James Cash Penney: born near Hamilton, Missouri  (pop. 1,535) 16 Sept.1875, "J. C. " worked at a mercantile store before moving to Wyoming to open his own store in 1902. When he retired in 1946, more than 1,600 J.C. Penney stores were in business. He died in 1971.

James Cash Penney's first venture as a retail proprietor - a butcher shop in Longmont, Colo. - opened in 1899 and failed almost immediately, after he refused to bribe an important local hotel chef with a weekly bottle of bourbon. "I lost everything I had," said Penney, "but I learned never to compromise."

The story of James Cash Penney is an amazing story...Penney's early upbringing was unusual. At age 8 he was buying his own clothes and earning his own money for his needs. He was taught scrupulous honesty by his minister father. James Cash Penney said at the end of his career, "What I done, given the times and circumstances, anyone could have done. I haven't any special attainments." But the boy who was baptized "Cash", by living the Golden Rule, became a leader of refined gold. 

 As he started out in business, his business was going poorly, and he had a physical collapse. He was up in a little sanitarium, rebuilding his health, and walking down one of those corridors in that little health rehabilitation center, he heard someone playing hymns on the organ. J.C. Penney walked in there, bowed down and said, ‘Lord, I'm giving my life to You.’ 

He had opened his first store, Golden Rule Store, in the mining town of Kemmerer, Wyoming in 1902...his stores changing names to the J. C. Penney Co., Inc in 1913. He became convinced (internally "convicted") that, even in debt and poverty, he should begin returning a tithe to God --- he did, and J.C. Penney department stores have sprung up all over America.

Penney's unwavering faith in the copybook maxims of his youth roused skepticism in a mercenary age, but his credo underlay his success. At his death in 1971, Penney, 95, left a 1,660-store empire that he built without compromising the stiff principles he had absorbed from three generations of Baptist preacher ancestors. He neither smoked nor drank, and for years demanded the same abstemious conduct from his employees. "I believe in adherence to the Golden Rule, faith in God and the country," he often said. "I would rather be known as a Christian than a merchant."

Until his final illness, he worked regularly at Penney's mid-Manhattan headquarters, where he kept five secretaries busy with volumes of correspondence.

(posted about 2003; latest addition/correction 7/7/08)