On the Edge: JCPenney, an American story (2024)

Did they call him J.C.? Probably not. His mother called him James, and the girls in downtown Hamilton, Missouri, in the late ’20s, if they spoke to him at all, surely called him “Little Jimmy.”

That’s what happened when you were a sickly fella having to watch the prom through the gym windows, as the prettiest girls from the better streets in town wearing pastel gowns their mothers and big sisters made for them arrived in those black Fords at twilight.

I like to think that James Cash Penney must have been a skinny kid with a bad haircut. On doctor’s advice, he moved to Colorado for better air, and went to work for Thomas Callahan and Guy Johnson who had two stores, the Golden Rule Dry Goods stores in Colorado and Wyoming.

That’s what Wikipedia tells us about J.C.

It also tells us that Callahan sent him to Kemmerer, Wyoming, where the first store has now become a National Historic Landmark.

I write this story today, full of Wikipedia dates and figures because you won’t bother, and because my two oldest sisters, during the Great Depression, demonstrated Singer Sewing Machines in the windows of Sears Roebuck and, yes, JCPenney.

So here is what I learned. James took his wife and son to Kemmerer and opened his own store on April 14, 1902, using the cash he borrowed from a savings and loan.

By 1912, he had 34 stores in the Rocky Mountain States with really big signs that said “JCPenney.”

And guess what? Jimmy, that skinny kid who couldn’t get a date for the prom, eventually opened his 500th store in his hometown of Hamilton.

Boy, I’m betting that all those girls who spurned Jimmy in high school were green with envy as they watched him open the store with JCPENNEY (finally got smart with those big initials) in big letters over the front doors.

You could do that sort of thing back in the United States of America in the feverish year of 1924, and still go on to open 1,000 stores only a few years down the road.

And guess what again! A guy named Sam Walton, who was probably selling underwear at JCPenney in 1940, went on to open his Walmart in 1962.

The rest of this pure American story is all there for your kids to read on Wikipedia.org, as their big orange school bus passes on upper Main Street, past Dunkin’ Donuts, and past the really big sign that hangs over little Jimmy Cash Penney’s final store in Waterville, Maine: CLOSING.

It’s likely that you won’t be reading the entire Wikipedia article, as I did, to discover that the original store in little Kemmerer, Wyoming, not only has been elevated to a National Historic Landmark, it is the center of the J. C. Penney Historic District.

I’m betting that somewhere in Kemmerer, there must be a statue of “Little Jimmy,” and maybe even a “JCPenney Day” … somewhere in July.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.

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