In October 2006, Dr. Robert R. Archibald, president of the Missouri History Museum, sat down with Jack Taylor, founder of St. Louis–based Enterprise Rent-A-Car®, to talk about Taylor’s U.S. Navy service, his entrée into business, and how he pioneered the rental car market. Part I of this two-part interview appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Voices.

Introduction

	Jack Crawford Taylor, ca. 1997. 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. Enterprise has since become 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.

Taylor has balanced his business accomplishments with community involvement. In 1982, he founded Enterprise Rent-A-Car Foundation to make donations 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:  It’s really an honor to be able to do this; I can’t tell you how thrilled I am. And if I were thinking about myself and thinking about how my life turned out the way it did, I think the first question I’d ask would be, are there particular events in your life that you regard as turning points?

JACK TAYLOR:  Yeah, I think my Navy experience changed me [from], as I’ve said before, a callow youth into somebody with some intensity. And I think that was, I think my Navy experience was a big factor in my life.

RRA:  Tell me about how you got into the Navy and what your war experiences were, and your reaction to all of that.

Jack Taylor as an aviation cadet in the Navy in 1943. Photograph by the U.S. Navy. Courtesy of Jack Taylor.

JT:  Got all afternoon?

RRA:  I do, I’ve got all afternoon.

JT:  Well, I was born in 1922, so when Pearl Harbor happened, I was 20 years old. Previous to that, they were inducting people into the service, in anticipation of what was going to happen. So I knew I was going to have to go into the service. So I said, how can I best go about flying? So I tried to enlist in the Army Air Corps and they turned me down ’cause I had hay fever, which was surprising to me. And so a friend of mine said, well, why don’t you try the Navy? So I went down to the recruitment office for the Navy, which was in the Federal building I think, took my test, took my physical, and that very day they said, you pass, we’d like to have you. And they signed me up in the Navy, in the V-5 program, which was a naval training program—a naval aviation program. And they said, we’ll call you when we need you. And now this was in March of ’42, and they called me in December of ’42 and I started my naval training, my flight training. It took me a year, and I got my wings in December of ’43.

RRA:  Where’d you go for flight training?

Fighter squadron Airgroup 15 aboard the USS Essex, 1944. Taylor is in the top row, sixth person from the left. Courtesy of Jack Taylor.

JT:  Well, my first flying was at Glenview [Naval Air Station] in Chicago, flying what were known as N3Ns. And then I went to Corpus Christi [Texas], and I was at two fields in Corpus Christi, flew two different kinds of airplanes. And then I got my wings, as I say, at Corpus, and then I went to operational training after I was a commissioned an ensign at Vero Beach [Florida], flying the combat plane that I would be flying with the fleet, an F6F Hellcat. And I was there in Vero Beach for, I guess, a month or two. Then I went to Hawaii where I was in a squadron, VF-15. I went out and joined the carrier Essex in June of 1944.

	Lt. Jack Taylor in an F6F Hellcat fighter aboard USS Essex, 1944. Courtesy of Jack Taylor.

RRA:  Had you done carrier takeoffs and landings by then?

JT:  I had gone to Glenview, which had a naval base up there, and shot three landings on a converted side-wheeler on Lake Michigan. Made three landings in the F6F.

RRA:  What did that feel like? I can’t imagine what that felt like.

JT:  Well, by this time I’d had a few hundred hours and I was very comfortable in an airplane. I was a pretty good pilot, if I do say so myself. And it was not a problem. As a matter of fact, when I was out with the fleet, I don’t ever remember taking a wing off because of my improper approach.

RRA:  I just can’t imagine. You’re bobbing around and the carrier’s bobbing around.

JT:  Yeah. I had about 80, 85 carrier landings when I was out with the fleet.

Taylor’s squadron served some time on the USS Enterprise (CV6) in 1944, while the Essex was being repaired. The signature on this photograph is to Jack’s son Andy from Captain M. D. Malone, who was the commanding officer of the Enterprise in 1997. Courtesy of Jack Taylor.

RRA:  Were you on the carrier Enterprise at some point?

JT:  In the last half of 1944, there was a lot of combat going on in the Pacific. MacArthur had landed in the Philippines, we had taken the Marianas, and the Essex had to go back off station to have some repairs and take on some armament or something, so it was going to be off-duty for a couple of weeks. And there was so much action going on that they didn’t want to lose the whole squadron. So they took about a dozen of us fighter pilots out of the fighter squadron on the Essex and sent us over on the Enterprise. So I served on the Enterprise.

Lt. Jack Taylor finished his tour of duty on the Essex in November 1944 and immediately returned to the United States to train for another tour of duty with another squadron. The war ended days before he was to ship out. Taylor was discharged from the Navy and returned to St. Louis in 1945.

RRA:  So you got out of the Navy, and you thought everything was possible. You felt pretty confident…

JT:  I didn’t know really what I wanted to do, and my father said that there was a friend of his that needed what he called an administrative assistant, he wanted an assistant to the president, which was French for he wanted a kid that did everything. So I took a job. It was at Smith-Scharff Paper Company. Arthur Scharff was the boss, and he was a wonderful guy, and it was a good, private St. Louis business. And I worked there for a few months and I said, hey, this is not for me. So I went out and I don’t know where I got the idea or what I thought I would do, I went out and bought a used truck and started a delivery service. And I went around to all the stores in Clayton and said, hey—Famous Barr and Stix, Baer & Fuller were the big stores downtown—rather than having you deliver your own packages, I will do it [for], I think it was 25 cents a package. So I drummed up enough business that I made a decent living having a little delivery service. I ended up after a couple of years, I had three vehicles, and one or two guys working for me, and I was making a decent living.

RRA:  Did you have children by then?

JT:  Yes, because I remember, I remember making deliveries in one of the trucks I had, with my son Andy in a laundry basket riding alongside of me in the truck as I made the delivery.

RRA:  So […] you were in a delivery business.

JT:  Yes. Then Arthur Lindburg was a Cadillac distributor, which was at that time a big-time deal; being the Cadillac distributor in any city was an important job. And he was known and made a lot of money and he offered me a job to come with him because I think I was a good friend of his son’s [Earl Lindburg], but I like to think that the reason he offered me a job is he heard about my little trucking business and my customers. When I would go in, I would be very upbeat and convince them that they were doing the right thing, and he heard about me and he offered me a job. And the first time he offered the job, I turned him down. I said, “Mr. Lindburg, I’ve got this little business of mine and I’m doing very nicely and thanks for the offer but I’m going to keep my business.” And a few months later, Earl called me and said, “Dad wants you to ride out to the airport with him.” And I said, “What’s it about?” He said, “He wants you to ride out.” So I got in the back seat of his Cadillac as Earl drove.

RRA:  So the two of you were in the back seat?

JT:  No, I was in the back seat alone. And Arthur Lindburg was in the front seat and he said, “Jack, I want you to come to work for me. And I’ll give you $400 a month.” And at that time, I was making max $300 a month in my little delivery business which, back in those days, that would be like we’ll figure ten times, that would be like $4,000 a month is what he was offering me and I was making $3,000 a month in today’s dollars. And by this time I was working on Sundays—I had gotten the drugstore’s business and I was delivering their prescriptions and I was working a lot—and by this time Joann had come along and I had two children. And I had gotten a little older, not much. And I said, “Okay, Mr. Lindburg, you got yourself a boy.” So I went to work for him in the spring of 1948, and I think in March of 1948, and the strange thing about it, he said, “Jack I don’t know what I’ll do with you but I want you to come with the company because the automobile is expanding and I want some bright young guys to come work for me.” And I was flattered, he said bright young guys, and he considered me one. And he said, “I don’t know what I’ll do with you. I have a little dealership down in Cairo, Illinois, I may send you down there.” And the funny thing about it, I didn’t really worry about what he’d do with me. I figured I was going to go with this guy, he was successful, and he was going to either do something with me worth a value to him and therefore to me, or I’d leave and go do something else. And I went to work for him and I sold used cars for a few months, and then I sold new cars for a year or so, and then as the business got bigger and we hired salesmen under me—I was the only salesman. He had a small dealership in Clayton. We started hiring salesmen ’cause we needed them; by this time the business had gotten bigger and we were making more cars. And I became the sales manager and so I eventually ended up being sales manager at the distributorship. And that’s when I made the decision that I would start the leasing business.

Jack’s first convertible was a dark green Cadillac with a green and white interior. Photograph, 1955. Courtesy of Jack Taylor.

RRA:  So you were leasing cars through Lindburg at that time when you started?

JT:  I was his sales manager and I was handling the sales at the distributorship. And leasing had appeared on the scene a few years before. And I’d been propositioned by a couple of guys that wanted me to maybe run the dealership for them. And I said, well, let’s say I end up with my own dealership. In those days, you could only have one dealership. The manufacturers would not let you have more than one dealership. And if you had a good dealership, you made a fine living. You had a nice salary, you could join the country club and had cars for your family as demonstrators and you had the T&E [travel and entertainment] and all the good things that come with being a private businessman. And then I thought about the leasing business. I said, if I go in the leasing business, I can have as many, be in as many cities as I want with as many locations as I want. I won’t have to carry parts inventory, I won’t have to carry an automobile inventory. And I can lease all makes of cars. So I thought it gave me a much broader opportunity to do more than just be a dealer.

RRA:  Sounds like a stroke of genius.

JT:  Yeah, now we’re talking car leasing now. Rental hadn’t come into the picture.

RRA:  Who’s leasing cars back then? This is 1950-ish?

JT:  There were some companies that were doing it. Feld Chevrolet was leasing some cars in St. Louis. That was about the only thing. Then the Buick dealer up north started leasing and there was some competition. But it started growing sometime after 1945, ’55.

RRA:  Who were your customers for leasing?

JT:  Doctors, business executives, one of my first customers was a guy by the name of Rumsey Ewing, a lovely man who had a suture company and he had three or four or five salesmen out selling sutures for surgical sutures. He came to me and he leased about five cars from me. And just all sorts of people. Bankers that didn’t want to have to worry about going to dealers who at that time were pretty avaricious in the way they handled customers. And when I started the leasing business, I told my salespeople this, I started acquiring salesmen, I said, “Don’t talk like a used car person, talk like a banker or a stockbroker and dress like a banker. Don’t dress like a car salesman.” And so it was a sort of a silk stocking, one-at-a-time leasing business. And it grew and, not huge, but we got up to a couple thousand cars. And those customers wanted cars for their mother-in-laws or their cousins that came in town or maybe their kids. So we started renting a few cars as a, just to accommodate our customers.

Executive’s first expansion was to this building in south St. Louis in 1968. Many other car dealers were located nearby, creating a “dealership row.” Courtesy of Jack Taylor.

RRA:  The incentive for these people who were your first customers was, they didn’t have to fool around with taking care of the car, they didn’t have to buy the car.

JT:  You don’t have to go to a dealer and deal with a dealer. We get the car for you, it’ll be licensed and titled and if you have service problems, you bring it in to us, we’ll [fix] the service problems and we’ll give you a car to drive while we’re servicing your car. Property tax, we’ll take care of that, and when you need a new car in 24 months, you come in and we’ll give you whatever kind of car you want, take your old one back, and there’s no dickering or anything like that. And it was a silk stocking trade. It simply made it easy for you to have your car.

RRA:  So your customer knew that he or she was going to pay a bit more to own a car this way but it was a lot less aggravation.

JT:  We sold on the basis it’s a standoff. If you want to go to a dealer and spend three or four days shopping around town to get the best deal, maybe you can beat our price. But if you don’t want to do that and you want to lease a car from us, it will cost you no more than if you went out and got a good buy.

RRA:  And you’re not going to have any hassles.

JT:  And you’re not going to have the hassle. And we’re going to take care of all the details of having an automobile. And a lot of businessmen and doctors in particular, we lease to a lot of doctors, like the convenience of it. And we were nice guys.

RRA:  I still get nervous walking anywhere near a car dealership.

JT:  And at that time, the car dealers were particularly avaricious. It was after the war; production was up. We acted like, hey, this is a good deal, if you want it, take it, if you don’t, we understand. And the customers liked it.

RRA:  So then you started providing rental cars for some of your existing customer base.

	A rate card from the early 1960s shows the company’s early logo and name. Courtesy of Jack Taylor.

JT:  Yes, and it was, a leasing salesman would come, “Jack, I’ve got this good customer, he’s got three cars leased from me and he wants a car for his mother-in-law who’s going to be in town.” And I said, “Well, we just took back a used car, put a license and put some gas in it and let him have it for a few days.” What do you want to charge him? I don’t know. And so it got to be such a pain for my lease salesmen to handle the rentals which they were doing, that I had a young guy that had worked for me in the summer, was going to college, he graduated college, came to work for us. And I said to him, “I’m going to start a rental company, do you want to run the rental company?” And he said, “Sure, I’ll do that.” I said, “Well, come in Monday morning and tell me how many cars you want and you’re the rental manager.” And he came in Monday morning and said, “I want 17 cars.” And I got him the 17 cars and that’s how it all started. And then he was a bright, aggressive guy and he went on and we started calling on insurance companies and the next thing I know, we’re doing business.

RRA:  And somewhere along the way you had to become a really effective manager because you went from one or two employees or yourself alone to a huge number.

JT:  I was a pleasant guy to work for. Somebody asked me, “I understand you were a good selector of people.” And I said to them, I wasn’t that great a selector of people. What I did is when somebody came to work for me, I made it an environment where they said, this is a fun place to work and Taylor’s an honest guy and if I stick with him, I’m going to be successful. And even though he wasn’t, may not have been a highly talented guy, because I’d like to think I instilled in him an attitude, he became a good guy. And it just worked out.

RRA:  It’s all about relationships, isn’t it?

JT:  Yeah, I think it’s attitude. When I came in in the morning, my attitude [was], I’m going to have a good time today. I hope you’re going to have a good time today, and I hope the customers when they come in, they’re going to leave saying hey, this is a great place to do business.

In 1969, Executive debuted in Atlanta, its first out-of-state office. It was also the first office to use the Enterprise name. All locations changed to Enterprise in 1978. Courtesy of Jack Taylor.

RRA:  As you look at the world now, and it’s changed an awful lot since you first joined the Navy, what kinds of things do you see and view optimistically and what kinds of things worry you?

JT:  You know something, I read the paper every day thoroughly, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I tried to read the New York Times, I couldn’t wade through it. And I watch a lot, I’m a fairly good television watcher, and I watch a lot of news programs. What really surprises me is the intolerance groups have for each other. And I’m talking about groups of Americans, liberals against conservatives and conservatives against liberals. That disturbs me and I don’t know how that’s ever going change, particularly with the media being as avaricious as they are for startling news which always emphasizes terrible things and...never compliments or shows positive things that occur. And I don’t know what’s going to happen with that. But it’s worrisome to me.

RRA:  The other thing that I often look at, and I look at it as an absolute revolution, the consequences of which I don’t quite see, is information technology, which is absolutely amazing to me.

JT:  Oh, yeah, absolutely. That’s, I’m an old guy and I don’t get into it a lot. I can barely turn my computer on and find my messages. If you ask me to look for something on the computer, it’d probably take me three hours to do what you’d do in four minutes. I’m constantly calling, “Leslie, come in here and show me how to do this.” I don’t know what that’s, it certainly changes things. But I’ve never thought about to what degree and in what fashion that changes things.

RRA:  What are the things you take the greatest pleasure in, in life?

JT:  Playing golf. And going out to dinner with friends, going out to lunch with business associates. Like to go to Florida in the wintertime ’cause I hate cold weather. But I’ve done, I used to travel, I used to love to go to California. I had a boat and we traveled in the Mediterranean. I’ve done all that. And very frankly, I’m happy in my old age, I really am. I’m happy in my old age, yeah.

RRA:  Are there things you wish you had done that you didn’t?

JT:  It’s a terrible thing to say, but no. I’ve had a full, complete life. And I think I’ve always worried about not giving back, which is a new expression. But I’m doing that now and that makes me happy, it makes me happy that somebody can come along with a project that they’re trying to do and want some support and I generally clear [it] with my daughter who runs our foundation, I say, “This person needs some money and they want to do this. What do you think we ought to do?” And having the money to do that, we’ve given to some activities in St. Louis, I can’t remember their name because my memory is shot. But, and we’ve given a million bucks to several of the people, of the operations downtown where they take care of kids that get out of school and have no place decent to go. The Boys and Girls Club, I’ve given money to that. And I get a great deal of satisfaction out of that.

RRA:  What are you most proud of?

JT:  I think the thing I’m most proud of is I’ve been able to build a company with a lot of wonderful people that are having a degree of success that they might not have had, had they not come with the company. Now that may be egotistical but I really believe that. We have a lot of people that I think work in a very ethical environment that are making I hope as much or more money than they ever thought they might and the environment is a happy, fun place, I hope. And I think it is.

RRA:  You’ve also created a rather extraordinary family.

JT:  Well, they’re nice kids. Yeah, Andy and I kid about the fact that he’s lucky to have a father that started a business that he could come into. I tell him I’m lucky that he came into the business and liked it and knows how to run it and took it far beyond what I was able to take it. My daughter came into the company, which pleases me, and runs our family foundation and is doing a terrific job. That pleases me. I’ve two granddaughters that work for the company and are unassuming, nice kids that I think the employees are happy they’re there because they feel there’ll be a continuation of the Taylor name. And the other granddaughters are all nice people and yeah, I mean, I have just been so damn lucky. I’m wondering what I’ve done to deserve it.

RRA:  It’s also interesting to me that you’ve created the family office that Jim [Mann] heads, which I don’t know a lot about, but it seems to me to be an extraordinary way of sort of carrying on a tradition.

JT:  I told Jim, “I don’t know exactly what you’re going to do but I think your main job is to keep all the kids primarily,”—when I say the kids I mean my grandchildren—“happy and comfortable with their association with the business and the family and if any of them are upset, I expect you to deal with the problem and explain why it’s not okay to be not okay.”

RRA:  Did you ever think about taking the company public?

	The “e” logo is universally recognized as belonging to Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Courtesy of Jack Taylor.

JT:  Oh yeah, we thought about it three or four times. There were so many things that came up that they, the Street, Wall Street, would expect from us that finally Andy and I one afternoon we were sitting, I said, “Andy, why don’t we just bag it?” And Andy said, “Right, let’s bag it.” And we’re so happy we did because a short time after that were all of the corporate things that started coming apart in the public and they passed new laws and new regulations, which are confining. And so we are delighted that we’re private.

RRA:  When you think about how relatively cantankerous and conflicted public life has become, do you have thoughts about how America could get better, how can we overcome the sorts of divisions that we somehow have created here?

JT:  It gets back, if you were a good guy and you wanted to run for public office, you are practically setting yourself up to just be pummeled to death. And how you change what’s happened in that area, I don’t know. The trouble, the thing that worries me is we’re going to end up getting the clunks that are willing to put up with that stuff and the people that are talented and could do a good job in the government are saying, hey, I don’t want to undergo that. That worries me.

RRA:  I’ve been on the school board for three-and-a-half years and I know that’s a pretty low-level public office, but I can tell you that trying to recruit good people to do what I’ve done is virtually impossible. People look at me like, you’re crazy, why would I do that?

JT:  Yeah, that’s right.

RRA:  And that scares me.

JT:  It worries me that good people aren’t getting in positions where they could do some good because they don’t want to endure the pummeling that they would take from the press and their opponents and all that. I don’t know how you solve that. I’m not that deep a thinker to be able to figure out how to deal with that.

RRA:  I guess at this point I will say, are there things, topics that we should have covered that I didn’t ask you about?

JT:  No, we’ve covered a lot more than I had expected we would and you are one hell of an interviewer, I’ll tell you that. And I’ve enjoyed it. No, I think we’ve covered a lot more than I thought we would and I’m delighted.

RRA:  I think you are an incredibly unassuming person who’s done remarkable things and made an extraordinary difference in the lives not only of all the people that you had as customers or employees, but now you’ve made an extraordinary difference in this entire community through your generosity.

JT:  That’s very flattering of you to say. And I hope that we can continue doing more. There’s still, if the rental business continues as good as it is and I have a few extra bucks, I hope I’m able to do more.

RRA:  My mother always said to me when I was little that you’re, by virtue of being born, you had an obligation to leave the world in better shape than you found it. And I think according to her yardstick, you win.

JT:  Well, you’re nice. I don’t know of anybody I’d rather have say that to me and I appreciate those kind words.

RRA:  Thank you so much, I have appreciated you.

JT:  I’ve enjoyed this.

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