Jim Burrows- Passing the Metalworking Torch

When Jim Burrows retired in 1996, he figured he’d settle into a comfortable retirement. After all, he’d begun his working career when he was 16 and it seemed like a good time to retire. His retirement was short-lived. Within a few months, January 2, 1997, to be exact, he took over the reins at the Canadian Machine Tool Distributors’ Association as executive director.

With a chuckle, Burrows recalls the moment he decided full retirement wasn’t for him.

“I came home one day and David Collison from SMS Machine Tools was sitting chatting with my wife Marilyn. He had a place close to us at that time. He was a director of the CMTDA and he mentioned that CMTDA had just let go its executive director. After he left, I thought it might be a good part time job that would keep me out of mischief and keep me in touch with the world.”

Little did he know that his part-time gig would last for 12 years. But he’s enjoyed every moment of it and is proud of the fact that when he took over there were approximately 29 members. Today it stands at 87.

Burrows attributes his early start in the working world to his mother who he says was a “good talker” and persuaded the school in Winona, ON, to take him in at the tender age of four.

“So I was a little younger than the other children in the class. Then I took grade three and four in one year—they don’t do that anymore—so now I was two years younger than everyone else. So when I reached grade 12, I was only 16 years old.”

Not knowing what to do, he decided to apprentice as a tool and die maker and in 1952 took up his apprenticeship at Crowthers Engineering. The metalworking shop, located on Sheppard Ave. in north Toronto, housed a machine tool shop, a tool and die shop and a welding shop. His pay was $0.65/hour, which for a first job wasn’t too bad, but when the workers on the plant floor found out what the new young apprentice was making “they got on the foreman’s case about it and within three months of starting I got a $0.25 raise, which was a pretty good increase.”

In 1955 he moved to Emmons Tool and Die located in Scarborough, ON. But by 1960, Burrows wasn’t sure if being a tool and die maker was something he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

He enrolled in a grade 13 math program at Danforth Technical School in East Toronto and later took public speaking and sales courses at Ryerson in downtown Toronto. He found his niche in sales, so much so that the teacher teaching the sales course at Ryerson offered him a job in the insurance business, but Burrows wasn’t interested. His focus was still on the metalworking industry.

On April 25, 1960—Burrows’s memory is impressive—he began to work in the service department of what was then a sizeable machine tool distributor in Toronto, Williams and Wilson. By December of that year he was given the keys to a car, a sales territory and started his career in the machine tool sales business.

In 1993, Williams and Wilson, which was founded in 1891, went bankrupt. Burrows moved to SMS Machine Tools for three years and then spent one year in sales at A.W. Miller before he officially retired in 1996.

Burrows has witnessed some significant changes in the industry. He was selling machines when the industry made the transition from manual machine tools to NC and then later to CNC machines. And while it was a difficult transition for some machine tool operators, particularly the switch from manual to NC technology, Burrows says the more difficult transition for the metalworking industry as a whole was the move from American-made to foreign-made machine tools.
“At Williams and Wilson, all the machine tools we sold were from American manufacturers and there was a perception that they were high quality and the Japanese machine tools coming onto the market were not.”

But then something happened. Offshore machines began to show up in North America. Among the suppliers of these machines was Harold Gross, the founder of Gross Machinery, who began importing Japanese machine tools in the early 1970s, says Burrows, and that’s when people began to hear about machine tools “coming out of a box, being plugged in and then working with no problems.

“American manufacturers seemed more concerned with making profits and would ship machines off and if there was a problem they would deal with it at the customer’s plant. But with the Japanese machine tools, there were no problems. Respect for these machines grew. Then more imports began to show up in the market from Germany and other European countries and their presence got bigger and bigger.”

Slowly, American machine tool manufacturers were sold off to foreign firms and the American machine tool manufacturing industry became a fraction of what it had been in the 1950s and ‘60s.

When Burrows made the decision to retire from the CMTDA, it was in part because he wanted to enjoy a true retirement.

“I was diagnosed with high blood pressure when I was 23 years old, so I’ve been dealing with this for 50 years. It’s been hard on me physically and I now want to enjoy myself as best I can while I still have my health.”

Indeed, he and his wife Marilyn plan to go down south for a few months. And he’s looking forward to curling more during the winter months and golfing in the summer.

And in January of this year, he welcomed a new grandson into his growing family. (He has three children, Lorna, who is married with her own children, son Howie who is also married and has five children, and a second daughter, Carol).

As he looks forward, he is concerned about the dwindling manufacturing base in North America and how it is going to impact machine tool suppliers and in particular, machine tool distributors in Canada.

“It is a competitive market and I don’t think it is going to get any easier, but it’s difficult to predict the future.”

As for his future, Burrows says he’s looking forward to spending time with his family, focusing on his health and enjoying a full retirement.