Our Founder

Otto Jangl was born on December 19, 1924, in what is now the Czech Republic, and raised on a farm, which is where he first learned how things grow. In 1947 he graduated from Charles University in Prague with a master’s degree in agronomy.

He never got the chance to use it there. He had been part of the student resistance, and in 1948 political persecution forced him to flee. With a close friend, he took the friend’s father’s car, crossed the no man’s land, and hiked over the mountains to reach a refugee camp. When the time came to choose a new country, he chose Canada, as Canada was looking for farmers. So that is what he told them he was. The master’s degree he kept to himself.

ARRIVING WITH ALMOST NOTHING

He landed in 1950 and went to work farming south of Montréal. His instincts showed almost immediately: noticing the mountains of sawdust the city’s factories were throwing away, he began collecting it and reselling it. By 1953 he was renting a farm of his own and was deep in the production and cleaning of agricultural seed. In 1956 he joined J.A. Pilar Seed Export & Import in Montréal, responsible for grass and forage seed. It was the beginning of a lifetime in turf.

1967 — O.J. COMPAGNIE

When Otto first turned toward the golf industry, there were only one hundred golf clubs in all of Québec, and the Canadian Golf Superintendents Association did not yet exist. He founded O.J. Compagnie in 1967 as a very small family business. The initials were chosen deliberately: they were shared by O.J. Noer, the most respected turf consultant in North America, who died that same year.

That same year, Otto sat the required exams at Université Laval and was admitted to Québec’s Ordre des agronomes. He was finally recognized in his adopted country. In 1995, Laval named him a lifetime member.

BUILT ON HANDSHAKES

The company grew on personal charm, warm handshakes and honest practices. Otto travelled more miles and walked more golf courses than almost anyone in the business, and the company outlived every one of its competitors. He became a Jacobsen dealer in 1982 and expanded steadily through the 1980s and 1990s. He also insisted that every customer receive a box of apples each fall and a bottle of wine each Christmas — a rule the company still remembers.

LUDMILA

Otto did not build it alone. Ludmila arrived in Montreal from Czechoslovakia in 1968 to visit the father she had known almost entirely through letters since the age of three. Trained in Prague as a technical draftswoman, she was working at Dominion Engineering within months. Then Soviet tanks entered Prague, and going home was no longer a choice she could make. She and Otto married in 1970.

THE LEGACY

Otto passed away in 2008. On January 1 of that year his son Phil became President; his daughter Gaby serves as Vice-President. His three granddaughters — Ella, Madeline and Mia — are the third generation of a company that began with a young man and his suitcase.