Janet Munro was 20 when she put her newborn son up for adoption in 1970, and she didn't meet him again until 2017. Between those two moments she built a custom furniture business with her husband Bill, rode out two recessions, and once ended up in the Guinness Book of Records for building what was briefly the world's largest rocking horse. Now 75 and living in Nashville, Janet talks with Sam about weathering storms, running a business for 46 years, and why she still doesn't consider herself a quitter.
What You'll Hear
- How a summer job at a fishing lodge on Great Bear Lake changed Janet's career direction
- What the adoption process looked like for unwed mothers in 1970 Winnipeg
- Why Janet walked home skipping the day her Hyatt Regency boss fired her in 1974
- How she and her husband Bill started selling handmade furniture at flea markets during the 1978 recession
- The Guinness Book rocking horse stunt that brought customers back during the 2008 downturn
- Why Munro's Furnishings put windows overlooking the workshop so customers could watch the builders
- The three-choices rule Janet used for both customer complaints and personal decisions
- The podcast project she's launching called Roots and Branches Adoption Stories
From England to the Arctic Circle
Janet was born in England and emigrated to Canada at age eight after her father, an electrical engineer, met some Canadians at a Boy Scout Jamboree and decided to take a job overseas. The family crossed on the Queen Mary in 1958. Her mother spent the entire trip in bed, her sister got sick on day two, and Janet ran the decks like she owned the boat.
After high school in Winnipeg she tried the jobs everyone else tried. A year coding insurance policies onto paper grids for early computers convinced her that sitting at a desk in silence was worse than school. A year of commerce accounting at university didn't stick either. Then a bulletin board flyer advertised summer work at Arctic Circle Lodge on Great Bear Lake, in the Northwest Territories.
She took it. Six girls around her age ran housekeeping for the lodge. Fourteen guides rotated through. Twenty-four hour daylight meant fishing trips at three in the morning. Janet caught a 13 pound trout and came home certain she was meant for hospitality, not an office. That summer of 1969 set the direction for the next decade of her working life.
An unplanned pregnancy and a closed adoption in 1970
Janet came back from the Arctic pregnant. She was 20, unmarried, and working shift work in a Winnipeg hotel. In late-1960s Canada, pregnant unmarried women were called loose women and their babies were called bastards. Abortion was illegal and unsafe. She made the decision herself, without being sent to a home for unwed mothers the way younger women often were, and placed her son for adoption.
The adoption was closed. She signed away all rights and had no say in who the parents would be. A week after her son went home with his adoptive family, a trainload of forty babies left Winnipeg for Minneapolis because there were more infants than homes in Canada at the time.
She describes the years that followed plainly. You remember him on birthdays. Something reminds you. Most days you know he's gone and you keep going. That discipline, do the next thing, don't sit still, shows up again and again in her story. She spent the summer after the birth recovering, took a trip to Denmark for her sister's wedding, and walked back into the hospitality industry in the fall.
The Hyatt Regency boss and walking home skipping
Janet worked her way from front desk clerk to reservations manager to assistant manager at the Hyatt Regency in Toronto. She loved the work, the guests, the people. Then she got a new boss.
She calls it a me-too situation, and she wasn't willing to go along with it. In 1974 Canada there was no Ministry of Labor complaint process, no HR playbook that would take it seriously. She ended up in the hospital, genuinely sick from the stress. When her boss finally called her in and fired her, she walked home and skipped the whole block back to her apartment.
Her advice, forty-some years later, is direct. If it's happening to you, it's happening to others. Talk about it. Don't carry it alone. The people around you probably support you more than they support him, and if you speak up, he'll be gone before you are. She almost sent him a Facebook message during the Me Too movement, thought about it, and decided to leave it in the past.
Building Munro's Furnishings from a flea market booth
Janet met Bill on a train to Montreal in 1978. He called her Tuesday, she picked him up Wednesday, and he never left. They were together 37 years. When the 1978 recession pushed mortgage rates to 20 percent and the kitchen company he worked for dried up, Bill told her he could build furniture. Janet's reaction was practical. Nobody builds furniture, they go to a store and buy it. Somebody has to make it in the first place, he said.
They set up tools in the basement of a rented house in Maple and took one piece to a Sunday flea market. They sold it for 15 dollars and paid 20 in booth rent. The comments were good, so they tried again. The next Saturday they sold 150 dollars worth. The following Sunday, 300. Within a year they had the beginnings of a business.
It grew into Munro's Furnishings, a custom furniture manufacturing and retail operation on a busy highway corner north of Toronto. Bill ran the shop floor from eight in the morning until four thirty, then loaded the truck and ran deliveries until nine or ten at night. Janet ran retail, logistics, and hand-written driving directions in a world without internet. They started the business to survive one year. They ran it for 37 together, and Janet ran it another nine with her daughter after Bill died in 2015.
The world's largest rocking horse and windows into the workshop
When the 2008 recession hit, foot traffic dropped. The Munros needed attention, not an ad budget. So they built the world's largest rocking horse. Lumber suppliers donated wood that had been sitting in their yards. Employees donated time. The shop team scaled up a smaller rocking horse design they had been selling for years. Two months of work, a public assembly weekend with vendor booths, and a place in the Guinness Book of Records. A competitor later beat the record by putting a mohawk on their horse's head, which Janet still finds ridiculous. What horse has a mohawk.
The stunt kept bringing people off the highway to photograph the horse. Magazines listed it alongside the big nickel in Sudbury as a place to see. Free publicity, local legend status, and a flow of walk-in customers during a recession.
But the rocking horse was one of many ideas. During the two weeks before Christmas, the delivery driver dressed as Santa Claus. Phones rang all day with people saying they'd just seen Santa driving the Munro's truck. Shop workers wore elf hats so customers could see them through the showroom windows. Those windows were the bigger idea, copied from a neighboring glass-blowing studio. Munro's put the workshop behind glass with labeled tools so visitors could watch furniture being built. Bill would dream up a table at night, build it in front of the window the next day, and sell it off the floor before it was finished. It wasn't a factory, it was an experience. They charged nothing to watch.
Finding her son in 2017 and what comes after
Janet found her son in 2017. That's why she lives in Nashville. She had six years with him, with his widow, his children, his half-siblings on his dad's side, and the wider family that adoption had scattered. She calls it an Oprah story. They were planning on happily ever after.
In 2023, he was killed in a workplace accident. Janet says honestly she isn't sure she's gone through the grief process yet. She still feels he'll answer if she picks up the phone.
She isn't stopping. She's 75, she sells healthcare sharing as an affordable alternative to US health insurance, and she's launching a podcast called Roots and Branches Adoption Stories. Between the US and Canada there are over six million adoptees, she says, and nobody talks about the ripple effects. Her approach to hard decisions is the same one she used in the store when a customer got a scratched dining table. Come up with three options. Refinish it, replace it, discount it. Let the person choose. When you only give yourself one way through, you're stuck. Three ways, and one of them will work today. The other rule she's carried since 1974, written on a poem her father gave her after her boating accident, is simpler. Rest if you must. But don't you quit.
About Janet Munro
Janet Munro co-founded Munro's Furnishings, a custom furniture manufacturing and retail business north of Toronto, with her husband Bill in 1978. At its peak the company employed 60 people and earned a spot in the Guinness Book of Records for building the world's largest rocking horse. After Bill's death in 2015 Janet ran the business with her daughter until closing it in 2024. She now lives in Nashville, works in healthcare sharing, and is launching a podcast called Roots and Branches Adoption Stories. Roots and Branches Adoption Stories