Truth: If anyone has your email address, everyone has your email address.
This is seldom a good thing. If I go more than a day or two without cleaning out my inbox, I’m in big trouble. I can’t wholesale delete everything, because—amidst all the junk–there’s almost always something I want to read or need to deal with.
Somehow, the website dictionaryscoop.com recently got hold of me. Before I could trash what they’d sent, a headline caught my eye. “Was J.C. Penney a real person?” it said. Before I even opened it, I was outraged. What kind of idiotic question was that? Is there anyone in the United States of America who doesn’t know J.C. Penney’s story? And if they don’t, why not?
J.C. Penney was the reason my family had a roof over our heads. Food on our table. Clothes on our backs and shoes on our feet. My daddy became a manager trainee at Penney’s before I was born. It all started with a letter my mother’s uncle wrote to him in the early 1950s. “A young man looking for a bright future who’s willing to work hard couldn’t find a better opportunity than the J.C. Penney Company,” Uncle Virgil wrote. “It has certainly provided me with a wonderful career.”
Daddy jumped on the suggestion.
Thus my siblings and I learned James Cash Penney’s story almost before we could talk. Born the seventh of 12 children in 1875 in Missouri, Mr. Penney learned the values of honesty and self-reliance from his parents. In 1902, he put those values into practice when he opened “The Golden Rule” dry goods store in Kemmerer, Wyoming. He offered quality goods at fair prices and focused on treating his customers and employees the way he wished to be treated. The Golden Rule, in other words.
That small beginning ballooned into more than 2,000 stores when Penney’s was at its peak in the 1970s.
A lot of what I know about J.C. Penney comes from a book Daddy gave me when he figured I was old enough to read it. That book is “Main Street Merchant,” written by Norman Beasley and first published in 1948.
The Bantam Book paperback version, copyright 1950, sits on the desk beside me as I write this column. It’s so old I can smell it and so dried out that some of the pages, yellowed with age, have come loose from the spine. The cover still delights me. It’s a full-color illustration of a 1940s town, complete with 1940s-era cars and people wearing 1940s-era clothing and—right in the middle—the two-story J.C. Penney store, with a yellow-and-gray striped awning shielding shoppers from the weather. I happily stared at that picture for hours when I was a kid.
Inside the book I learned lots of interesting stuff about J.C. Penney. I learned he didn’t have an official “closing time” for his store, but instead went out into the middle of Kemmerer’s main street every evening and looked up and down for about ten minutes. If no one was in sight, he closed.
I learned that Mr. Penney sold ladies’ dresses with deep hems in the front so they could be let out, allowing a regular dress to become a maternity dress. I learned that The Golden Rule sold men’s shaving brushes for one cent. I learned, not from the book but from my daddy, that before Mr. Penney would hire a man, he took him to lunch. If the prospective employee salted his meat before he tasted it, he didn’t get the job.
I had the honor of meeting Mr. Penney in person in 1965, when my daddy managed the Penney store in Augusta, Georgia. He was a sprightly 90 years old and greeted folks from a chair in the shoe department. He smiled and shook my hand when we were introduced. I’ll never forget it.
Was J.C. Penney a real person? You bet he was. As real and wonderful as it gets.
(Jennie Ivey is a Cookeville writer. Her email is jennieivey@gmail.com)