The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

The brat ier-toot leven "How Ken Jackson parlayed a mother's recipe into fame and fortune from a small-town garage - The following story is courtesy of The Financial Post and writer Jim Christy, who interviewed Mr. Ken Jackson of Flamingo Pastries recently. The article was featured in the September issue of the magazine which is published by Maclean-Hunter Ltd. .The star feels that since Mr. Jackson has been such a supporter of projects within Scugog Township for most of his life, that our subscribers would enjoy reading about Ken's rise from the days of the Flamingo Restaurant to the multi-million dollar business he now heads. We would like to thank Jim Christy and the Financial Post for letting us reprint the story in full, as follows: . the home of | What are the raw materials on which fortunes are mostly founded? In the old days they were such solid commodities as steel and iron, railroads and lumber; more recently they have been the less tangible assets associated with high technology, information and communication. But how about a mix of sugar, eggs, raisins, palm oil, margarine, butter, water, vanilla and a basic pastry recipe? Yes indeed, a fortune has been built on that too. Just as there have been shipping magnates and financial wizards, cotton kings and robber barons, Canada has her very own butter-tart baron. Ken Jackson, a man with flamboyance, a dream and his mother's recipe. A bit of a rough customer too. But a man whose time has clearly come. Ken Jackson's two companies are called Flamingo Pastries Ltd. and Mother Jackson's. Between them, they project sales of around $7.5 million' this year. They are the modern manifestatiori of a turn-of-thecentury dime-novel success story. Why, if it weren't for thissstomachache I got sampling Jackson's butter tarts, pecan tarts, lemon tarts, cupcakes, brownies and meat pies, I would think I made the whole thing up. Even the companies' physical plant is unlikely. It sits like a surreal presence on the gentle southern Ontario landscape. Twenty miles north of the General Motors' city of Oshawa lies Port Perry, sleepy on the and cuts through softly rolling countryside" which holds few surprises - until suddenly. there it is, a pink vision of empire, the town's largest employer flagged by a sign depicting a box of butter tarts. On 15 acres of land sit these two enormous pink buildirigs plus a couple in a moye sedate gray. Tanker trucks pull in with supplies, is pull out carrying more than two million butter tarts a week. The growth of his companies has exceeded Ken Jackson's wildest expectations and it could double any day he chooses. He sits in his office drinking a beer and telling his story while a stereo plays jazz versions of Christmas carols. Itis April. Ken Jackson does things his own way. ou Ld The only more-or-less conventional aspect of the ' i ' scene is the office furnishing: wood paneling, green broadloom, a table with family pictures (wife Marj and a son and daughter who have since grown up), a neat desk with a glass elephant paperweight and a Sheaffer pen-and-pencil set presented to him by his staff. Away from the desk in the middle of the room is a highly varnished oak slab of a tablé; Jackson likes to do business around it because he often likes to drink beer while working and he feels it somehow inappro- priate to clutter his desktop with Old Vienna .cans. "They thought I was right off my nut when I . started all this."*'A stocky man of about 5 ft. 10 in; with big, spatulate hands, he glances out of the picture window and rests a two-tone patent-leather loafer PASTRIES LIMITED BUTTER TARTS upon the table. He is wearing silk socks, a $400 suit, a custom-rhade striped shirt and a wide tie secured with a diamond pin. There is another diamond, a large one, on his right index finger and nine more small ones set in gold on his left index finger. His $1,500 cufflinks are of gold and bear the company logo. "I had a hell of a time explaining the 15 bills to the tax boys." He grins, takes a long pull from the can and taps his foot to a Yank Lawson solo on 'Hark the Herald Angels ° Swing'. . He is a multimillionaire. He becomes a little vague when I ask precisely how many millions. He concedes at least three and later allows that it might be more. He makes the term nouveau riche seem obsolete but his is a style born more out of don't-give-a-damn flamboyance than from any inherent lack of class. He is a hand-pumper and a backslapper, an outfront' extrovert minus any middle-class defences, a back- room big talker with an oldtime loose tongue. Other more conservative businessmen sometimes mistake him for some flash-in-the-pan 'wheeler-dealer who's been lucky. They are given to underestimating him, seeing him as a real rube and figuring they'll wait until he's had a couple more drinks and then put one over on him. They never do. And they wouldn't underestimate him if they watched his eyes. They're as piercing as shattered blue glass. Even while he's joking he's apt to level his hard stare on you and you had better know then that he can be tough and hard shores of Lake Scugog. A dirt road leaves Port Perry.--~~~ and smart like a fox. Jackson was born 49 years ago in the small town of Blackstock, 10 miles from Port Rerry. His father died when he was four, leaving his mother to support him and his three brothers on a $30-a-month cleaning - lady's wage. 'There was the side of the tracks we were on, and the other side. I wanted even then to get to the other side." = i It was the depression and'Ken Jackson began working when he was seven. He left school when he was 11 to work full-time and drifted through a series of manual jobs until he joined the army. After he was discharged he bluffed his way into a chef's job at Rideau Lake Lodge. "My mother was a fantastic cook and a lot of her talent rubbed off on me." At the end of the lodge's season he got a job on the "that place with the restaurant with line at General Motors and stayed there six miserable years, knowing he could do better but at a loss to translate his ambition and his hunger into action. Finally he realized he must gamble on those inherited culinary skills. -- He quit- GM, borrowed $1,000 and opened a restaurant on Port Perry's main drag. He called it the Flamingo and it soon acquired a'reputation for serving the best food in town. It also became known for its butter tarts, which Jackson baked from his mother's recipe. Word about ther spread; in fact people from all over came to regagd Port Perry as fantastic butter tarts. Mike Laing, now Flamingo Pastries' controller, remembers: "I first heard of Ken years ago when I lived in Oshawa. My girlfriend would tell me about driving all the way to Port Perry just to eat Ken's butter tarts," i Jackson and his wife Marj were working 14 hours a day in the restaurant and it was a moderate success. But there wasn't that big a dollar to be made in a town _ whose 3,000 inhabitants weren't all that interested in excellent cuisine. Also, he himself wasn't interested in moderate success. (It must have showed because he had a 15-year-old student called France Venning working for him as a waitress; today, she's Jackson's office manager and she remembers applying for a job with Flamingo Pastries when it first got going because "I knew Mr. Jackson would make it big. There is just something about him.") Then Jackson realized that he was already baking 200 dozen butter tarts a week. And then, as he puts it, "naturally the bell rang". So, at the age of 39 and to the bewilderment of the locals, Ken Jackson sold the restaurant for about $15,000 and, in March 1966, went into the butter tart business. They Move Along, 24 Hours A Day, An Endless Chinese Army. Of Butter Tarts He backed the family station wagon out of the garage and replaced it with a three-decker oven, a packaging machine, a table and a rolling pin. He hired a young woman named Dorothy' Bourgeois as" helper at $1.50 an hour (she is today his $275-a-week production coordinator) and decided to start with 400 dozen tarts a week. He figured that would make him. a good living supplying local stores and restaurants. He would expand, but gradually. ia It didn't happen that way. go ; In those days he baked from midnight till noon. Then he loaded the station wagon with tarts, began distributing...and invariably came back with bigger" orders. In a mere eight months 3,000 dozen butter tarts were pouring out of the garage every week and Jackson had to begin a 30x30-foot addition. It outgrown before it was completed. *' Distribution increased to a radius of 60 miles, production to 20,000 dozen per week. He started building again. Soon he was selling tarts from Quebec to Windsor. Things just kept growing. .Another. expansion tripled the size of the operation. Every- thing was coming up butter tarts...a million of them, two million! Think of it! He did, and then he got into -lemon tarts, mince pies, muffins and brownies. A couple of years ago he launched the second company, Mother Jackson's, to make meat pies, Today the two companies employ about 110 people. Jackson has two partners in the new one (they , own 50 per cent of it between them) but he remains thé sole owner of Flamingo. Both companies are debt-free and Jackson is already planning to extend distribution from Newfoundland to Winnipeg. He has refused invitations to supply markets in both British Columbia and the U.S. because "I'd have to build other plants and I wouldn't be able to keep an eye on things." ! When I asked Jackson the standard question, *"To- what do you owe your success?" he gave a standard' answer: 'Quality, hygiene, good service, good people." % Then he added: "I mean that sincerely but also the damn things taste so good. Here, have a couple more." I accepted graciously, then asked: "But surely there must have been other butter tarts?" "Yes, yes, but none so good. Which is the secret. Also, my competition then was packaging in two's and half-dozens. I started out in dozens and I was able to do that because my butter tarts were good enough that . folks wantea to buy that many. Dozens still outsell six-packs four to one." ; He has been offered money for his secret. 'All the ingredients are listed on the package and a chemist could break it down anyway. But I do have my sec- rest which I'm not about to sell. It's all in the baking, you see. My bier tarts taste homemade...the same as when " ' : Bow starieg (continued) a