Czech born shoemaker Thomas Bata dies at 93

PRAGUE (CZECH REPUBLIC): Thomas Bata, the Czech-born head of the worldwide family shoe empire that bears his name, died today in Canada, an official said. He was 93.

Bata died today in a hospital in Toronto, said Pavel Velev, who heads the Thomas Bata Foundation based in the Bata family's former villa in the eastern Czech town of Zlin. He did not give the cause of death.

"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.

Bata's father, Tomas, founded the shoe empire in Zlin in 1894, and it would later swell into the giant Bata Shoe Organization. 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 World War II, they seized his factory and declared Bata a capitalist evil.

"I found it very sad," Bata told the Associated Press in a 2005 interview, "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.