Burton Davis Morgan was a successful entrepreneur, who started or helped to start dozens of businesses during his lifetime.

He was born in 1916 in New York City but eventually settled in the Chicago area where his father taught psychology at Northwestern University. As youngsters, he and his brother spent their summers at their grandparents’ farm in Indiana.

Throughout his life, Morgan considered himself “just a farm boy.” In reality, he was an engineer, an inventor, an author and a philanthropist.

He moved to Ohio because his first job upon graduation from Purdue University was at B.F. Goodrich in Akron. Morgan left Goodrich when the company failed to select him as a future company leader. He determined that engineers didn’t get enough respect and that he wanted to be the boss.

He landed at Johnson & Johnson in New Jersey, where he was assigned the task of designing a machine to make small-size Band Aids. What he called the “sticky paper” business would become his stock and trade.

In 1953, he teamed up with the Avery Label Company of California to start a company in Painesville, Ohio. Morgan convinced his partners that the pressure-adhesive paper company -- known as Fasson -- should be near Akron, where some of the world’s best rubber and adhesive compounds were made. Fasson found success when it began manufacturing an adhesive-backed product similar to Contact paper.

In 1958, Morgan teamed up with the owners of the Bemis Bag Company, once the world’s largest importer of burlap, and founded the Morgan Adhesives Co. in Stow. Burt and Peg Morgan and their three children moved to nearby Hudson, which had been settled by one of Peg Morgan’s ancestors.

In the early 1960s, Morgan invested in another start-up, Filmco, which wound up making an oxygen-permeable cellophane that helped revolutionize the way meat was wrapped in supermarkets. When that company was bought by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. in 1967, Morgan’s small investment made him a multimillionaire. That same year, The Burton D. Morgan Foundation was established.

During the decades Morgan ran his companies, he traveled around the world on business. He also traveled with an organization of corporate leaders and as a business ambassador on behalf of the state of Ohio.

He returned home each time with a conviction: that entrepreneurship and the free enterprise system “comprise America’s number one advantage over the rest of the world.”

That conviction strengthened as the years went on. And as it did, the Foundation that Morgan established began to focus on grants to promote entrepreneurship and the free enterprise system.

In 2002, one of those grants went to Morgan’s alma mater, Purdue University, to build a Center for Entrepreneurship.

Burt and Peg Morgan were honored at a reception and ground-breaking that fall at Purdue. At the time, he had almost finished writing his autobiography, My Life . . . So Far.

A few months later, Burt Morgan was diagnosed with cancer. He died in March 2003, at the age of 86. The epilogue of his autobiography quotes from his speech at Purdue and well summarizes the direction of his life:

“. . . failure never stopped anyone who was truly determined to succeed. I have found that entrepreneurs’ failures are often more interesting than their successes, and these failures help to develop the character and intelligence that eventually led them to success. An entrepreneur who fails is not stopped. He or she can always try again. And successful entrepreneurs always do.”