03-01 Getting Started

The ground work for a new business is laid early in life. Our father, John A. Bulloch, apprenticed in the woollen business in Belfast. He went to Canada in 1928, working for a year in the wheat fields of Saskatchewan to pay his passage. Father then worked for “Eatons” in Winnipeg in 1929, where he learned how to measure and sell made-to-measure custom clothing.
He boarded with a family that had a daughter his age who fell in love with our Dad. While in Winnipeg he was the captain of the “Winnipeg Wanderers” which was part of an English rugby league. In the photo he is seen in his football jersey in what was called a “picture postcard” that he sent to friends and family in Ireland.
When the T. Eaton Company (as it was called in those days) opened its prestigious College Street store, Dad was transferred to Toronto and sold men’s clothing, dressed in a formal morning coat. There he met our mother who worked in the linen department just next to him. A romance developed.
His boss was David Eaton, the future President, who told him if he married my mother (who happened to be Jewish), he would never be promoted. That is when our father decided he would leave “Eatons” when he was 30 years of age to start his own company. And that is what he did.
I have memories of Dad working with his neighbour, Mr. Irwin, building shelves to stock woollens. I remember my Mother helping paint shelves with my younger brother watching from his carriage. And I especially remember Father mumbling this ditty: “When I was a lad I went with my Dad and always got clad at Spackmans….”. Years later in 1947 when the family went to Ireland, he took me to Spackmans, the men and boys clothing store in Belfast. I saw the source of Father’s ditty that he recited over the years.
Although his boss at Eaton’s opposed marriage to our mother, Father got a great deal of help and support from manufacturers and suppliers in the clothing trade who were mostly Jewish. David Dunkleman, the founder of Tip Top Tailors gave him a harvest table for his showroom. And Ben Hillman of Schiffer Hillman gave him a sewing machine.
But of all the memories from 1938, I can clearly remember Dad’s first employee, a retired alteration tailor that had worked for Ben Hillman. His name was Mr. Abernathy who is shown in the photo taken in 1938. He called me “young John”.
And what a pleasant surprise … finding a letter of recommendation before Dad left Ireland. What few people knew was that his mother encouraged him to emigrate, so he would not be under his father’s influence.