Editor's Note: Morry Taylor, the chairman of Titan International, spoke at Lessiter Media's two national conferences in January 2025 in Louisville. Known as "the Grizz" for his 'bear-like' presence - replete with candor and a "call it like he sees it" approach -- Taylor has a storied career that began in tool and die manufacturing before becoming a manufacturer's rep in the heavy-duty wheel business. Following his rise and the eventual acquisition of Titan Wheel International from Firestone, he gained national attention as a GOP presidential candidate in 1996, an experience he chronicled in his bold book Kill All the Lawyers -- And Other Ways to Fix the Government. In its last completed fiscal year in 2023, Titan International had done $1.8 billion in sales.
Following his presentation, I got my signed copy of Trump: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, which he and co-author Dale Buss published in 2024 prior to the 2024 presidential elections. Since past histories were so popular with our readership, we sought, and received, Taylor's permission to excerpt from the book. What follows here is unedited and in Morry's own words, as it appear in the book, which is available for purchase on Amazon here. - Mike Lessiter, editor/publisher
To know me, you need to know where I came from. None of us get where we are entirely by ourselves. The generations that went before us laid down a foundation, and we walk on it, and build on it, and hopefully we leave things better for the next generation to build on themselves. So my story really doesn't begin with me.
My grandparents made it through the Great Depression. To most people living today, that's an accomplishment that can't really be grasped.
We might read about how tough things were then and how little they had to get by on, but when people today have closets overflowing with clothes they'll never wear, pantries stuffed with food, and three cars in the garage, it's difficult to comprehend the kind of hardship the whole country went through in those days.
I learned a lot from who my forebears were and what they accomplished. I learned the values of perseverance, fortitude, and making much out of little. For example, my father, who was the first Maurice Taylor, was the youngest of four siblings, with an older brother and two older sisters.
They were all born in Detroit, my dad in 1921. But they barely knew their own father: Just before the Great Depression started, when Dad was three or four years old, his own father, my grandfather, just left the family-he basically disappeared. This was incredibly hard on my dad and, of course, the whole family.
Older relatives took in my dad's older siblings, but he was sent to a farm. My grandmother got him room and board with a farmer, so he left home at eight years old because his mother simply couldn't care for his material needs during the worst economy this nation had ever experienced. There was no way for her to put food in the bellies of four children, much less her own. To help out, Dad did chores on the farm, for his unofficially adoptive parents.
Mom was born in 1923 and didn't have an easy, carefree youth either. Her mother became sick and died in the hospital when Mom was about thirteen years old. Her father was an Irish firefighter who drank a lot. As the oldest of her siblings, without any supportive and reliable parents, my mom stepped in to fill that role with her younger siblings.
My parents never talked about how they met; I never knew. I was born on August 28, 1944. Before my birth, Dad was drafted into the U.S. Army for the war effort and shipped out. He went to the Philippines to fight the Japanese, and he served in the Army for more than a year. Meanwhile, Mom lived with Grandma Taylor in Detroit.
After Dad returned stateside in late 1945, he worked as a toolmaker in Detroit, where the industrial infrastructure was about to return full-time to making cars again as the war drew to a close. Having learned the trade at night while he was a teenager at Ford's drafting and apprentice school in downtown Detroit, before the war broke out he started a business to make the toolings you put into molds and presses. After he returned from World War Il and for several years, he operated his little tool-and-die shop in Pontiac, Michigan, north of Detroit, with just another guy or two.
Things changed when the Korean War started in 1950. Dad told friends that he wanted to get away from big cities because he had been in Japan and knew what could happen to them -- and their populations during war. So in 1951, shortly after my brother, Fred, was born, Dad moved the family across lower Michigan a couple hundred miles to Charlevoix, a city near the "pinkie" of the Michigan mitten, on Lake Michigan.
Dad looked for work opportunities with his brother, and they found two Army Quonset huts they could use. That was where they set up shop. However, they were unprepared for the intensity of the winter and its impact on those huts: One night they got three feet of snow, and one of the huts caved in.
My dad learned from people from nearby Ellsworth, a town of about 300 people, that he could borrow $35,000 for a loan at 7 percent interest to construct a little building and build the company safely against the snows of northern Michigan. That was a lot of money back in the 1950s, but my father and uncle went ahead and did it. We moved to Ellsworth in 1952.
I loved being raised in a small town, what might be called a village today. It was a wonderful place to spend my childhood. Plenty of people prefer big cities and their obvious opportunities, which are in much shorter supply "out in the sticks." But there are many advantages to a small-town upbringing.
For one thing, it's really safe. Part of my sense of growing up feeling secure in my person was simply being an American kid in the 1940s and 1950s. But another part was due to growing up in a small town. People didn't lock their doors at night, and children were allowed to explore all over town, on foot, on our bikes, without parents or townspeople really having to worry about what they were doing or what was being done to them.
We could go to a friend's house, find someone to play with, and then wander around without supervision. Even as kids, we had so much freedom. Even if our parents didn't trust us, they knew they could depend on the other people in town to keep an eye on us and to inform them right away if we were doing something we shouldn't be.
With sort-of apologies to Hillary Clinton, it was the non-woke version of It Takes a Village. Everybody knew everybody else, so it was kind of like having a family of hundreds of people all living around you. Another advantage of this is that friends I've had since nearly infancy are still my buddies.
Life in a small town is quiet, a characteristic you never fully appreciate until you spend time in the big city. In Ellsworth, you could look up at the night sky and understand why our galaxy is called the Milky Way; in the city, you might be able to count the stars you see at night on two hands if you're lucky and half of them aren't just planes flying by. In and around a small town, nature has a beauty that is hard to deny.
While maintaining my appreciation of living in a small town, as I grew up, I began to take on a different perspective on my parents. It was one of growing appreciation. I began to really understand what it means to work hard and provide for a family. I grew to see that my father did the best he could, and he worked very hard. When I was growing up, all he did was work. For the first 15 years of my life, he never took a vacation -- he just worked. That's how he got ahead in his business.
While pursuing that work ethic, he also was modeling it for me -- and expecting me to pick it up. When I was 12, Dad had me working during every break from school, whether it was for the summer, during Christmas break, or some other time off. Even following after-school activities, he expected me to come and work with him.
So every summer, I worked eight hours a day, 40 hours a week. Besides working, my father also expected me to train my brothers. He paid me 37.5 cents an hour, which equaled $15 a week. (I also got my first taste of how much the government takes out in taxes when I saw that my first paycheck was only $11.90!)
As a kid, it was hard to work while my friends were out playing or splashing at the local swimming hole. But as I grew up, I saw the practical work experience and expectation of a work ethic as real strengths.
I attended elementary through high school a block from our house. After graduation, I enrolled at Michigan Tech Univ. in 1962 and went to classes there, but only for one semester-it was just too cold for me, in Houghton, almost at the northern tip of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan as it juts into Lake Superior.
I was ready for a warmer climate, so a buddy and I went to Florida, doing common-labor jobs around Miami and enjoying the sunshine for a while. But the next summer, 1963, we came back to Michigan and to Ellsworth. I did some local jobs and then enrolled in Northwestern Community College in Traverse City. I took accounting courses, given my interest in math, and graduated with a two-year associate's degree.
During that time, there were summer cabins in a development called Baker's Acres, on Lake Michigan. All through college, I rented a cabin and hosted poker nights, where we'd play what we called Burn-because you would just put your money in and burn through it. It was a version of Texas Hold "Em.
Then I got my best winter gear and went back to Michigan Tech to graduate with a four-year degree. But the more important "certification" I gained there was an imprimatur in entrepreneurship.
You see, entrepreneurship isn't the same as hard work, and it isn't just capabilities, and it isn't just inspiration, and it isn't just risk-taking. True entrepreneurship requires all four. Already by around 20 years old, I fully knew I possessed capabilities and that I could work hard. I still had to find out if I could produce all four of these attributes of entrepreneurship, and in a winning combination.
I'd observed my father, and he clearly also had capabilities and a work ethic to match. But I'd seen him come up short in the inspiration and risk-taking categories, and I keenly desired to make sure I didn't do the same thing.
Because he was so skilled at manipulating metal and engineering things that worked, periodically Dad would get feelers from inventors who wanted him to help them realize their inventions and partner with them. For example, the guy who invented pop-top aluminum soda cans and had a patent on the design lived in Traverse City and asked my father for $20,000 to $25,000 to make a die to manufacture a new idea for a more convenient can, and presumably to partner with him from there.
My dad figured all people had to do to open a can of pop was use a key or a can opener, and he didn't think it made sense for manufacturers to add cost to the cans by installing a pop-top. So he passed on it, and the inventor became a millionaire by selling his design to Illinois Tool Works.
Another time, the developer of the McCullough motorized chainsaw wanted my dad to do the tooling for making links in the chain; Dad passed. A third opportunity slipped through his better judgment when the developer of what would become famous ski resorts in Michigan, Boyne Highlands and Boyne Mountain, asked Dad to fabricate a T-bar for pulling skiers up the hill. He was going to give my father a percentage of revenues for that device. But Dad said, "What would you want to do that for? Just walk back up the hill."
I'm not saying Dad wasn't capable of thinking entrepreneurially and indulging in a bit of risk-taking. One thing he did that worked out is making a die for an outfit that made a new kind of aluminum archery bow that looked like the traditional wood on the outside. It ended up being used to win some world archery championships, and Dad had a bit of skin in that game.
The difference between my dad and me is that I ended up searching for ways to engage in entrepreneurship and then usually jumping in head-first, counting on my mind and abilities to offset the element of risk. It also helped that I began early as an entrepreneur, before I knew any better!
It all started after I went back to Michigan Tech. I'd internalized the fact that there was no car wash in the area, but the weather was crappy most of the year, creating an acute consumer need that simply wasn't being mer. So I decided to build a car wash. It seemed like a moneymaking idea: identify a need, or a gap in the marketplace, and find a way to fill it. (And if someone else was doing it, find a way to do it better.) I would use this strategy, beginning then and for the rest of my life, to great effect.
But first, I needed a building. I hardly had any money, of course. So 1 went to Morton Buildings, a major local building company, and became a rep for them. That would give me the inside scoop on buildings in the area and a discount on materials if I wanted to do my own construction.
I also needed land. I was aware that a copper company - mining is a huge industry in the Upper Peninsula-owned about 70 feet of land on the edge of a cliff overlooking where the company had cut through the peninsula for the ease of its shipping. There was nothing there at the time because nobody wanted to build at the edge of a cliff! So they leased me the land.
Now I had the land and discounted construction materials, but I needed car-wash equipment. I went to a manufacturer of car-wash equipment with the same approach I'd used with Morton: I became their rep so I could get a huge discount if I bought from them.
Then I went to a bank and showed them what I had done, and the loan officer was duly impressed. The bank loaned me 100 percent of the amount I had requested, about $7,000, to build the car wash. Bankers like clean cars, too.
My inventiveness continued. I got some students from Michigan Tech's civil-engineering department to lay out the car wash. I bought the lumber, but the tricky part was going to be the cement. Some of my civil-engineering buddies helped me figure out that I needed to order 10 yards of cement, but that would be the easy part. I wanted them also to help me level it, put drains in, and other stuff you need for a car wash.
We would need to move and spread the cement with hand carts, and I came up with those. We were ready for the cement trucks to arrive. Meanwhile, I went to a local brewery to buy two kegs of beer to reward my friends for their work. While I was away, the cement trucks showed up a little early at the construction site. "Where do you want us to drop the cement?" the drivers asked the Michigan Tech guys standing around.
Stupidly, these juniors and seniors in engineering simply pointed to the site and told the drivers to dump the cement there. It was no skin off the drivers noses, so they divided the cement into two piles, dropping five yards on one side of the site and five yards on the other. They got a student's initials on the paperwork and drove off.
When I came back, I was apoplectic. I couldn't believe what I was seeing: two big pyramids of cement sitting nowhere in particular, rapidly drying and setting. Barking, I asked these guys what the hell they were doing studying engineering if they were going to let this happen. After using some more choice words on my friends -- I can be, um, a bit salty -- I grabbed tools, and so did they, and we tried to level it out even as the cement kept getting harder, second by second. We did our best to get it laid out and smooth, and that would be my carwash.
It worked out okay. The place certainly became popular right away. On Saturdays in the spring, there would be well over a mile of cars lined up, coming to get a carwash. We had coin boxes for people to pay for their carwashes, and they filled up so fast that I had to keep coming back during the day to empty them.
The next year, the owners of the gas station across the street offered me $16,000 for the car wash -- to a college senior. I thought about accepting their offer, but I figured that if I kept this thing running for two years, I would make that much money as income from the car wash.
So I kept it.
I did hire a guy to bring the money in for me because I was busy with school, but I found out he was siphoning off some of the cash. I put a stop to it, and sometime after graduating from Michigan Tech, I sold the car wash. But not for a profit.
With my degree in mechanical engineering in tow, in the spring of 1968 I conducted a job search, setting up appointments with various manufacturers in the Detroit and Chicago areas and getting five or six interviews. I landed a job with General Motors and went to work for GM in Saginaw, Michigan, as a plant engineer.
The job was boring -- too much bureaucracy -- but I was glad for the position. When I had a chance to improve the plant's efficiency, I took it as an opportunity to showcase my capabilities. For example, I came up with an idea for removing a bottleneck in the steel-melting operation, to improve quality and get more parts per hour. All they had to do was move an employee break area to another part of the plant. I figured out how they could recover the cost of reconstruction, about $150,000, in just a week by creating better and more production.
This was in 1968. Plant management loved the idea, but the proposal had to go up the chain of command. So the big boss invited me to meet with the top executives in Saginaw. Here I was, this young guy sitting in there, amid a bunch of older guys in more expensive suits except for another man, who was probably about 27 years old, a couple of years older than me. Presumably in part because he was the whiz kid and didn't want to be shown up by a whizzier kid, this guy said GM couldn't afford to execute my idea because the company had used up their money and would have to wait for the next cycle!
But another guy said, "Well, let's just take it from our capital." More suggestions came up, but every time, the finance kid would shoot them down. Then my boss, a man named Mr. Poole, decided he'd seen enough-and that I was right. My idea clearly was brilliant enough to shine through the B.S. the finance kid was trying to cover it with.
"You guys argue about it, but do it," he said. "The payback comes in less than a week. Just charge it to something." As I sat there, shocked, Mr. Poole walked to the door. He looked at me and said, "You gonna listen to this crap too, Taylor?" So I jumped up and went with him. We went to the maintenance manager and got an agreement to buy the material for the construction project. Mr. Poole said, "They will be so happy after they see the results. You will have to work the weekend to make this happen. You get time and a half on Saturday, and two times on Sunday."
Sure enough, within two weeks all the construction materials came together, and we made the changes over the weekend, then reworked it. On Monday, things were up and running. No one at the upper levels knew. It worked just as I thought it would, and I knew it was saving GM millions of dollars a year, but I never got any accolades for it.
This experience taught me a major life lesson: Sometimes recognition will come, and other times it won't -- and it's in those moments that you have to be satisfied with doing what's right.
I was making $13,000 in salary at the time, which seemed alright to me then. However, the job was not only boring, it was also dirty. I would go into the plant in the morning wearing a nice, white shirt and slacks, and when I came up from the plant floor, I'd be covered in black from head to toe, my shirt filthy with soot and dust. Everyone in engineering would get a good laugh at me for being such a mess, but we worked in a foundry, and I knew there was no way to understand how it worked if you didn't get dirty.
Still, the challenges at GM and what I was learning about how industry worked, weren't enough for me. I had gotten married along the way, and my wife at the time was pregnant, so I moved to Detroit and talked to my father. He had always wanted me to work with him, and he still did, so I went to work for my dad. I did that from 1970 until 1972.
The problem with working for him, though, is that he had spent so long building his business that the staff always wanted to hear from him directly, so my authority as No. 2 was minimized. At the same time, Dad was in the process of losing his business. As a former staff sergeant, he had been able to get U.S. military business from a general. In the early 1970s, however, the general told my dad to make some modifications in their agreement regarding aluminum prices, and he would get a new contract for business going forward.
But that never happened. The general canceled the contract with my dad's company for some reason and went to another supplier even though my father's price was lower. Dad lost a lot of money in this calamity and had to declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy. His business never recovered.
Before that point, however, in 1972, I'd left Dad's company on the conviction that I needed to take my own path professionally. Things were changing for me personally as well. Soon, I would be going in promising new directions that would set me on a better course for the rest of my life.