Born: March 29, 1918
Died: April 5, 1992 Place of Birth: Kingfisher, Oklahoma
Major Notes:
Sam Walton, with help from his brother James, established the largest chain store operation in the world.
He and his brother were the only children born to Thomas and Nancy Lee Walton.
The boys lived on their father's farm until 1923 when Thomas decided to forego farming and go back to a type of work he formerly had as a farm loan appraiser.
This meant moving from Oklahoma to Missouri and from town to town over a period of years.
Sam attended Hickman High School, Columbia, where he was an exceptional student in the classroom and in sports as well as student affairs.
Following high school, Sam Walton enrolled in the University of Missouri as a ROTC officer majoring in Economics.
Because of financial difficulties, Walton worked part-time jobs but this did not deter him from his studies.
After he graduated university in 1940, he found employment in a J.C. Penny retail store in Des Moines, Iowa.
He married Helen Robson in 1943, a business graduate of the University of Oklahoma, whose father was a prominent banker and rancher.
After he married, Sam Walton went to serve in the Army supervising aircraft plants and prisoner of war camps based in the US.
With the war over, he was determined to open his own store and, with help from his father-in-law, opened a Ben Franklin variety store franchise.
The store was so successful the landlord company itself who leased him the store purchased the business from Walton.
Walton then used the profits to open another Ben Franklin franchise in Bentonville but with the name Walton's 5 & 10 and shortly opened a second 5 & 10 twenty miles away.
Sam Walton and other family members, using sales methods Walton recommended, had a chain of 16 stores by 1962.
In 1962, he opened his first Wal-Mart store in Rogers, Arkansas.
That same year also marked the opening of competing stores K-mart and Woolco.
The Wal-mart business has expanded all over the world and is considered the largest discount retail chain worth many billions of dollars.
Sam Walton passed away in 1992 and his method of buying products in large quantities and selling as cheap as possible has been adopted by many other firms.
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