JC Penney, the Person

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Marc Levinson, The Cowboy Capitalist; When a life insurance told James Cash Penney that overwork put him at risk, he stepped down as president of his company and toured the country. Wall Street Journal, Sept 25, 2017
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cowboy-capitalist-1506289445
(book review on David Delbert Kruger, JC Penney; The man, the store, and American agriculture. University of Oklahoma Press, 2017)

Quote:

"Many American entrepreneurs have obsessed over how to make good use of their wealth. The money of steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie built 1,689 public libraries. Julius Rosenwald, the genius behind Sears, Roebuck, devoted much of his fortune to funding schools for African-American children in the rural South. Oil magnate John D Rockefeller gave vast sums to medical research, higher education and Baptist missions. For James Cash Penney, the obsession was farming.

"Born on a Missouri farm in 1875, he found his calling in 1898, when he became a store clerk in Colorado. The store was called Golden Rule, and the philosophy of its owners was to sell a abroad array of merchandise at fair prices, cash only, to small-town residents desperate for consumer goods. * * * in 1902 the company offered Penney a partnership in a new store in Kemmerer, Wyoming, He did so well there that he soon bought the entire operation. In 1914, the headquarters of the JC Penney Co, as it was by then known, moved to New York, but nearly all the stores were in small towns in farm countries. By 1917, it w the largest department-store chain in the United States.  But the previous year, a life insurance told Penney that
overwork had made him a high-risk customer, and he responded by transforming his life. At age 41, he stepped aside aa president of his company * * * but still chairman of the board, he traveled the country * * * 'It seemed to me that nearly everywhere I went farmers stood in need of better cattle,' Penney recalled later.

"This is where Kruger picks up the story. If you want to know about retailing, this isn't the book for you; the author has nothing to do merchandising or inventory control. Instead. He takes us through Penney's less-known ventures in livestock breeding, dairy production and farm improvement. For his last five decades, until his death in 1971, these efforts, far more than the dry-good business, absorbed the retail magnate's attention.

"in 1930 Penney's own fortune was wiped out. The following year, the entrepreneur was hospitalized following a nervous breakdown. * * * [His health, and later,] finances recovered.

"Not all of these venture succeeded: In his enthusiasm for breeding better mules, Penney failed to foresee how quickly tractors would make mules unwanted.

"Penney kept going strong until 95, when a series of accidents took their toll. A few months before his death he had fallen on a New York sidewalk while trying to catch a bus to his office. The company would gladly have provided a limousine, but that was not the way JC Penney traveled.

Note:
(a) James Cash "JC" Penney Jr (Sept 16, 1875 – Feb 12, 1971 (age 95) )  Wikipedia.org
(i) The English surname Cash is "variant of Case."
(ii) Penney is a variant spelling of English surname Penny: "for a tenant who paid a rent of one penny. This was the common Germanic unit of value when money was still an unusual phenomenon. It was the only unit of coinage in England until the early 14th century, when the groat and the gold noble were introduced, and was a silver coin of considerable value."  Dictionary of American Family Names, by Oxford University Press.

(b) There is no need to read the rest.

groat (coin)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groat_(coin)
("was first minted under King Edward I" in 1279)
(c) merchandising (n): "sales promotion as a comprehensive function including market research, development of new products, coordination of manufacture and marketing, and effective advertising and selling"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/merchandising