The Grizz

Maurice “Morry” Taylor, who built Titan International into a major player in the heavy-duty tire and wheel business and once ran for President of the United States, says the nation is eager for a business leader to return to the White House. // Photographs by Matt Lavere
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Industrial magnate Maurice “Morry” Taylor is very comfortable with long-ago glory. He and his wife, Michelle, live half the year in a cream-colored stone mansion in the Grosse Pointes, a mystically timeless place.

Taylor even has a huge “sports house” out back where he used to smoke cigars, play poker, and watch football games on TV with Tony Soave, Richard Manoogian, and other local captains of industry.

Now it mainly houses framed autographed jerseys from Detroit athletic heroes — and a dormant racquetball court. Like many of his peers, Taylor also has a home in Florida, and lives there the other half the year to qualify for its nonexistent income tax.

He also memorializes erstwhile accomplishments in a way only a handful of Americans can do by bringing out buttons, flyers, and other swag from his own presidential campaign.
In the 1996 contest, Taylor was a credible enough candidate to make it to the televised debate stage, taking a businessman’s point of view and mostly raging at national irresponsibility about deficit spending. He had some currency for a few months in the Republican nomination contest, but it was eventually won by Bob Dole, who lost to Bill Clinton.

That was then; this is now. And Morry Taylor is all about now. In fact, he’s chairman of Titan Industries, the $5-billion manufacturer of tires, wheels, and undercarriages for tractors and trucks that he founded in 1992 after a brilliant career as a manufacturer’s sales rep. He remains so actively engaged in helping guide the business that he, not CEO Paul Reitz, is at times the executive quoted about Titan’s business performance in its quarterly earnings reports — an unusual wrinkle for a publicly held company.


DBrief

Titan International Inc.

Products: Global manufacturer of off-highway wheels, tires, assemblies, and undercarriage systems.
Headquarters: West Chicago, Ill.
Revenue: $2.2B (FY2022)
EBIDTA: $253M (FY2022)
Employees: 7,500
Manufacturing plants: 6
Chairman: Maurice “Morrie” Taylor


Not surprisingly, Taylor wants to remain relevant in the political realm, as well. He’s been plotting a comeback of sorts. At the age of 79, Taylor harbors no thoughts of running for president again, even though President Biden will be 81 if he stands for re-election next fall, and Donald Trump is 77 years old.

Instead, what Taylor wants to do is influence what the politicians do no matter who wins, and straighten out a binder full of policies that mean the U.S. government makes even less sense now, in his view, than it did 27 years ago when he first tried to rectify things by becoming president.

These days, Taylor is sounding off about political issues in ways that he hasn’t in decades. He’s even talked about writing a book he wants to come out in time to give Trump some useful advice and help him win the 2024 campaign in the form of assessing the “good, bad, and ugly” of the former president.

“The good is that his business is his name,” says Taylor, lounging in a sweater and sneakers in the front sunroom of the home built in 2005 by he and his wife, Michelle, a former flight attendant who married him in 1973 (they have three children). “Trump’s had to fight, and they’ve pulled a lot of stuff on him. He’s smarter than all the guys he’s running against, and he understands their gig.

“The bad,” Taylor continues, is that “he believes he can show everyone how good he is, and they’ll like him. But sometimes you can’t be liked.” And the ugly of Trump, he concludes, is where the former president hurls personal insults. “Why waste time telling someone they’re a fat slob? You’re the president of all the people. Leave it alone.”

Taylor was born in Detroit, the son of a toolmaker; was raised in Ellsworth, just south of Charlevoix, in northern Michigan; graduated with an associate degree in accounting from Northwestern Community College; and finished his undergraduate studies at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, where he earned a degree in mechanical engineering.
His entrepreneurial bent showed even before he got out of college, when he blithely registered successively as a sales representative for a building company, then for a car-wash equipment company — and, after he understood the business, got his friends in the civil engineering program to help him build his own car wash.

After joining General Motors as a plant engineer in Saginaw, Taylor worked for his father’s toolmaking business in Detroit in the early 1970s, but he was peripatetic. Soon, he began a 20-year career as a superstar salesman, at first representing machine toolmakers, selling their wares to the auto industry.

“All our European competitors had the rug pulled out from them when I showed up,” he says. From a Canadian industrialist, Joseph Tannenbaum, Taylor learned “how to do a deal.” That came in very handy when Taylor soon wanted to help Tannenbaum buy a steel rim-and-wheel operation in Quincy, Ill., that Firestone had shuttered.

Grizz with Russian Hat
Taylor has hundreds of stories and artifacts from his days as a corporate titan, including how he once tipped a Soviet Army captain $100, and the captain gave him his hat. The tip was more than the captain made in a month.

What Taylor saw in 1983 was that a Firestone-owned company, Electric Wheel, had about 65 percent of the U.S. tractor-wheel business, but tractor sales were declining. Firestone wanted to close the UAW-represented plant in Quincy, where the union wouldn’t consider contract concessions. Tannenbaum was willing to bite if Taylor got the right price.

“When I walked through the plant, I didn’t have some grand vision,” Taylor recalls. “It was simple: If I could figure out how to get the money and buy this, if it didn’t work, in three years I would close it down and scrap everything and get our money back. Firestone was willing to sell it to me for $6 million, which was $4 million less than what Tannenbaum thought was the best price I could get.”

Over the next 10 years, that business, renamed Can-Am, grew to $100 million in sales. When Tannenbaum’s original Canadian factories closed, Taylor snapped up the equipment and moved it to the United States.

He went on to buy up other closed factories. When Tannenbaum died in 1992, Can-Am was split three ways: between his estate, Taylor, and Masco. The CEO of the then Detroit-based manufacturer of plumbing and building materials, Richard Manoogian, helped Taylor put together a leveraged buyout of the Tannenbaum estate’s share of the company, which they renamed Titan Wheel International.

“In (private equity), they look to buy five outfits and, if only one succeeds, they’ve made money,” Taylor says. “They’re all numbers boys. I looked at it a little differently. I was in the wheel business as a rep, but my background of being a toolmaker and welder is understanding metal. It wasn’t that hard when you looked at it.”

Sure enough, by the next year, Taylor had pulled Titan out of the tailspin that was afflicting the industry, and Titan International went public in 1993, yielding some $40 million to Taylor. The enterprising new industrialist accelerated his empire-building at that point, purchasing one woebegone wheel-making operation after another, around the world.

Titan also acquired its first tire plant, a facility in Tennessee that made wheels and tires for ATVs and lawn and garden equipment. Getting his first integrated look at tractor wheels and tires together, Taylor realized that the technology behind both kinds of devices had advanced little over the course of 30 or 40 years. So he put together a team of engineers, including himself, to start working on a new approach to tires that he called “low sidewall.”

The idea behind “LSW” tires was both simple and revolutionary in the agricultural sector: They help reduce what’s called “power hop” and “road lope,” as well as soil compaction, according to research Titan has conducted over the years.

The Grizz Teddy Bear
Titan International’s mascot, The Grizz, is based on Taylor’s nickname.

By the end of the 1990s, Titan was able to persuade Caterpillar to become the first original equipment manufacturer to offer factory-installed equipment with LSW tires, specifically its line of skid steers. When Titan struck an agreement with Goodyear to get a national tire brand behind LSWs, Titan’s ticket to continued prosperity was punched.

Not long after he became a wealthy man, Taylor became intrigued by the idea of teaching the nation what he’d learned as a successful business-turnaround artist. It all made sense in his head.

“I thought he was nuts,” remembers Soave, founder of what has become a highly diversified and successful business empire, Soave Enterprises in Detroit, and a friend of Taylor. “We were driving down Lake Shore Road, and he said, ‘I’m going to do it.’ I said, ‘Do what?’ He said, ‘Run for president.’

“I thought he meant president of some club he was involved in,” Soave continues. “So I asked him, and he said, ‘Run for president of the United States.’ I said, ‘What?’ I had to pull over. I thought he’d lost it.”

Indeed, Taylor did lose it — the 1996 presidential race, anyway. He defied the skepticism of Soave and many others and entered the fray with his usual enthusiasm, but bowed out after several months. As Michael Lewis would write in “Trail Fever: Spin Doctors, Rented Strangers, Thumb Wrestlers, Toe Suckers, Grizzly Bears and Other Creatures on the Road to the White House,” his book about the 1996 campaign, “Morry learned nothing running for president, except that the American people are not yet ready to do business.”

But what an impression Taylor made along the way. He was the “unlikeliest presidential candidate” of the cycle, wrote Lewis, the fabled author of bestsellers such as “Liar’s Poker,” “Moneyball,” and “The Blind Side.” Lewis noted that in Iowa in January, Taylor campaigned in a string of six Airstream motor homes that blared Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” out of the lead vehicle as they traversed past cornfield after cornfield along Interstate 80.

“The way Morry saw it, he’d roll his land yachts into town, surround the local courthouse, flip on the rooftop speakers, tap a few kegs of beer, and have everyone talking for weeks about the new Republican candidate for president, Morry Taylor. He was right.”

Taylor and his wife, Michelle, during a stop on the campaign trail in 1996.

Taylor’s platform — which Lewis described as “one part economic conservatism, one part social liberalism, and one part titan of commerce” — was highly agreeable to the citizens of Iowa at that time, polls showed.

Newspaper page
An article in the March 17, 1996, issue of the Reading Eagle lists Taylor as the winner of an informal poll, even though he had just dropped out of the race.

Taylor was able to boast that he was the only candidate to finance his own campaign. And Iowans loved his streak of independent thinking — for example, they mostly nodded when candidate Taylor pledged that he could straighten out America’s problems in four years, and had no interest in a second term if he won. “Why the hell would I want to do that?” he said, according to Lewis. “I like my life.”

Taylor’s platform included a number of ideas that he called “practical business sense applied to politics,” including slashing the federal workforce by one-third, especially lawyers; cutting required regulatory paperwork; and simplifying the tax system by eliminating deductions except for mortgages.

On a radio talk show in Iowa, Taylor bellowed, “Anyone who wants to come and help, call 1-800-USA-BEAR.” The host on the other end of his cellphone asked him why that number.

“Well, I use the bear number because my nickname is ‘the Grizz,’ ” he replied. Turns out Taylor had gotten the nickname from business associates after he took Titan public, when they gave him a plaque bearing the inscription, “In North America there is no known predator to the grizzly.” The appellation quickly took over from Taylor’s previous nickname: “Attila.”

Feverishly working the campaign trail in appearance after appearance, in Lewis’s telling, Taylor slammed a lot of doors, loudly. He tromped through a school and left “a trail of startled adolescents in his wake.” He “swagger(ed) like a quarterback on the way back to a huddle,” bespeaking his background as a top athlete in high school.

Talking to a gymnasium full of kids riveted by his unorthodox style, Taylor described his Republican opponents as “three talk-show hosts, four politicians, and an heir.” Then he singled out the nomination favorite, Bob Dole, before pivoting to his real point. “He’s been running for president for 20 years and spent 30 million of your dollars doing it. Which one of them has created any jobs? Thousands of jobs? Only myself.”

In the end, his determination, gusto, candor, and nickname couldn’t overcome the name recognition, war hero’s resume, and seeming inevitability of Dole’s nomination, which Taylor ended up supporting.


 

Morry-Isms

Morry Taylor produced a well-thought-out platform when pursuing the White House in 1996, and he’s similarly got a sophisticated prescription for America today. These sound bites illustrate some of what he believes and would like to see done, as well as his views on other current matters and people.

On the federal government: “It runs by itself. D.C. has never had a recession or a depression. And basically, the state capitals haven’t, either. Everything the federal government touches, eventually they screw up. The next item they’ll take on will be Medicare. Health insurance used to be pretty reasonable until the feds got involved, so I want to get the feds out of it. Have every state be in charge of their borders, and figure out how much money we have and pass it back to the states. Eliminate the federal bureaucracy.”

On the presidential-candidate racket: “In a presidential race, if you raise money, then the Federal Election Commission matches it. Pat Buchanan was making $6 million a year when he ran (in 1992 and 1996), plus he got to write a book about it.”

On compensation for automotive CEOs: “Paying top executives what they did the last few years was sheer stupidity. They did it because they’re all members of the higher echelon of corporate executives. If the head of GM wanted (exorbitant) pay, I’d have no problem with that: go private. Get banks to give you the money; don’t rob it.”

On the U.S. military: “World War II was won by a bunch of sergeants. There were 2.4 million people under arms then. Now it’s 1 million, but we’ve got 10 times the officers. They’re tripping over themselves.”

On nuclear energy: “Most people don’t understand what it takes to generate power. The cheapest power in the world is nuclear. If you look at submarines and aircraft carriers, they run on it, and there are 5,000 people on a carrier. So we should have nuclear all over. Build small reactors to run for 10,000 or 15,000 people. It’s not going to do the damage people think.”

— Dale Buss


“We traveled to Texas one time during the campaign,” Soave says, “to an event hosted by Ross Perot,” who had run for president as an independent in 1992 and was running his candidacy back again four years later. “I brought down a plane load of supporters, but there were three to four thousand people in the audience. Perot introduced each candidate, and then they’d get a chance to explain what they thought they could do for the country.


Presidential Candidates with Michigan Ties

(Ulysses S. Grant, who lived in Detroit from 1849 to 1851, is the only candidate elected to office.)

 

James Birney
James Birney

 

James G. Birney, presidential candidate, Liberty Party, 1840 and 1844.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lewis Cass
Lewis Cass

 

Lewis Cass, presidential candidate, Democrat, 1848.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant

 

Ulysses S. Grant, 18th American president, 1869-1877.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thomas Dewey
Thomas Dewey

 

Thomas Dewey, presidential candidate, Republican, 1944 and 1948.

 

 

 

 

 

 

George Romney
George Romney

George Romney, governor of Michigan, 1963 to 1969, ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 Gerald Ford, vice president, 1973-1974, assumed the office of the president in 1974.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Morrie Taylor
Morrie Taylor

 

Morry Taylor, ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mitt Romeny
Mitt Romeny

Mitt Romney, Detroit native and later governor of Massachusetts, presidential candidate, Republican, 2012.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Perry Johnson
Perry Johnson

Perry Johnson, ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 2023.

 

 

 

 

 

 


“No one had heard of Morry. After he was through, I made the people who had been on the plane with me jump up and holler, ‘Yay!’ People looked at them, but they still didn’t know who he was.”

In his own book, published after the election, “Kill All the Lawyers and Other Ways to Fix the Government,” Taylor summarized his approach this way: “The one thing America doesn’t have a deficit in these days is people complaining about what’s wrong with our society, and in particular, our government. Unfortunately, complaining doesn’t get much accomplished. I know some of my ideas are off the wall, and I’m no intellectual. But the one thing I’ve got going for me is that I get things done.”

Another renowned observer who got to know Taylor during the campaign, as Lewis did, was satirist Dave Barry. “He tends to be blunt, and bluntness is a quality that simply is not tolerated in American politics,” Barry concluded in an introduction to “Kill the Lawyers.” “But that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have been a good president.”

Reitz, who has worked with Taylor since becoming CFO of Titan in 2010, observes, “What’s unique is the way he gets attention around things, the way he thinks, and the way he operates. He’s not crazy or off the wall. He’s very intelligent. He cuts through a lot of bull crap and has a very sound path on how to do things. He knows in his head where he wants to go; how he articulates it is just Morry’s style.”

He also was one of the few businesspeople ever to run for the office, and a precursor not only to Trump but to others who’ve campaigned for president since Taylor, such as Herman Cain, the late former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, who ran to some effect as a Republican in 2012.


Down on the Farm

Morry Taylor doesn’t suffer fools gladly. So while he’s enjoyed the attention being paid to Titan International Inc. by an upcoming documentary produced by the actor Dennis Quaid, Taylor says he didn’t appreciate the lack of understanding of agriculture and farm equipment from the film crew when they arrived last fall at a John Deere dealership in Assumption, Ill.

“These people show up and have no idea how farming works,” Taylor complains about the production for Discovery and PBS. “It’s like having to explain wheels and tires to a 5-year-old.”

After three decades of growing, running, and overseeing the success of Titan, Taylor could be excused for idling. But he still loves serving as chairman of the company that made him wealthy, and he relishes competing on the playing field of business, so he keeps doing it.

“He feeds me with passion and he feeds the company with passion,” says Paul Reitz, president and CEO of Titan, who joined the company as CFO in 2010, became president in 2014, and CEO in 2017. “With a publicly traded company, his role as chairman requires a lot of responsibility; it’s not just a sit-back, do-nothing kind of role. He loves what he’s doing to this day.”

Tony Soave, chairman of Soave Enterprises in Detroit and a Titan board member for more than 20 years, agrees. “That company is in his blood,” he says. “I joined the board because I admired what he was doing. He has a tremendous manufacturing mind; he thinks fast and he knows how to organize a company.”

The legends that stem from Taylor’s stewardship of Titan include what happened after the company’s purchase of a Pirelli Armstrong tire plant in Des Moines in 1994. The 680 members of the United Rubber Workers there had struck the plant, but Taylor was in no mood to coddle them. Instead, he pulled a Shawn Fain, two decades before the United Auto Workers president theatrically threw Stellantis contract proposals in a garbage can last summer.

Charlotte Observer clippings
Race car driver Dale Fischlein sent Taylor a thank-you letter for sponsoring his No. 70 car at NASCAR’s Busch Grand National at the Charlotte Motorspeedway in June 1995. The red, white, and blue car highlighted Taylor’s 1996 presidential campaign.

“The union had two thick documents, each of them a 3- or 3.5-inch binder, one on economics and one on health benefits,” Taylor remembers. “I picked them up and put them in trash cans. The union boss said, ‘It took us 35 years to get all of that.’ I said, ‘Another way to say that is it took you 35 years and you’re broke, and that’s why (Pirelli) sold you.’ ”
Taylor settled the strike more or less on Titan’s terms, which didn’t surprise Soave. “Morry was fighting it, and he didn’t give up very easily. He’s like a tiger when he goes after something.”

Taylor did, however, introduce profit-sharing for employees of Titan’s wheel plants, which aren’t unionized.

These days, Reitz is happy to report to investors that Titan followed up its record sales and earnings of 2022 with another strong year in 2023. Third-quarter results (revenue of $1.9 billion and adjusted EBITDA of $210 million) proved that Titan’s recent strategy was “accomplishing exactly what (it) was designed to do: mute the cyclicality of certain aspects of our business and drive performance when market conditions are volatile.”

Specifically, in 2023 Titan was dealing with what Reitz told investment analysts was a “de-stocking dynamic” by tractor manufacturers of their inventories of wheels and tires — something that was drawing to a close and would allow Titan to “enter 2024 with relatively normal market conditions.”

Those market conditions, Reitz says, include the fact that “farmer income remains healthy” and there’s a “solid demand picture” from large agricultural operations. This is no small thing, because farmers big and small are notoriously exposed financially to factors that range from season-long droughts to floods to drastic changes in overseas markets.

Meanwhile, a typical piece of equipment, like a combine, can cost upwards of $700,000.
“Even if (farmers) make a lot of money, they’re not just giggling,” Taylor observes. “They still (complain).”

New technology continues to help farmers improve their incomes, and Titan has done its part to assist in the form of low-sidewall tires that Taylor was instrumental in inventing. Titan has proven that the company’s low-sidewall wheel and tire assemblies can save farmers up to 6 percent in efficiency and up to 5 percent in yield gains.

Such performance not only has pleased Titan’s customers, but it also has led to the growth of a strong aftermarket business over the past four or five years.

But any company like Titan that’s dependent on the robust but volatile American farm economy faces big risks. “What happens in our business,” Taylor says, “is (companies) build all these tractors and combines, but up to two weeks before one is shipped, a farmer can say, ‘I don’t want those (standard) tires and wheels because it’s been raining and the ground is soft, so I want bigger tires.’ That doubles the number of wheels and tires we have to keep around.”

— Dale Buss


At the same time, one business tycoon who hasn’t run — and Taylor wishes he would — is Roger Penske, one of the most iconic entrepreneurs and company owners in Detroit’s history. “Roger would make a great president,” Taylor says about his billionaire 86-year-old friend, who built an auto-racing and retailing empire, among other enterprises. “He’s just smart. But he didn’t want to go through the beating.”

If Taylor’s quixotic presidential campaign and unvarnished rhetoric sounds vaguely like the rumblings Trump made over the years before getting serious and running for the office in 2016, Taylor invites the comparison. To an extent, he believes he was Trump before Trump.

“I understand Trump,” Taylor says. “Look at his history and background. He toyed for 35 years with the idea of running for president. Is (Trump) egotistical and everything else? Yes. But he’s America first. And he’s smarter than any of them who’ve run for president lately. He’s smarter than I am. But he made a lot of mistakes in trying to hire Washingtonians. You don’t hire or make recommendations from (partisan bureaucrats), or you’re going to get screwed.”

Taylor also has a lot to say about the governors with whom he’s dealt, mostly to great frustration, especially when they don’t seem to understand the benefits and needs of businesses in their state and do a poor job as fiscal managers.

“I was with the former governor of Illinois the other day, Pat Quinn,” Taylor told an interviewer in 2011, “and he was talking to six of us business guys. I had to say, finally, ‘You’ve put this state in bankruptcy. You’re so far below, you’re in so deep, you’re not even solvent.’ He’s raised taxes 66 percent and it doesn’t even cover half the deficit. His background probably was political science or history — it sure wasn’t math.”

Taylor reserves even more ire for the current governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer. She’s “trying to go down the same road that Illinois went down,” he says. “You can’t have people running the state who’ve never run anything. If you know (former Gov. Rick) Snyder, you know that his personality wasn’t over the top, but he did a good job. You’ve got to get some people in and turn it around.”

Taylor scoffs at a major prong of Whitmer’s economic-development strategy, which gives away millions of dollars in tax credits and other incentives with little to show for it. “You have a very low tax state, so why aren’t people moving here? Why is the population falling on her watch?

“She works more for the Democratic Party than Michigan. That’s the problem. Plus, she’s using her position to try to get a job in Washington. She’s a weak leader, driven by polls, and is a prime example of why we have term limits.”

Such discussions demonstrate how revved up Taylor is once again to register his views with the public and, if possible, make a difference in the political arena. In the view of those who know him best, that means one thing: watch out.

“What he does, he wants to be all in, and committed, and make a difference,” Reitz says. “He could go do something else with his energy, but he sees that the political system, or politics, is broken. It’s what he said 25 years ago, and it’s hard to argue that the path we’ve been on since then has been good.”

Soave calls Taylor’s ideas then and now “a good prescription. It doesn’t get old. It’s some basic stuff, but it would be good if we could do it.”