• by Thom Forbes , July 5, 2016

Jack C. Taylor, a World War II fighter pilot who later founded a car rental company — Enterprise — named after one of the aircraft carriers he flew off of, died in St. Louis Saturday after a short illness. He was 94.

Returning to his hometown of St. Louis after the war, Taylor operated a package delivery business before taking a sales position in 1948 with Lindburg Cadillac, according to an obituary on the Enterprise Web site. Then, with seven vehicles, he founded Executive Leasing in partnership with the Lindburg family in 1957.

“Taylor started renting cars on a small scale in 1962 as an additional service for his auto leasing customers. At a time when other car rental companies were focused on serving customers at airports, Taylor recognized the potential market for renting cars right in the neighborhoods where people lived and worked,” according to the company.

“He was known for saying, ‘If you take care of your customers and employees, the bottom line will take care of itself,’” Laurence Arnold writes for Bloomberg.

In 2007, Enterprise acquired the Alamo and National car rental brands, which were based at airports. In 2009, it took the name Enterprise Holdings. Enterprise Holdings and Enterprise Fleet Management, which together offer car rental and car-sharing services, commercial truck rental, corporate fleet management and retail car sales, took in $19.4 billion in revenue in fiscal 2015. 

Enterprise Holdings is now the world’s largest car rental company, and employs 91,000 people in more than more than 9,000 neighborhood and airport locations in more than 80 countries and territories. It “has more than 1.7 million vehicles, double the size of Hertz or Avis, its major American rivals. With a retail automotive division, it is also the largest buyer and seller of cars and trucks in the world,” Robert D. Hershey, Jr. reports for the New York Times.

“But despite its immense size, Enterprise has attracted less notice than its big competitors, particularly among business travelers, mainly because of its traditional focus on downtown and suburban locations, rather than airports, and its private ownership,” Hershey writes.

Crawford’s son, Andrew, succeeded him as CEO in 1991.

In an October 2006 interview with Voices, the online magazine of the Missouri History Museum, Taylor said that they “weighed taking the company public but never did,” Bloomberg’s Arnold relates.

“We thought about it three or four times,” he said. “There were so many things that came up that they — the street, Wall Street — would expect from us, that finally Andy and I one afternoon we were sitting, I said, ‘Andy, why don’t we just bag it?’ And Andy said, ‘Right, let’s bag it.’”

“My father took a simple idea and created a great company,” said Andrew, who stepped down as CEO in 2013 and is now Enterprise Holdings’ executive chairman. “We will miss him. But we will honor his memory every day as we live the values he instilled in our company — taking excellent care of our customers, encouraging and supporting each other and giving back to our communities.”

“Through the years, Taylor — whose charitable giving ranked him No. 11 on The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s 2015 “Philanthropy 50” list of America’s top donors — made many notable private contributions to several of St. Louis’s leading civic and cultural not-for-profit institutions,” according to a memorial Web site, jacktaylorremembered.com. Twice divorced, he is also survived by his daughter, Jo Ann Taylor Kindle, who runs the Enterprise Holdings Foundation, as well as five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Funeral services will be private.