One of the most respected chains of American department stores is the J.C. Penney Company.
Its origins can be traced to a store started in 1902 by James Cash Penney, the son of a Kentucky Baptist minister, in Kemmerer, Wyoming.1 It was incorporated under its present name in 1913 and by 1929 Penney himself was worth 40 million dollars.
Stockmarket crash
But 1929 was the year of the stock market crash. The store’s stock plunged from 120 points to 13, and Penney himself lost almost his entire fortune. Crushed by this sudden reversal and plagued by unrelenting financial worries, Penney’s health began to suffer. ‘I was so harassed with worries that I couldn’t sleep and developed an extremely painful ailment’, he later admitted. In 1931 he decided to admit himself into the Kellogg Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, where one of the resident doctors told him that he was extremely ill.
