George Purvis’ ‘63 UWO MBA class a cut above
LONDON—“A story in the InTouch: 100 Years of Leadership Centennial (magazine) issue has a feature story on the Unforgettable MBA Class of ’63,” George Purvis told The Expositor. “Of all the classes that have attended (UWO) our business class was voted the best.”
“Our leaders in the class included Donald K. Johnson who would become a senior executive at the Burns Fry investment firm and the Bank of Montreal,” said Mr. Purvis.
The class of 106 produced three senior executives instrumental in building the modern Toronto Dominion Bank: Urban Joseph, Sydney (Bud) McMorran and Bill Brock (who died in late 2022). There was the head of a leading think tank, Canada’s chief statistician, professors and deans at major business schools and sage investors.
“We were there five years and Urban Joseph and Peter Knoefli were my other classmates that we hung around with,” said Mr. Purvis. “I can remember we wrote a book for a professor on long range planning in Canadian corporations with $5 million in sales for a year.”
“We had devised a survey using a punch card that we had to purchase to survey business people all over Ontario,” continued Mr. Purvis. “We had surveyed most of the big companies in Toronto.”
“We only had one year to do this project, but our questionnaire was fairly complicated,” explained Mr. Purvis. “We spent a lot of late nights and a lot of hours putting this together. And then when our professor read it he threw it on the floor. I almost had a heart attack, I could have punched our professor in the face,” he quipped. “This was in October.”
“So, we had a few months to do this project all over again, so we devised a new one,” stated Mr. Purvis. “We worked very well as a team.”
In the story in the magazine, written by Gordon Pitts, he wrote “in late 1989, as a writer for the Financial Post, I asked then Ivey dean and marketing professor Bud Johnston, HBA ’54, MBA ‘57: ‘Which was your most outstanding class?’ He recommended the Class of ’63 as among the highest achievers. The result was a warm and rewarding relationship with that class’s members, captured in four feature articles in the Financial Post and the Globe and Mail over two decades in which I chronicled their life journey.”
The class had a cohort of 106, slightly below the numbers these days, and all men. Today, MBA classes at the Ivey Business School are typically about one-third women.
“The MBA was a rare commodity, new to Canada, where there were only four such programs. Ivey’s was the best known and established. Today, there are an estimated 45 MBA schools in Canada,” the article notes.
“Life threw some curves at the group. George Purvis, HBA ’62, from Manitoulin Island on Lake Huron, was two weeks out of his Bachelor of Business Administration program at Ivey when his father died. Instead of a summer job at a steel company before entering the MBA stream, he went home to run his family’s Great Lakes fishing company.” He had got the undergraduate degree from 1958-1962, then obtained his MBA.
“The following fall, he juggled the MBA with commuting back and forth to Manitoulin, putting 80,000 miles on his Ford T-bird. At 84, he is still running the 140-year-old fishing company with his two children.”
Mr. Purvis explained, “I bought my ‘60 T-bird from McQuarrie Motors in Gore Bay. I had invested money at 50 cents a share and the stock went to $6.50 per share so I could buy the car.”
“George Purvis ran his own company, but he felt the MBA gave him the confidence and poise to talk and negotiate with anyone from other entrepreneurs to government officials.”
“We all meet every five years,” said Mr. Purvis. “Peter was the best man at my wedding.”
“A big celebration dinner is being held for the class at the Toronto Stock Exchange in Toronto in September,” added Mr. Purvis.
