Ed Mirvish

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Edwin "Honest Ed" Mirvish, OC , CBE , O.Ont , LL.D (born July 25, 1914) is a Canadian businessman and philanthropist who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He is best known for his flagship business, Honest Ed's, a landmark discount store located at Bloor and Bathurst Streets in Mirvish Village in downtown Toronto.

Born in Colonial Beach, Virginia, the son of recent Jewish immigrants from Lithuania (his father, David) and Austria (his mother, Anna). Mirvish delights in telling the tale of his bris; there was no mohel in Colonial Beach, so the family hired one in nearby Washington, D.C., to come down to perform the ceremony. The mohel chosen was Rabbi Moshe Reuben Yoelson, the father of Al Jolson. This, Ed says, was his introduction to show business.

The family later moved to Washington, D.C., where Ed's father opened a grocery store. The grocery store went bankrupt in 1923, and David Mirvish moved his family to Toronto where he worked as a door-to-door salesman – peddling, among other things, Fuller Brushes and the Encyclopedia of Freemasonry – until he opened a grocery in the Toronto Jewish community, on Dundas Street. The family lived above the store, sharing their tiny apartment with a Hebrew school. Ed often jokes that it was his dream in those days to someday have a bathroom he didn't have to share with 50 others.

David Mirvish died when Ed was 15. Ed dropped out of school to manage the store, becoming the sole support of his mother and his younger brother, Robert (who would become a successful novelist and short-story writer) and sister, Lorraine. The grocery business did not do well, and Ed closed shop to reopen as a dry-cleaner, in partnership with his childhood friend, Yale Simpson. The shop was known as "Simpson's". When the well-known downtown Toronto department store "Simpson's" attempted to force him to change the name of his business, Ed pointed to Yale and said, "Here's my Mr. Simpson. Where's yours?" The dry-cleaning business did no better than the grocery, however, and Ed soon abandoned it to take a regular job working as a produce manager and buyer for Toronto grocery store entrepreneur Leon Weinstein, founder of the Loblaw's supermarket chain.

With a real job and regular pay, Ed bought a Model-T Ford and went courting a radio singer from Hamilton, Ontario, named Anne Macklin. Ed and Anne were married in 1941. In 1945, their only child, David, was born.

During the War, Ed and Anne opened a dress shop known as "The Sport Bar". This business ran until 1948, when Ed cashed in Anne's insurance policy and opened a new business, a "bargain emporium" known as "Honest Ed's", stocked with odd lots of merchandise purchased at bankruptcy and fire sales. He quickly found success with his unique no-credit, no-service, no-frills model of doing business. Ed claims to have invented the "loss-leader", below-cost discounts on selected items designed to lure buyers into the store. "Honest Ed's" gradually expanded to fill an entire city block. Billing itself as "the world's biggest discount department store", it was soon bringing in millions of dollars a year.

Ed is renowned for getting free publicity, doing everything from riding elephants, to hiring protestors to picket his own store over its dress code. Every Christmas Mirvish gives away a thousand of free turkeys in his store to shoppers who stand in line for hours. A tradition since his 75th birthday has been the large annual party adjacent to the store, which attracts over 50,000 people for seven hours of free food, entertainment and children's rides.

In addition to Honest Ed's, Mirvish is best known in Toronto for his live theatres. His first purchase was the Royal Alexandra Theatre, a popular Edwardian landmark that was slated for demolition. Mirvish purchased the building in 1962 and refurbished it, revitalizing the Toronto theatre scene. In 1993 built the Princess of Wales Theatre, the largest new theatre - and first privately financed theatre - in North America in thirty years. In 2001, Mirvish Enterprises entered into a management contract to run the Pantages Theatre, now renamed the Canon Theatre, for Clear Channel Entertainment, who had run the theatre since it purchased the assets of the bankrupt theatre company, Livent. The first show run in the theatre under the Mirvish banner was a touring production of Saturday Night Fever.

Today, he and his son David operate Mirvish Productions, which stages major touring theatre productions from Broadway and London and which has produced and/or co-produced the Canadian stagings of such recent hits as The Lion King, Mamma Mia!, The Producers and Hairspray. In 1982 Ed and David Mirvish bought London's Old Vic for a million dollars and spent four million renovating it. Under their management, The Old Vic was celebrated for winning more awards for its productions than any other single theatre in Britain; It never made money, however, and they sold it to its present owners, a theatre trust, in 1998.

Mirvish took ill in 2003 with a severe case of pneumonia, and was away from public life until May, 2004. In July, 2005, he celebrated his 91st birthday with a lavish party, to which all of Toronto was invited, at Honest Ed's.

[edit] Awards

Named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire
Named a Freeman of the City of London in recognition of his contributions to British theatre.
1978, Made a Member of the Order of Canada
1984, Awarded Retail Council of Canada's Distinguished Canadian Retailer of the Year Award
1987, Promoted to Officer of the Order of Canada
1999, Awarded Retail Council of Canada's Lifetime Achievement Award

[edit] Sources

Honest Ed Mirvish is back - Toronto Star
Batten, Jack (1972). Honest Ed's story: the crazy rags to riches story of Ed Mirvish. PaperJacks, Don Mills (Toronto). ISBN 0-7737-7031-3.
How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate, or 121 Lessons I Never Learned at School, the autobiography of Edwin Mirvish, published by Key Porter Books, Toronto, 1993
Retail Council of Canada's Awards of Distinction