SOUNDAR JC PENNY FULL

That experience soured young Jim on the organized church. He strongly urged his church to start a Sunday school, and that was an unpopular position there. But things would turn out all right, he was told, if he just followed the Golden Rule, treating others with fairness and respect.īut things weren't working out so well for the elder Penney. Life was tough, his father said, and success only came through hard work and long hours. At age 8, young Jim was told he would have to start buying his own clothes and earning his own money.

SOUNDAR JC PENNY FULL

James Cash Penney (yes, that was his full name) learned about faith and business from his father, who served as the pastor of a small Primitive Baptist church in Hamilton, Missouri, and struggled to make a living off the family farm. I saw God in his glory and planned to be baptized and to join a church.' 'It was a life-changing miracle, and I've been a different person ever since. 'At that time something happened to me which I cannot explain,' he said later. He had been striving all his life to honor God with his business, but now it was time to rest in the Lord's grace. Someone read a Scripture passage: 'Come unto me all you that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' It was a moment of clarity for the hard-working entrepreneur.

Be not dismayed whate'er betide,įollowing the sound, he stumbled upon a chapel filled with worshiping doctors and nurses. One morning he awoke too early for breakfast and was wandering the corridors when he heard a hymn he remembered from childhood.

The rest and medical attention did him good, but there was another event that restored him spiritually. It was all my fault.' He was even contemplating suicide.Īn old friend convinced him to enter a sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. wife and our children were estranged from me. 'My business had crumbled, my communications with colleagues had faltered, and even my. 'I was at the end of my rope,' he said later. His parents had instilled in him a basic Christian faith that had given him the principles on which he had based his life and his business, yet now that faith was being tested. I have found that unselfishness pays because it tends to engender unselfishness. But when the economy caved in during the 1930s, Penney lost nearly everything-including his health. Now in his fifties, James Cash Penney had already built an empire of dry goods stores, dedicated to following the Golden Rule as a basic commercial principle. In the midst of the Great Depression, one of America's leading businessmen sank into a personal depression of his own. There he competed for customers with 21 saloons.

He bought his first in the small mining community of Kemmerer, Wyoming, in 1902. Penney's first stores did not bear his name but were called The Golden Rule stores.

Soundar jc penny