Bata shoe mogul dies in Toronto

Toronto, Sept 2 (PTI) Thomas Bata, owner of global shoe
corporation, a house hold name in India that bears his name,
died in Toronto at age 93.

A spokesperson of Bata Shoe Museum, said Bata died early
Monday morning in Sunnybrook Hospital only weeks before his
94th birthday.

She did not give cause of his death. She said a company
statement will be issued later. Funeral arrangements were not
immediately known.

Bata is survived by his wife, Sonja, a son and three
daughters.

Bata came to Canada to make his mark, he had said some
years ago. "I wanted to do something where I could say OK, now
this enterprise I built on my own. Canada was the one country
that I selected for this experiment."

By 1940, the Batawa plant was in business. And after 1945,
when the Czech factories were nationalised by the Communists,
the company headquarters was relocated to Toronto under Bata's
leadership. Toronto is home to the Bata Shoe Museum, a
four-storey structure with 10,000 shoes.

The company returned to the Czech Republic in 1989, after
the Communist regime ended, nearly 100 years after the company
was founded in 1894.

Thomas G Bata, a grandson of the founder, became chairman
of the business in 2001.

Bata's father, Tomas, a ninth generation cobbler, founded
the shoe empire in Zlin in 1894, which later swelled into the
giant Bata Shoe Organisation. Thomas Bata ran the shoe company
from the 1940s into the 1980s.

"One of the greatest personalities of our time has left,"
Czech President Vaclav Klaus said in a statement.

"Despite ill fortune in his homeland, he managed to
succeed in the world and became for us a symbol of business
success. We will all miss him," Klaus said.

Born September 17, 1914, in Czechoslovakia, Thomas Bata's
life was buffeted by the worst horrors of the 20th century.

He exiled himself in Canada in 1938 when the rise of
Nazism forced him to flee his homeland. Seven years later,
having served with the Canadian army on the battlefields, he
returned to his freshly liberated birthplace, but not for long

When the communists took over the country after the WW-II,
they seized his factory and declared Bata a capitalist evil.

"I found it very sad," Bata said in an interview in 2005,
"because what we thought was liberation really became a
dictatorship of the communists."

The regime gave the company a new name and it went on
making shoes, but it was Bata, headquartered in Toronto that
remained a byword for shoes.

Bata broadcast support to the dissident movement on Radio
Free Europe and offered his business as a vision of what could
be - "so that people would see that the democratic system,
based on democratic economy, would be the most advantageous
for them."

It took 40 years, but vindication finally came in 1989.
As Eastern European communist dictatorships collapsed one by
one, Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident leader and playwright
turned president, asked Bata to come back.

"Vaclav Havel sent me a message through my wife and said,
'Tom should come as soon as he can'," Bata recalled.
Cheering crowds greeted him at the airport in Prague.

Havel awarded him the country's top decoration, the Tomas
Garrigue Masaryk Order, in 1991, and he also received high
Slovak and Canadian decorations. He last visited the Czech
Republic in June.

Besides his business activities, Bata also served as
chairman of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development's business and advisory committee on non-members.

His son Thomas George Bata took over the shoe company
from him in 2001.