a really good guy.

RRA:  Did he get hurt during the Depression?

	Jack Taylor's father, Mel. Courtesy of Jack Taylor.

JT:  Because my grandfather lived with us and he had a good job, we had in the household two incomes, my father’s income and my grandfather’s income. And we knew the Depression was on, but there was always food, and we had a couple of cars and I was never really affected by it. But I knew that things were tough and I remember my father would say “turn off the lights, they cost money.” And yeah, we knew money was tight, but as I say, we had two incomes in the house and we were not deprived.

RRA:  So sort of describe that household and who was in it. It was your maternal grandparents?

JT:  My brother, my mother and my father, and my mother’s mother and father. And my mother’s mother, my grandmother, was not terribly healthy, and I think my mother convinced my grandmother and my grandfather, well, why don’t you just come live with us? And it was a very, very wonderful household. They all got along well and we’d all sit down to dinner every night. My grandfather was an inventor and not terribly well-educated but a very knowledgeable engineer. And my father was a stockbroker, and during their conversations, I learned a lot, I learned a lot from just sitting there listening to them talk about the world and what was happening and their business and that sort of thing.

Jack, Mel, and Paul Taylor. Courtesy of Jack Taylor.

RRA:  When had your family, when had that side of the family arrived in St. Louis? How many generations?

JT:  Oh, my father’s father was here, and I don’t know beyond my father’s father where they were. But my father’s father was in the fur trading business and lived here a long time.

RRA:  What was his name?

JT:  Taylor, my grandfather on my father’s side, his name was Charles Taylor. Died rather young, was in the fur business, and I don’t know anything about his father. I wish now I had quizzed my aunt who lived to be quite elderly about the family but I just didn’t do that.

RRA:  Talk to me a little bit about your daily routine. Where did you go to school, did you walk to school, all that kind…

JT:  I graduated from Clayton High and then I went to Westminster CoIlege.  I came back and went to Washington University for a semester, barely attended class. And at the end of that semester, knew I was going to have to go into service.…What’d they call it, National Induction or National Conscription…

	The exterior of Clayton High School. Jack graduated after attending his senior year at the school. Photograph, ca. 1950. Missouri Historical Society Library.

RRA:  Yeah.

JT:  …was in place so I knew they were gonna call me ’cause I was young and healthy. So I went to work for several months, after I joined the Navy and [was] waiting to be called, and I worked in my grandfather’s foundry and machine shop, which was National Bearing Metals over on Manchester. It was a substantial railroad supply business. I ran a 24-inch Bullard turret lave for about six or seven months.

RRA:  Was this for making the balls?

JT:  I made journal bearings for railroad, for freight cars, yeah. I bore them out and then offset bore them, yeah, and I kinda liked doing it. I thought at one time I wanted to be a mechanical engineer, whatever that is. But then when I got out of the Navy, that didn’t happen.

RRA:  Where did you go to grade school?

JT:  Glen Park Grade School. Still ride by and look at it every now and then and remember my years there. That’s one-through-six grade school.

RRA:  Did you walk to school?

JT:  From Ames Place, lots of days. Yes, walked, rode my bicycle, roller-skated.

RRA:  Roller-skated to school?

JT:  Roller-skated, yeah. The alleys were great for roller-skating.

RRA:  Even with the cobblestones?

JT:  Yeah, you’d roller-skate up the alley and it was terrific, yeah.

RRA:  So when you were in grade school or high school or whatever, what kinds of things did you do just for fun?

JT:  There was no television then. And there was radio but kids, they played, we played corkball for one thing, if you remember corkball, sort of a St. Louis sport.

RRA:  Tell me a little bit about it. I think I know a little bit but not much.

JT:  Corkball, it’s a little ball that looks like a little miniature baseball and the bat is a thin, narrow bat. I don’t remember the ground rules now, but you had a pitcher and a catcher and you would try to hit the ball, and it was a game that was invented in St. Louis. I think it was originally played in alleys or during lunchtime. And played touch football. Oakleigh Lane had a lovely side yard, and I had some friends and we would play touch football. And it just was a lovely period to grow up. No pressures, no television, no… and kids liked to be out doing things.

RRA:  Did you ever think about how hot it was in the summer?

JT:  Never bothered me. Loved hot weather, loved hot weather. Hate cold weather, love hot weather.

RRA:  What kind of family outings did you do?

JT:  I know we used to go away in the summertime. My dad had, I remember, a 1933 Ford, and we drove up to Michigan one summer in that. And then we had a 1940 Ford convertible once and I drove up to Canada in that car with my mother once and we went to Perry Sound. A friend of ours had a cottage out in Georgia Bay. And there were always things happening. I went away to camp four years, I think. I went to a camp in Illinois called Camp Quiver when I was quite young, and then I went to a place called Round Up Lodge for two years. Which was a horse camp. That was out in Buena Vista, Colorado. And I went there for two years.

RRA:  That must have been a grand experience.

JT:  Yeah, and we went for two months.

RRA:  Did your whole family go?

JT:  No, just my brother and I. My brother and I, we did everything together. He and I weren’t that tight but we liked each other. But we pretty well went our ways. There’s nineteen months difference between my brother and I.

RRA:  Is he older or younger?

JT:  Younger.

RRA:  Younger. Is he living?

JT:  Yes. He’s still living. My father died when he was 67 and my brother and I, I’m 84 and my brother will be 83 in November. So we sit around and we’re amazed that we’re still alive when our family line has not lived that long.

RRA:  Must be good living.

JT:  We take care of ourselves, we think.

RRA:  That makes a big difference. Were there particular teachers that you remember?

Younger Group Athletics at the Taylor School. Jack Taylor is seated fourth from the left. Halftone, 1936. Missouri Historical Society Library.

JT:  I went to a private school. I graduated from Clayton, I went there in my senior year, but prior to that I had gone to a private school for seven years called Taylor School, strangely, not related to me. The headmaster of the school who started it was not related to me or my family. And I really liked Taylor School, and there was a teacher there by the name of Allen Cole who taught Latin, and there was a French teacher whose last name was Mutrol, I don’t know what his first name was. And of course, Joe Taylor, who owned the school, was just a fabulous guy. He would have an assembly every morning and was a spellbinder when he talked. He would talk about world affairs and what we had to do in the school that day and everything. And I really liked him.

RRA:  Where was Taylor School?

JT:  On Central Avenue, right where, 201, let’s see, Central Avenue, just north of Pershing. In Clayton, right downtown Clayton. Two old frame houses. One was the school and the other one was a faculty house where some of his teachers lived.

RRA:  It sounds like you had a nearly idyllic childhood.

JT:  I really did. I really did. Other than the fact that I had to have my tonsils out, that was the worse thing that probably happened to me. But yeah, I had a great family and environment was terrific. And we all cared about each other.

RRA:  Those days a lot of people had their tonsils out.

JT:  I know they did. That’s right.

RRA:  My generation, not many people did.

JT:  I know. They don’t take them out much anymore. You’re a lot younger than I am.

RRA:  A little bit, a little bit. So you were a pretty sick guy after that, sore?

JT:  Yeah, I remember that vaguely. I think they gave me a milkshake finally, that was the first thing they gave me and it calmed my throat down but I remember that vaguely. I guess I was seven years old at that time. Something like that.

RRA:  When you grew up, was your family religious at all?

JT:  No, my mother, my grandmother and grandfather, I don’t know if they went to church or not. My mother used to take Paul and me to church on Sunday when we were nine, ten, around there. My father never went to church. And I asked him, I said, Dad, why don’t you ever go to church when we go to church? He said, I don’t feel I need it. If I’m going to think about God or anything, I go out and sit under a tree and think about it and look at the sky and look at the tree and that sort of stuff. But he sort of moved off. He was not a religious person. My mother was an Episcopalian. How closely she was aligned with that religion, I don’t know.

RRA:  What were holidays like? Christmas, Thanksgiving…

JT:  Generally a big deal, you know. Turkeys, and my aunts and uncles came over and maybe my cousins when we were at that age when the cousins were young enough that they came. They were, I remember mostly on Sunday we had Sunday dinner at one o’clock and it generally was a turkey or a ham or a lamb or something like that, with cranberries and all the other stuff. And then we had sandwiches that night. That was what most Sundays were like. Strawberry shortcake.

RRA:  So what did a young couple do for…what was St. Louis like then? What did you do, what kinds of entertainment did you engage in?

JT:  We generally, at this time none of us had a lot of money and so we generally gathered at our friends’ house on the weekend. We had B.Y.O.L., you know what that is? Bring Your Own Liquor. So we would go and the hostess would have an onion dip or some potato chips and you would bring your own bottle of booze and you would all just hang out and talk and laugh and giggle and that sort of thing. Maybe go to the movie. That would be a big night. Rarely went out for dinner. And if you did, you generally went to a hamburger joint or something. And early on you were happy the war was over and you’re happy you’re all back and could do those things. But it was a very simple life back in those days.

RRA:  So after the war when you come back and you’re running your delivery service, I assume St. Louis was pretty prosperous then?

JT:  Yeah, well, St. Louis has never been a high and low city. When things are bad, it doesn’t go as low as the cities that are in trouble. But when things were good, it never hits the heights that other cities hit. St. Louis always kind of flows through the middle and it’s sort of a together, calm, unemotional sort of city where you don’t have the big highs and the big lows. The highs aren’t as high as maybe LA would be, and the lows aren’t as low as maybe Pittsburgh would be when they had a steel problem. It sort of flows through the middle.

RRA:  Did you ever think, after the war, about leaving St. Louis?

JT:  No, that’s never crossed my mind. As a matter of fact, I was talking with some of our Enterprise Rent-A-Car® employees that had moved here, and some of them had moved seven and eight times. I was talking to one of our executives and I said, how can your wife deal with this? And he said, she’s wonderful, she does. And I said, I’ve never moved once other than being in the Navy, and I don’t know how I would deal with having to move to another place.

RRA:  Besides your deep family ties here, are there other things about St. Louis that just feel good to you?

JT:  I just have so many… like Forest Park, as you know, I’ve been involved with the park. My dad would take me and my brother out and they had electric boats in the park at that time and we’d get in the electric boat. And I remember riding around the park with my dad in an electric boat. And somehow or other, that memory is so prevalent in my mind that that’s why I gave the money to the park, ’cause I’m sentimentally attached to it. As you know, I’m involved with the symphony. I remember when I went to Taylor School, one Thursday afternoon a month we would go to what was called the Student Symphony. And the symphony orchestra played programs tailored for young people. I remember that. And St. Louis for me, I’m just the luckiest guy in the world. It was a wonderful place to grow up.

RRA:  I’m also very much an admirer of the philanthropy that you’ve done and I’m aware that some people who have wealth choose not to give it away or not to give it away the way you have. And I’m always interested in the motivations of people who do what you do, because there’s an incredible sense of obligation implicit in what you’re doing and it’s wonderful.

JT:  Why do I do it?

RRA:  Yeah.

JT:  First of all, it’s fun. When you give some money and the people to whom you give it, they generally are grateful. So many big businesses have moved away from St. Louis, so there’s not the big givers there used to be. Fortunately our business has been good and it’s expanded far beyond I ever thought [possible]. I’m 84 years old, I don’t need a bigger house. I had a boat once. I can’t wear more suits than I’ve got, so what do I do with it? So you’re faced, well, you’ve got this money, and you don’t want anything, what do you do with it? Well, you give it away. You give it to somebody who needs it, wants it, can use it, will make things better because you give them that money. So I don’t know what would have happened to the symphony if me and my family had not come by.

	Members of the Taylor family celebrate with Dr. Virginia Weldon and Randy Adams of the Saint Louis Symphony after the symphony reached its fundraising goal. The Taylor family matched the challenge of $40 million. From left to right: Dr. Virginia Weldon, Andy Taylor, Barbara Taylor, Chrissy Taylor, Jack Taylor, Jo Ann Taylor Kindle, Carolyn Kindle Payne, Susan Taylor, Randy Adams. Photograph, 2004. Saint Louis Symphony file photo.

RRA:  I view things like the symphony as really one of the major magnets for the community without which we’d be much poorer.

JT:  I think having a first-class symphony to some degree identifies the city as to what kind of city it is. It shows that people are interested in culture. And I want St. Louis to be looked upon as a first-class city, which I think it is. And I think having that symphony puts that stamp on it.

RRA:  I think you’re absolutely right, and I think in the aggregate the institutions like the symphony and the garden and the opera theater and so on make this a desirable place.

JT:  Yeah, and Forest Park. And this is one of the biggest, most beautiful parks in the country.

RRA:  Sure is.

JT:  If it isn’t THE most…

RRA:  You’ve done a lot to make it so. But it’s interesting that in some ways it’s because you grew up here and you lived here and you’ve got personal ties to these things.

JT:  Yeah, people say, do you give money elsewhere? And I say, my first interest is St. Louis. If it isn’t St. Louis, I’m going to give it a really hard look. I spent my life here, I love this city, I love the people here. And I want to do for St. Louis first.

RRA:  In some ways, your generosity and your philanthropy seem to also reflect your business philosophy, which has always been directed toward other people. Which I find very fascinating.

JT:  Well, I’ll take a minute and tell you. When I started Enterprise, not being a good student and really not liking school and having a tough time in school, I was, I don’t know whether I was just dumb or inattentive or what. But I was not a good student… and Monday morning was always the toughest day of the week because I knew that the teacher would call on me to recite something that I hadn’t studied the Sunday night before, and so forth and so on. And I said, when I go into business, I’m going to do something I want to do. When I get up in the morning, I want to want to go to work and when I get there, I want it to be the kind of place I enjoy, and the way I will make it be enjoyable is have the people that work with me be good people that are glad they are there and the customers that do business with us will say, hey, that’s a good place to do business. And that was my motivation. Money, huh, if we make enough money to succeed, that’s fine. If we make a lot of money, that’s terrific. If we don’t make enough money to stay in business, that’s bad. But as long as we made enough that we could succeed, that’s… and my motivation in business is to have people around me, including the customers and the people that work for me, be happy and glad they’re there, glad they do business with us, glad they’re working for us and have it be a happy place.

RRA:  Did you hear those kinds of conversations around the supper table when you were growing up?

JT:  No, I don’t know where I got this. I know my dad was an always-see-the-bright-side-of-the-thing, of the world, sort of guy. He was a positive guy and he was a very ethical guy, but he was a fun guy. And I said I want to be like him.

RRA: When you look back at all of that, when you look back at the extraordinary growth, exponential growth of everything that you began, do you have incredible sense of pride for all that?

JT:  I really don’t, I really don’t think about it.

RRA:  Don’t you?

JT:  When I go to lunch occasionally and I will talk with one of my executives, I try to go to lunch with each one of them eventually, and they tell me about things we’re doing and we’re doing things that I don’t even know about. And I say, I didn’t even know we were doing that. Well, it’s gotten so big I can’t keep my finger into everything. But I have a hard time wrapping my arms around how big we’ve gotten. We’ve gotten, a Marcom department that I think, it’s marketing and communications, that has 40 or 42 people in it. And I say, why do we need 42 people? They say, Jack, we’re making up ads and dealing with people all around the world, it takes a lot of people. But no, I don’t think about it. I think it’s wonderful and I think I’m very fortunate to have a son that likes the business and cares about it as much as I do and has my same attitudes about it, about the integrity and the making sure the customer is happy and making sure the people are happy.

Andy Taylor. Courtesy of Jack Taylor.

RRA:  But you don’t ever just put your feet up on a stool and have a drink and say, wow?

JT:  I guess I’ve done it occasionally, but I don’t think about it a lot. I think about it when I’m talking to you but yeah, it’s been a real, I guess it’s been a real success story. I’ve been very lucky.

RRA:  It’s been an incredible success story. I think one of the great success stories of 20th-century American business.

JT:  Well, let’s not get carried away here. Yeah, well when you think of it, we started from scratch. There wasn’t, if you wanted to rent a car other than the airport, there was no place to rent a car other than the airport. And we started doing that and it was a huge market for it.

RRA:  I went to Florida one time and I rented a car from Enterprise, I think I went to Fort Meyers, and your rental location was off the airport grounds but there was a shuttle that took me there. I’ve never had such service in my life. And the funny thing was that they asked me where I was from and I said St. Louis, and they, to a person, knew your name and thought the world of you. I mean, this is down in the lower levels of your company.

JT:  Well, I’m glad they feel that way. I hope they do and I’ve done everything I can to make them feel that way about the company. Whether they feel that way about me or not, it’s very nice that they do, but…

RRA:  But they gave the kind of service that you talk about and it’s amazing to me that a company that size can be that imbued with a philosophy and I can’t imagine what you did to make that permeate.

JT:  It’s taken some work but it’s easy to do because people like the idea of what we’re trying to accomplish.

Talking
to Us