Thomas A. Russell

Born in 1877, Tommy Russell grew up on a farm in southwestern Ontario. After graduating from the University of Toronto, where he excelled as both an athlete and a student, Russell went to work for the Canadian Manufacturers' Association. He would deliver the Association's condolences upon the death of Walter Massey in 1901. 

When Canada Cycle & Motor (CCM) continued to struggle following the death of Massey, the company directors approached Russell about the possibility of managing the faltering enterprise. In 1902 Russell was named general manager of CCM, a role he held until being named company president in 1916. Russell would remain president until his death in 1940.

By the end of 1903 Russell had CCM showing a profit and by the end of 1905 had introduced two new products to the company line - the Russell motor car and skates made of automobile steel (aptly called Automobile Skates). In 1916, under Russell's guidance, CCM built a new state-of-the-art factory on Lawrence Ave. in Weston, ON. 

Russell never strayed far from his rural roots and in 1910 bought a forty-acre farm in Downsview where he began to breed shorthorns just as his father had before him. Russell would eventually expand "Brae Lodge", as he called it, to 650 acres and begin to show his steers at the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) and the Provincial Winter Fair in Guelph.

While the early directors of CCM were, for the most part, a mysterious lot of milionaires who knew far more about making money than they did about making bicycles or motor cars, Tommy Russell, the farm-boy from Exeter, was the company's human face. Held in high regard by employees and dealers alike, Russell was often seen walking through the plant, talking to the workers and taking a genuine interest in what they were doing. 

CCM would never fully recover from the loss of Russell in 1940. The ensuing gulf between employees and management would forvever cloud contract negotiations and the things that Russell had valued so highly - the long-term assets of the company - its workers, its plant, its equipment, would be lost in a maze of backroom bickering and deadly greed. 

More than anyone Tommy Russell had maintained a clear vision of what CCM was all about. For Russell it was about co-operation or what he called "shared responsibility."  It was, above all else, a commitment "to give the public a good article at a fair price and to give to the working man the fullest share possible of the returns which they helped produce." It was this pledge that made the Russell years the golden years at CCM.