Page 2 - 90 Years of Harper's Tire

John Munroe Harper was born in Banff, on the coast of Scotland’s Aberdeenshire in 1897. In 1912, the teenager’s family immigrated to Calgary, a city of 62,000 named for a castle on the Isle of Mull.
The year the Harper family arrived in the city, sandstone schools were popping up to accommodate the booming population and the local police force recorded the municipality’s first ever serious automobile accident; a vehicle collided with a horse, killing the people in the vehicle and injuring the animal.
In 1914, as the First World War started, J.M., his three brothers and their father all enlisted in the Royal Canadian Army. After serving in France for the course of the war, J.M was offered post-service education and signed up for a vulcanizing course to learn the process of hardening rubber.
In 1919, he started working at Fisk Tire where he changed the tires on milk trucks. He married Marion, who had been born in Yorkshire, in 1922.
In November 1931, just days after Dupont started manufacturing synthetic rubber, J.M., by now a father himself, bought Foster’s Vulcanizing at
130 12th Ave SW. He paid the princely sum of $1,450, putting $400
up front and paying $100 a month, with 7 per cent interest.
Three generations later, after a few expansions and a couple of locations, a foray into selling boats and skis, a small stack of yellowing
NSF cheques and countless tires, Harper’s Tire is celebrating 90 years in business.