Sam Walton, an American success story, was born in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, March 29, 1918, and raised in Missouri. Graduating from the University of Missouri with a degree in economics, he entered JC Penney's management-training program in Des Moines, Iowa. In 1945 he opened a Ben Frankin five and dime franchise store in Newport, Arkansas.
Along with his brother James, he built a network of Ben Franklin stores, eventually opening 15. The first Wal-Mart opened in 1962, and the empire of 1735 stores would ultimately span the nation coast to coast. The stores were usually located in small towns and rural areas, and their low prices maintained by high volume proved to be disasterous for local competition from hardware and dime stores.
Walton went on to found a chain of discount wholesale outlets known as Sam's Warehouse in 1983, and further refined the Wal-Mart concept to include Hypermarts and Supercenters, enormous stores that were even larger than the huge Wal-Marts.
Walton considered himself throughout his life a student of his craft, and attended an IBM school in 1966 to learn how to computerize his operations. Wal-Mart became a pioneer in just-in-time inventory control and built a computer database second only to the Pentagon's in capacity.
Though he was to become one of the world's richest men, with a net worth estimated at $23 billion, Walton worked hard to maintain a folksy image. He favored hands-on management, and was a pioneer of the profit-sharing concept. One of the stories often told about him was his promise to "dance in a grass skirt on Wall Street" if employees exceeded profits goals. They achieved his goal, and Walton was seen hula-ing in New York in 1983. Sales in 1992 were $50 billion, and the Wal-Mart/Sam's empire boasted 380,000 employees.
Walton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George Bush, just a month before Walton was to succumb to leukemia on April 5, 1992. In his speech, Bush called the midwesterner, "an American original, embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and epitomizing the American dream."
