The initials monogrammed on Joe Segal’s shirt cuff are tiny as two ants.
J.S.
A small identity stamp, not a grand embellishment. They are a modest statement, not unlike the one he gives about the June 4 gala that will celebrate his 88 years on this planet: “I don’t want the dinner. I don’t need it.”
He flashes a wry smile, graciously downplaying his role as honoree at the fundraising event, Joe Segal: An Extraordinary Life.
“But if it’s going to benefit an organization, I’ll be there.”
The organization is Coast Mental Health, beneficiary of the gala and much of Segal’s legendary philanthropy.
The businessman who gleefully defied the predictions of in-laws, who once said he would never amount to anything, would rather talk about the plight of the mentally ill than himself.
With the deft hand of a man accustomed to successfully steering negotiations and sealing deals, Segal continually nudges the conversation in the direction he would like it to go.
“Twenty-five per cent of the population walking the streets around the world have a mental health problem of one type or another. There is a stigma. When you have cancer or a heart problem, there is lots of support. When you have mental health problems, you walk alone.”
Segal knows what it is to walk alone — his father died when he was 14, prompting him to quit school and set out to earn his own way in the world. But since he met Rosalie, his wife of 65 years, he says he has been lucky to have a “partner in everything.”
Together they have survived lean years and enjoyed Segal’s extraordinary success, an adventure that has seen Segal go from penniless kid to billionaire business titan whose CV is stacked with awards and honours, not just for his business acumen, but for his humanitarian efforts and commitment to the community.
Together, Joe and Rosalie Segal have supported many causes, including unheralded interest-free micro loans to needy individuals, as well as contributions that have dramatically influenced the character of the city — such as their 2005 donation of the Bank of Montreal heritage building at Granville and Pender, which became the SFU Segal Graduate School of Business.
Most recently, the couple has poured their efforts, and money, into supporting mental health.
In 2010, the couple gave $12 million to the VGH & UBC Hospital foundation to create the Joseph and Rosalie Segal Family Health centre, a proposed 100-room acute-care centre serving people with mental health needs.
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Sun pours in the wide corner windows of his office overlooking the Hotel Georgia and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Segal is here daily, his coffee table strewn with some of the dozens of newspapers and publications he reads each week.
The monogrammed shirt cuff is clipped with gold cufflinks. In the pocket of his perfectly tailored jacket is an orange paisley pocket square that matches his tie. On his lapel, two small pins representing his Order of B.C. and his Order of Canada.
The honours and accolades have streamed in over the decades as Segal built a merchandising empire that includes starting Fields department stores, acquiring Zellers, becoming the largest single shareholder of the Hudson’s Bay Company and, later, real estate development and venture capital.
His community work includes six years as chancellor of SFU, and he’s credited with having the vision for the downtown campus.
“He said why would you want to have your customers so far away?” marvels Jack Blaney, SFU president emeritus, recalling their first lunch some 20 years ago.
At Kingswood Capital’s Georgia Street office, Segal’s hand is still on every paper, his ear to the phone on deals, and each day around noon he strolls, as he has for 30 years, over to the Four Seasons for lunch.
Segal says he was moved to support mental health causes after attending a Courage to Come Back dinner 12 or 13 years ago. The dinner, where he heard people share personal stories of living with mental and emotional issues, moved him deeply.
Learning that mental health was chronically underfunded was a clarion call.
He and Rosalie quickly adopted the cause that advocates call the health system’s “neglected stepchild.”
“It’s not a sexy cause,” says Segal, musing on why mental health services have been so overlooked.
He looks out the window. “Just imagine how many people walk the streets and have nowhere to turn, no one to turn to. Can you imagine being on the street with no support mechanism in your life, all alone?”
More than one stranger has made their from the street up to Segal’s fifth floor office on a small pilgrimage of hope. Sometimes they come for advice. For mentoring. Sometimes for an envelope Segal has left discreetly at the front desk.
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David McLean, chairman of CN and head of the McLean Group says he’s observed Segal’s quiet, constant generosity during their 40-year friendship.
“Joe is one of those guys who has been very good to a lot of people in need, and has done so with very little fanfare. He’s the kind of guy who does it, and says, ‘You help someone when you can. Pay it forward.’”
Segal protests. “I don’t want to talk about this. I’m embarrassed saying all these things.”
He’d rather acknowledge the people that are on the ground putting the dollars to use.
“Writing a cheque, if you have the money, is easy. Involving yourself in the work, that’s hard.”
He wants to clarify.
He tucks his handkerchief back in his inside pocket and leans forward.
This, he says, is important.
“You knock on a door in East Hastings and an elderly woman comes to the door. She’s 78, maybe 80 and she’s living in this little house, and she’s been living there for 50 years. She and her husband dreamed of owning a house. So they built this house and they lived in this house, and he died and left a pension. A modest pension. When they built it, there were property taxes of maybe $1,000, but now the property taxes are $10,000 because the lot has gone up in value, but she and her husband had this dream, and she wants to stay in this house, and she wants to die here.
“You knock on the door soliciting for whatever, and she wants to say, ‘I can’t help you.’ But she doesn’t. She says, ‘Just a minute.’ She goes to the kitchen. She opens up the cookie jar where she keeps all her money and her shopping list and she takes out $20, and she gives him $20. But what he doesn’t know is that she went back to the kitchen, she took out her shopping list and she crossed off three items. That’s giving. Because she feels it. And she misses it.”
The story could be a parable, but it illustrates more than just what Segal sees as true giving. It’s what so many of his friends and colleagues try to explain about the way he lives and does business, but have difficulty putting into words: Joe sees the whole picture, and in some unconventional way that borders on the mystic, he feels it. Not just the dollars and cents of a transaction, but the entire emotional tapestry of meaning and influence behind it.
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Joe Segal says life is not a journey, or a road. “It’s a runway. You’ve only got so much runway before you take off.”
“How old are you?” he asks. He’ll crunch the numbers, eyes gleaming, calculate what percentage you’ve covered, how much distance you’ve got left — and he’s not afraid to estimate the length of his own runway, what’s used up, what’s yet to come.
When he was a kid, and the runway was a limitless stretch, he wanted only one thing: “To be a success.”
What success meant then, and what it means now are different, he admits.
In the beginning it was about independence, earned a few cents at a time.
“Success, to start with, is making a living,” he says.
“When my father died, I quit school. My mother was a widow, I had siblings, I didn’t want to have to come home and say give me half a dollar.”
To buy a second-hand bicycle, he sold frozen whitefish door to door in Vegreville, Alta., the town where he was born.
“I’d sell you a fish,” he chuckles.
Things were looking up when, at 17, he got work in the North, building the Alaska Highway.
At the end of a year, he had saved $3,000.
Flush, he hopped on a train and headed to Calgary, where he had a girlfriend.
“I landed at the station on 9th Street. There was a taxi office across the street. Polly’s taxi. I had a reservation at the York hotel on Centre Street. I got in this cab and the guy said, ‘Where you from?’ I said, ‘I’ve been up in the bush.’ He said, ‘What do you do up there?’ I said, ‘There’s nothing to do. We play a little friendly poker.’”
The cab driver proposed a little friendly poker game right there, in the office at Polly’s taxi. “We played poker in the office, and then we adjourned to my hotel and played poker all night and by the time we were finished I had nothing.”
Busted flat, Segal phoned his mother. “I said, ‘I can’t pay the hotel bill.’”
She told him he’d made his bed, he’d have to sleep in it.
He still remembers the taxi driver’s name, but he doesn’t hold any resentment.
“It’s part of life. It’s part of growing up. Experience is something you don’t get out of a textbook. If you learn something, it’s worth it.”
Segal had to find work immediately, so he joined the army.
After 30 days of basic training, the young soldier was sent to war.
He served 2½ years overseas with the Calgary Highlanders, was a participant in the liberation of the Netherlands and stayed on with the occupation forces in Germany.
“When you’re young, there are lots of things that you can tolerate. Emotional. And you can bounce back. When I was young, and I was in the army and I was overseas, life took on a different meaning. The value of life was different.”
He instructs not to land, but to skim gently over this part of the runway: “Don’t get into this stuff,” he says. “I’d rather talk about life, and people.”
Segal reconsiders for a moment. He recalls how once, when he was trapped in a crossfire, he prayed. And of course, he learned.
“When things really look tough, you can’t blame God. You have to give him the benefit of the doubt when things look tough, and give him the benefit of the doubt when things look good.”
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Segal’s optimism and independence are part of what attracted Rosalie when, at 15, she first met him.
It was 1946. Segal, 21, had returned from the war and was visiting family in B.C.
Rosalie was a stunning, dark-haired beauty with silver screen looks, in whom her Russian émigré parents had invested all their hopes: hopes for a doctor, or a lawyer, a professional at the very least.
But along came Joe.
“I don’t know how it happened, or why, because Joe was shorter than guys I dated, and blond, and I always dated dark guys, and he weighed 121 pounds, but we just hit it off.”
Segal approached her parents to formally request her hand in marriage. They sent him packing.
“Joe was just starting out, he had nothing,” says Rosalie.
It wasn’t that they didn’t like the slight, but charming, young man who said he wanted to build an empire. Rosalie’s parents were European, she explains. They had escaped Russia during the pogroms. Education, status and class were important, and part of a defined system. You couldn’t just earn those things. Joe had nothing but promises and bright dreams.
He also had Rosalie’s heart. When Joe was 23, and Rosalie 17, her parents gave in and the couple married.
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“When I started in business, the only thing I could buy was what nobody else wanted,” says Segal. “The leftovers. I had no money, no credit, no nothing.”
War surplus was the only thing Segal could afford, and even in war surplus there was a pecking order. The good stuff, the land, aircraft, weapons and ammunition went to the high rollers.
Segal got the paint. Two thousand five-gallon drums of olive drab.
“I could hardly lift it, I couldn’t sell it.” No one would paint a house that colour.
“I had to figure out how to sell the stuff.”
So Segal rented a truck and hit the road, peddling the paint door to door in Chilliwack, then Ladner, out again the next day. He convinced the farmers that olive drab would spruce up their dilapidated barns.
Drum by drum he sold the paint he had purchased at 25 cents a gallon for $2 a gallon.
Next came direct current oscillating fans from the navy.
No one wanted those either. He changed each fan to alternating current, AC, so they could be used in residences. They sold.
Then came an entire lot of medical equipment: sutures, cranium drills, autoclaves.
He had no idea how much the stuff was worth, so he put an ad in the newspaper inviting doctors and hospitals to come and buy it at a discount.
“They would come in and say, ‘How much for this autoclave?’ and I’d say, ‘You know how much it is, now take 50 per cent off.’ They’d cheat me a little, and I would let them,” he says.
When he made a deal, they got a deal. Everyone was happy.
It’s an example of Segal’s character that has contributed to his success: “When he makes a deal, he always leaves something on the table,” says his longtime friend and legal counsel Morley Koffman.
Segal wants to make a deal that benefits both parties.
“He always says, you’ll want to do business with that person again. Leave them something.”
Segal branched out from war surplus to women’s fashions when he bought a load of Simpsons-Sears leftovers: blouses and dresses that hadn’t sold the previous season and couldn’t be put in the catalogue again.
He rented a storefront, took out big newspaper ads and sold the blouses for $9.95, a third of what they’d sold for in the catalogue.
Segal says no one thought it would work. Who would want last season’s fashions?
The merchandise flew out the door.
In 1948, at the age of 25, he founded a no-frills, cash and carry discount department store.
Originally he dubbed the store Thrifty’s. He’d already bought ads with the name, but something didn’t look right. Then it hit him. If he called it Thrifty’s, he’d be boxed in to always selling at a bargain.
“You have to allow yourself to be flexible,” he says. He pulled the ads, and changed the name to Fields.
Segal took the company public in 1968, then expanded by purchasing 240 hardware stores and transformed them to Fields franchises. Less than a decade later, Fields acquired Zellers.
Segal had already observed the struggling Zellers store near one of his Fields locations: “I had 6,000 square feet and was doing $1,000,000 a year. They had 24,000 square feet and were doing $400,000 a year.”
The acquisition was a David and Goliath deal, recalls Koffman.
Segal, with Koffman and Rosalie at his side, led a bidding war against a multinational corporation in a New York bankruptcy court.
Segal had limited funds. His competitor could have outbid him, but the representatives they had sent were not able to make decisions without consulting their headquarters in Minnesota, a process that hampered them in the direct bidding war Segal led.
Segal was so shrewd in his strategy “the judge had no choice but to give it to him.
He said, ‘I hope I never have to see you in here again,’” says Koffman, his voice still tinged with admiration. “He was the dark horse, and he got it.”
Within three years, Segal had turned Zellers from a foundering white elephant to a player worth $800 million.
Segal has an expression for how he turns a business around.
Rosalie explains. “He says he takes the Saran Wrap off and lets it breathe. He has a feeling, and a sense for people. He puts people in the right place, he puts a round peg in a round hole.”
Three years later, Segal, who had been quietly purchasing stock in the Hudson’s Bay, was poised to take over the company that was once described by Canada’s Governor General as “a kind of kingdom.”
Each deal, Segal explains, was a single step.
“You have to go up the ladder rung by rung,” says Segal. “You can go up one rung, sometimes two but if you try to step to the top of the ladder it will become unbalanced, and you’ll fall.”
There has to be a certain logic to what you do.
“If you can’t afford it, don’t do it,” says Segal.
“Every thing is a risk/reward ratio. If you can’t afford the risk, you shouldn’t try for the reward. You’ll knock the ladder over. If you can afford to risk less, the reward may be less but you’re not going to be bankrupt. Life is about logic.”
Sometimes, however, the heart has its own logic. Segal would, after much consideration, give up the Hudson’s Bay takeoveropportunity in order to manage a more important bottom line.
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Rosalie had four children in quick succession. She was both mom and dad when the kids were little. “I wanted my children, I wanted to be a parent,” recalls Rosalie.
But she also wanted Joe. Segal worked day and night from the time they were married.
“If he came home and offered the kids a piece of candy, they would look at me to ask if it was all right to have it,” she says.
“What I remember about my dad, is that he was never around,” says son Lorne, director of the Vancouver Board of Trade and President of Kingswood Properties.
He thinks for a few minutes about the father who was absent, who is now so present in his life that they are — most days — just a few paces from each other at their Kingswood Capital headquarters. “I do remember that sometimes when he came home late at night, he would tuck me in. Then he would lie down in bed with me. Sometimes I would pretend to be asleep just so he would do that.”
There was a fierce closeness, even when Segal worked seven days a week.
Lorne says Rosalie made their home a haven to them and all the stray kids in the neighbourhood. On Friday nights with the baking Rosalie was famous for and a gaggle of kids that had nowhere to go, the house was dubbed “Segal Centre” long before the family was donating buildings for wider community causes.
That first house was tight, and so were funds, says Rosalie.
“He bought this little house with one bathroom. I didn’t have a car. We had four children. If I went to the doctor, we went on the bus. If we went to Safeway, I piled them all into the buggy.”
As their financial situation improved, and Joe built the empire he’d promised Rosalie, the Saran Wrap came off their own lives and the couple found their oxygen in giving back to the community.
“We never argue about a donation,” says Rosalie.
Over the years, their philanthropy has been poured into the United Way, Variety Club, Simon Fraser University, the Children’s Hospital Foundation, the Hebrew Free Loan Association, Coast Mental Health and dozens of other organizations. But a server in a restaurant who can’t make rent, a friend of a friend who can’t make tuition, or someone in need on the street might be just as likely a recipient.
“It used to bother me so much when I saw people begging. It would actually depress me, put me in a state, from the time I was young,” says Rosalie. “To this day, I won’t pass someone on the street. People say they’re just going to buy drugs, but I don’t care what they do with it as long as I give them something to ease their pain.”
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Segal stepped back from the opportunity to further build HBC when he realized that in order to do so would mean either being away from his family, or moving them to Toronto. It would also mean leaving behind the community he had become so deeply connected to in Vancouver.
The risk/reward ratio was unbalanced.
“I have no regrets,” he says. “I started with nothing. Today I have everything, and by everything I don’t mean the material. Everything is emotional first. If you haven’t got the right emotional environment, you have nothing. Money is just a by-product of success. Happiness is the true measure of success.”
He smiles. He’s thinking about the runway again, crunching his own numbers.
“I’ve only got a little bit of the runway left,” he says, measuring a small span in the air.
Segal has the controls again, steering deftly toward his ultimate destination.
The man who launched his magic voyage by taking on the leftovers, the stuff no one else wanted, has more personal business to attend to. Raising money for the most neglected community members. The mentally ill and emotionally vulnerable. The leftovers.
“Can you imagine being alone and without anyone to turn to? Loneliness is the most difficult thing in the world. It doesn’t matter what the age is. It’s quite profound in the elderly. If you have nowhere to turn, no one to speak to, no one to look to for consolation and encouragement? Everybody wants to be loved, everybody wants to be cared for.”
Joe Segal wants to talk about people. Other people.
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