McDonald had the grit to show the boys how it’s done
Businesswoman had grease in her blood
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
What kept her going, Wendy McDonald once said, was the bearing grease in her blood. It must have been some grease because at her 90th birthday party she danced all night. McDonald was a feminine force of nature in the rough-andtumble maleness of B.C.’s mid-20th century business world.
Married three times, she outlived all her husbands, raised 10 children, built a globe-spanning enterprise in a field that is often stereotyped as the manliest of businesses — supplying parts to the mining industry — and ended her life as a much-beloved philanthropist with an infectious enthusiasm for Vancouver.
She was born Wendy Burdon Stoker on a small farm in North Vancouver on June 13, 1922, and dreamed of being a movie actress. Out clubbing one night as a teenager, she met Robert MacPherson. He was 12 years older and had a small machine shop. They married in 1942. He promptly departed to pilot bomber missions over Europe with the RCAF.
While he was dodging anti-aircraft flak and German night fighters — he did two tours — she was pregnant with the first of the 10 children she would raise, five of them adopted. She decided she had better find out what her husband’s business was all about, since he had given her power of attorney. So she started going to the machine shop.
The war ended and she returned to the kitchen, had three more children and suddenly, in 1950, she was a widow. Her husband was killed when he crashed his single-engine seaplane near Point Roberts.
She went back to the office of the company she had just inherited. The managers told her it was not a place for a woman and suggested she leave running the business to them. She was having none of that. Instead, she thwarted efforts to undermine her authority, out-manoeuvred those who sought to take over the company and built it into B.C. Bearing Engineers Ltd., Canada’s largest distributor of bearing and power transmission products. It had more than 600 employees on three continents and annual sales exceeding $200 million when it was sold in 2009 to Genuine Parts Co., an American behemoth with annual sales of more than $15 billion and almost 40,000 employees.
McDonald died of lung cancer on Dec. 30, 2012, leaving behind 27 grandchildren and 36 great-grandchildren. She was a member of the Order of Canada, the Order of B.C. and had many awards recognizing her distinction as a business leader.