The Tragedy of J.C. Penney: He Lost $900 million, Then Lost His Mind
Old Money Documentaries
15,986 views
In this in-depth, full-length documentary, we explore the story of James Cash Penney, born on 16 September 1875 in Hamilton, a farm town in Caldwell County, Missouri, the seventh of twelve children in a household where only six of those children lived to be adults, the son of a Primitive Baptist preacher who took no pay for his preaching and farmed three hundred and ninety acres to keep the family fed.
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From the day he turned eight years old, Penney's father informed him he would buy his own clothing.
On 4 February 1895, he reported for work as a clerk at the J. M. Hale dry goods store in Hamilton at twenty-five dollars a month, and that spring his father died with the reported last words, Jim will make it, I like the way he has started out.
Around 1897 a doctor told him he was consumptive and prescribed the standard nineteenth-century remedy, which was to go west and breathe.
He went to Colorado, bought a butcher shop in Longmont with his roughly three hundred dollars of savings, and the shop failed after he refused to keep supplying the local hotel chef with a bottle of whiskey along with his meat orders.
The Golden Rule store in Longmont hired him as a clerk, and in March of 1899 the partners Thomas Callahan and Guy Johnson sent him to Evanston, Wyoming at fifty dollars a month, where he married Berta Alva Hess.
On 14 April 1902, Penney opened his own Golden Rule store in Kemmerer, Wyoming, a frame building on Pine Street measuring twenty-five feet by forty-five, with a capitalization of six thousand dollars of which his third was two thousand, five hundred of his own savings and fifteen hundred borrowed from a Missouri bank at six percent.
First-day sales are reported at four hundred sixty-six dollars and fifty-nine cents, and by the end of that first year the store had done better than twenty-eight thousand dollars in business and cleared a profit somewhere in the vicinity of eight thousand, in a town of under a thousand people.
In 1907 he bought out Callahan and Johnson entirely, and in 1909 the headquarters moved to Salt Lake City, and the partnership rule he invented awarded any manager who trained a subordinate capable of running a store a one-third partnership interest in the new store that subordinate opened.
On 17 January 1913 the business incorporated as the J.C. Penney Stores Company with between thirty-four and forty-eight locations already trading, and by 1917 the company was the largest department-store chain in the United States with between one hundred seventy-five and two hundred stores across twenty-two states.
Berta died of pneumonia in 1910, leaving him with two young sons, and in July of 1919 he married Mary Hortense Kimball, who died in 1923 of a hemorrhage following an ectopic pregnancy, leaving a third small boy.
In 1921 he bought Emmadine Farm, seven hundred and twenty acres at Hopewell Junction in New York, and beginning in 1925 he and his associate Ralph Gwinn acquired roughly one hundred and twenty thousand acres in Clay County, Florida.
In 1926, on ground that would be chartered the following year as the Town of Penney Farms, he built the Memorial Home Community, a settlement of apartments for retired ministers, missionaries and church workers.
By 1928 the company opened its one thousandth store and did one hundred and ninety million dollars of gross business, and historians estimate his peak personal net worth in the 1920s at somewhere near forty million dollars.
He had pledged his J.C. Penney stock as collateral for bank loans that funded his philanthropies, and when the stock fell from above one hundred dollars to around thirteen after the 23 October 1929 New York Stock Exchange listing, the banks foreclosed on loans secured by his personal holdings.
The next morning he heard singing coming from the chapel where the staff held a short service for patients and went in and sat at the back, and the hymn was Civilla Martin's 1905 God Will Take Care of You, and he called those twenty minutes in that chapel the most glorious of his life.
More than a thousand associates of the company donated portions of their own salaries and their own stock to help him buy back shares.
On 3 June 1940, three days after graduating from college, a young man named Sam Walton reported to the J.C. Penney store in downtown Des Moines as a management trainee at seventy-five dollars a month.
James Cash Penney died on 12 February 1971 of a heart attack at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York at the age of ninety-five, with an estate reported in the New York Times the following month at approximately thirty-five million dollars.
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The Tragedy of J.C. Penney: He Lost $900 million, Then Lost His Mind
Old Money Documentaries
15,986 views
In this in-depth, full-length documentary, we explore the story of James Cash Penney, born on 16 September 1875 in Hamilton, a farm town in Caldwell County, Missouri, the seventh of twelve children in a household where only six of those children lived to be adults, the son of a Primitive Baptist preacher who took no pay for his preaching and farmed three hundred and ninety acres to keep the family fed.
----------------------------------------
Gain FREE access to secret full-length documentaries on wealthy families "too scandalous for YouTube" by joining our newsletter: https://www.substack.com/@oldmoneyluxury
----------------------------------------
From the day he turned eight years old, Penney's father informed him he would buy his own clothing.
On 4 February 1895, he reported for work as a clerk at the J. M. Hale dry goods store in Hamilton at twenty-five dollars a month, and that spring his father died with the reported last words, Jim will make it, I like the way he has started out.
Around 1897 a doctor told him he was consumptive and prescribed the standard nineteenth-century remedy, which was to go west and breathe.
He went to Colorado, bought a butcher shop in Longmont with his roughly three hundred dollars of savings, and the shop failed after he refused to keep supplying the local hotel chef with a bottle of whiskey along with his meat orders.
The Golden Rule store in Longmont hired him as a clerk, and in March of 1899 the partners Thomas Callahan and Guy Johnson sent him to Evanston, Wyoming at fifty dollars a month, where he married Berta Alva Hess.
On 14 April 1902, Penney opened his own Golden Rule store in Kemmerer, Wyoming, a frame building on Pine Street measuring twenty-five feet by forty-five, with a capitalization of six thousand dollars of which his third was two thousand, five hundred of his own savings and fifteen hundred borrowed from a Missouri bank at six percent.
First-day sales are reported at four hundred sixty-six dollars and fifty-nine cents, and by the end of that first year the store had done better than twenty-eight thousand dollars in business and cleared a profit somewhere in the vicinity of eight thousand, in a town of under a thousand people.
In 1907 he bought out Callahan and Johnson entirely, and in 1909 the headquarters moved to Salt Lake City, and the partnership rule he invented awarded any manager who trained a subordinate capable of running a store a one-third partnership interest in the new store that subordinate opened.
On 17 January 1913 the business incorporated as the J.C. Penney Stores Company with between thirty-four and forty-eight locations already trading, and by 1917 the company was the largest department-store chain in the United States with between one hundred seventy-five and two hundred stores across twenty-two states.
Berta died of pneumonia in 1910, leaving him with two young sons, and in July of 1919 he married Mary Hortense Kimball, who died in 1923 of a hemorrhage following an ectopic pregnancy, leaving a third small boy.
In 1921 he bought Emmadine Farm, seven hundred and twenty acres at Hopewell Junction in New York, and beginning in 1925 he and his associate Ralph Gwinn acquired roughly one hundred and twenty thousand acres in Clay County, Florida.
In 1926, on ground that would be chartered the following year as the Town of Penney Farms, he built the Memorial Home Community, a settlement of apartments for retired ministers, missionaries and church workers.
By 1928 the company opened its one thousandth store and did one hundred and ninety million dollars of gross business, and historians estimate his peak personal net worth in the 1920s at somewhere near forty million dollars.
He had pledged his J.C. Penney stock as collateral for bank loans that funded his philanthropies, and when the stock fell from above one hundred dollars to around thirteen after the 23 October 1929 New York Stock Exchange listing, the banks foreclosed on loans secured by his personal holdings.
The next morning he heard singing coming from the chapel where the staff held a short service for patients and went in and sat at the back, and the hymn was Civilla Martin's 1905 God Will Take Care of You, and he called those twenty minutes in that chapel the most glorious of his life.
More than a thousand associates of the company donated portions of their own salaries and their own stock to help him buy back shares.
On 3 June 1940, three days after graduating from college, a young man named Sam Walton reported to the J.C. Penney store in downtown Des Moines as a management trainee at seventy-five dollars a month.
James Cash Penney died on 12 February 1971 of a heart attack at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York at the age of ninety-five, with an estate reported in the New York Times the following month at approximately thirty-five million dollars.
Gain FREE access to secret full-length documentaries on wealthy families "too scandalous for YouTube" by joining our newsletter: https://www.substack.com/@oldmoneyluxury