The native paper recorded, “Mrs. J.C. Penney dies. Sick with pneumonia and affected by bronchial asthma for a very long time. Died at dwelling 371 Seventh Avenue, Salt Lake. Funeral December 26, 1910, at dwelling. Age 43.”
James Money Penney, Jr. confronted a bleak Christmas. “In that hour my world crashed about me,” Penney wrote. “ I felt mocked by life, even God himself.”
He was one in all our metropolis’s most storied businessmen. On the time of his loss of life in 1971, the JC Penney shops had been pulling in over $18 billion of enterprise. However in 1910, he nearly dedicated suicide.
His spouse Berta was deeply religious in addition to a lot concerned with Penney’s vocational hopes. His contemporaries uniformly praised his ethics however discovered him personally formal and slightly distant. Nevertheless, Penney’s coronary heart was saved heat by his spouse, a heat that spilled over into his different relationships. Berta additionally believed in him and comforted him within the face of his fears of failure. Then, she instantly fell deathly sick whereas her husband was on a protracted journey. Falling right into a coma, she by no means knew that her husband had made it again. A JC Penney official later wrote, “They needed to pry his hand from hers lengthy after it had turned chilly.”
Good ethics gave Penney a fairly good begin in life, however with no deeper private spirituality, the principles may appear fairly chilly consolation in a disaster that violated the principles. There have been no factors off loss of life for good conduct.
The shop magnate didn’t know the place to show. Outwardly moral, inside he had no deeper religious supply to brace his coronary heart via a disaster. His life was an ethical one however not a prayerful life. “I didn’t pray throughout this shattering expertise, for the explanation I couldn’t. The plain truth is, I had not realized the way to pray.”
Sooner or later after the funeral Penney was sitting in his workplace and startled everybody with a sudden scream, “Why!”, then sobbing uncontrollably. A employee took him dwelling, and he recovered sufficient to go about enterprise, which was booming. However inside he felt empty, adrift. He used the busyness of enterprise to present a semblance of objective to his life. He always traveled. The New York author Ring Lardner as soon as wrote {that a} man adrift wanders round searching for hassle to kill the sense of meaninglessness.
After arrival for enterprise in New York on a chilly, windy winter day in 1910, Penney completed work after which wandered all via the night time. Stress tortures the human thoughts in a thousand methods. For Penney it was sleeplessness. He came across a coal dock on the East River. He puzzled if it might be higher if he simply slip into the waters. Many a life in previous New York Metropolis was misplaced this manner.
As an alternative, he took off for the Bowery, averting catastrophe via stressed motion. However he additionally had an nearly uncontrollable want to drink himself to oblivion. He remembered, “I walked lengthy hours alone, blindly battling the ceaseless assault on my will and nerves…via the darkish, abandoned corridors of the impersonal metropolis, alongside the tangled streets of the Decrease East Aspect.”
Penney hoped that exhaustion would overtake him earlier than something dangerous occurred.
Bowery Road was dotted from its head in Chinatown to its finish at Fourth Road with bars, flophouses, and rescue missions. Life in boomtown New York Metropolis might be harsh and unforgiving. Some folks had been solid adrift because the detritus of the town. The poor situations of so many individuals pricked the consciences of the town and the nation. Within the earlier 12 months, The Bowery Mission had simply opened its new chapel with United States President William Howard Taft at its dedication in December 1909. Different charities additionally had opened or expanded.
Penney wandered within the space beneath the shadows of the previous Third Avenue El prepare tracks. He heard a faint sound within the night time, one thing musical that appeared like a ray of heat. He was interested in it.
The chilly wind pushed Penney alongside; he was nearly out of vitality. Curiosity additionally pulled him towards a rescue mission. Penney recounted, “I stepped contained in the mission, slipping right into a seat behind the room.”
A fellow merchandiser was talking upfront. Penney seen “he was dressed sprucely within the top of style.” But, the person talked of his disastrous spiral to “a bitter caricature of a person.” Penney couldn’t reconcile the person he noticed with the historic image introduced. Then, he realized that he was that man now, spiraling downward. It was solely a matter of time that Penney would take to drink and sink “as little as it’s doable for a person to go.”
The speaker then expressed his personal shock that “the nice folks of this rescue mission” put the enjoyment again into his coronary heart.
Penney heard the person’s phrases as a preplanned telegram from God above. “In my distraught state, I didn’t altogether grasp it clearly. However I felt that my steps had been led indirectly midway throughout the town…to Tom Noonan’s Rescue Mission.”
The person within the again pew felt his coronary heart fill with braveness. Anonymously, as he left, he gave one of many leaders a examine for the mission, the primary of many who he would go away for rescue missions.
Penney felt emboldened. He threw himself again into constructing what would change into JC Penney shops “with a sure reviving sense of pioneering journey.” He gained an energized zeal by doing charity work. He moved the chain retailer’s headquarters to New York Metropolis. A couple of years later, he bought married. However there was another Christmas disaster earlier than he lastly obtained crucial Christmas present of his life.
In 1929, the Nice Despair hit. JC Penney firm inventory went from $140 to $13 per share. Consequently, a number of banks referred to as of their loans to Penney. His personal financial institution failed. Personally, it appeared that he was headed for monetary break. He took a mortgage on his life insurance coverage, he closed down his dwelling apart from a couple of rooms, his spouse Caroline canned tomatoes and fruits. Then, Penney spiraled downward into an emotional abyss. He began accountable others for his failures.
Shortly earlier than Christmas in 1931, a pal insisted that he examine himself into Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, the place Penney went for annual check-ups. Penney later recalled that he had misplaced sense of his personal private limits and capabilities. “I tackled issues I had no enterprise [doing]; I felt there was no restrict to what may be completed.” He felt invulnerable. Later, he wrote, “I had permitted the thought of the ability of cash to own me.” The lack of cash and management threw him down on the bottom.
On the clinic, Penney felt that his loss of life was imminent. One night time at 10 pm, he bought up and wrote letters of farewell to his household.
Within the morning, the enterprise govt was shocked to find that he was awake. A sense came to visit him that one thing momentous was going to occur. He stumbled out into the hallway and shuffled off to the eating room for breakfast. It was too early, and nobody was there. Penney later wrote, “I felt as if an immense loneliness closed me in. I stood there, unsure in an vacancy that appeared to me to don’t have any horizon.”
Softly, “the thread” of a favourite hymn of his mom and The Bowery Mission wafted into the eating room. “Be not dismayed whate’er betide. God will maintain you.”
Penney entered a chapel off the eating room, and, because the medical doctors and nurses sang, “Lean weary one,” he sank down within the again. That second was “the particular turning level in my life.” Later, he mirrored, “one thing occurred to me…I had the sensation of being lifted out of an immensity of darkish house right into a spaciousness of heat and good daylight.”
The affected person immediately knew why he was there on the sanitarium. It was to achieve a kind of life that went deeper than he had ever skilled. He cried out, “Lord, I can do nothing. Will you maintain me?”
He realized that it wasn’t all people else’s fault for his issues. “The thought flashed via my wearied thoughts that, if I had held myself answerable for such success I had achieved, so too was I, and I alone, answerable for all of the troubles that had descended upon me. However the good thing was that now I knew; God with His boundless and matchlessly affected person love was there to assist me.”
Penney began to recuperate quickly and was capable of go dwelling for Christmas.
His moral satisfaction had been crushed by accusations over his failures; even his compassionate pursuits had been stripped from him. Neither of these — ethics or compassionate conduct — was capable of fill the void. However now he found a brand new stage of being: the ability of the private love of Jesus, the Christmas present that opens the guts. Penney opened his coronary heart to change into accustomed to God, with others, and with himself — ” for a human’s finish will not be in defeat, however victory.”
It took time for Penney to vary a lifetime of placing up partitions and filling in moats to maintain others out. However he got here to relaxation on this deep supply of life and energy that he found again in Michigan. He was a poor man on the altar on his technique to higher issues.
A particular word: because of the super assist of The Bowery Mission; and the extraordinary assist and data of Archivist Joan Gosnell, Director Russell L. Martin III, and employees at DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist College, Dallas, Texas. They made A Journey‘s go to to the library a delight.
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