The local paper recorded, “Mrs. J.C. Penney dies. Sick with pneumonia and suffering from asthma for a long time. Died at home 371 Seventh Avenue, Salt Lake. Funeral December 26, 1910, at home. Age 43.”
James Cash Penney, Jr. faced a bleak Christmas. “In that hour my world crashed about me,” Penney wrote. “ I felt mocked by life, even God himself.”
He was one of our city’s most storied businessmen. At the time of his death in 1971, the JC Penney stores were pulling in over $18 billion of business. But in 1910, he almost committed suicide.
His wife Berta was deeply devout as well as much involved with Penney’s vocational hopes. His contemporaries uniformly praised his ethics but found him personally formal and a little distant. However, Penney’s heart was kept warm by his wife, a warmth that spilled over into his other relationships. Berta also believed in him and comforted him in the face of his fears of failure. Then, she suddenly fell deathly sick while her husband was on a long trip. Falling into a coma, she never knew that her husband had made it back. A JC Penney official later wrote, “They had to pry his hand from hers long after it had turned cold.”
Good ethics gave Penney a pretty good start in life, but without a deeper personal spirituality, the rules could seem pretty cold comfort in a crisis that violated the rules. There were no points off death for good behavior.
The store magnate didn’t know where to turn. Outwardly ethical, inside he had no deeper spiritual source to brace his heart through a crisis. His life was a moral one but not a prayerful life. “I didn’t pray during this shattering experience, for the reason I could not. The plain fact is, I had not learned how to pray.”
One day after the funeral Penney was sitting in his office and startled everyone with a sudden scream, “Why!”, then sobbing uncontrollably. A worker took him home, and he recovered enough to go about business, which was booming. But inside he felt empty, adrift. He used the busyness of business to give a semblance of purpose to his life. He constantly traveled. The New York writer Ring Lardner once wrote that a man adrift wanders around looking for trouble to kill the sense of meaninglessness.
After arrival for business in New York on a cold, windy winter day in 1910, Penney finished work and then wandered all through the night. Stress tortures the human mind in a thousand ways. For Penney it was sleeplessness. He came upon a coal dock on the East River. He wondered if it would be better if he just slip into the waters. Many a life in old New York City was lost this way.
Instead, he took off for the Bowery, averting disaster through restless movement. But he also had an almost uncontrollable desire to drink himself to oblivion. He remembered, “I walked long hours alone, blindly battling the ceaseless assault on my will and nerves…through the dark, deserted corridors of the impersonal city, along the tangled streets of the Lower East Side.”
Penney hoped that exhaustion would overtake him before anything bad happened.
Bowery Street was dotted from its head in Chinatown to its end at Fourth Street with bars, flophouses, and rescue missions. Life in boomtown New York City could be harsh and unforgiving. Some people were cast adrift as the detritus of the city. The poor conditions of so many people pricked the consciences of the city and the nation. In the previous year, The Bowery Mission had just opened its new chapel with United States President William Howard Taft at its dedication in December 1909. Other charities also had opened or expanded.
Penney wandered in the area under the shadows of the old Third Avenue El train tracks. He heard a faint sound in the night, something musical that seemed like a ray of warmth. He was attracted to it.
The chilly wind pushed Penney along; he was almost out of energy. Curiosity also pulled him toward a rescue mission. Penney recounted, “I stepped inside the mission, slipping into a seat at the back of the room.”
A fellow merchandiser was speaking upfront. Penney noticed “he was dressed sprucely in the height of fashion.” Yet, the man talked of his disastrous spiral to “a bitter caricature of a man.” Penney couldn’t reconcile the man he saw with the historical picture presented. Then, he realized that he was that man now, spiraling downward. It was only a matter of time that Penney would take to drink and sink “as low as it is possible for a man to go.”
The speaker then expressed his own surprise that “the good people of this rescue mission” put the joy back into his heart.
Penney heard the man’s words as a preplanned telegram from God above. “In my distraught state, I did not altogether grasp it clearly. But I felt that my steps had been led in some way halfway across the city…to Tom Noonan’s Rescue Mission.”
The man in the back pew felt his heart fill with courage. Anonymously, as he left, he gave one of the leaders a check for the mission, the first of many that he would leave for rescue missions.
Penney felt emboldened. He threw himself back into building what would become JC Penney stores “with a certain reviving sense of pioneering adventure.” He gained an energized zeal by doing charity work. He moved the chain store’s headquarters to New York City. A few years later, he got married. But there was one more Christmas crisis before he finally received the most important Christmas gift of his life.
In 1929, the Great Depression hit. JC Penney company stock went from $140 to $13 per share. Consequently, several banks called in their loans to Penney. His own bank failed. Personally, it seemed that he was headed for financial ruin. He took a loan on his life insurance, he closed down his home except for a few rooms, his wife Caroline canned tomatoes and fruits. Then, Penney spiraled downward into an emotional abyss. He started to blame others for his failures.
Shortly before Christmas in 1931, a friend insisted that he check himself into Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, where Penney went for annual check-ups. Penney later recalled that he had lost sense of his own personal limits and capabilities. “I tackled things I had no business [doing]; I felt there was no limit to what might be accomplished.” He felt invulnerable. Later, he wrote, “I had permitted the idea of the power of money to possess me.” The loss of money and control threw him down on the ground.
At the clinic, Penney felt that his death was imminent. One night at 10 pm, he got up and wrote letters of farewell to his family.
In the morning, the business executive was surprised to discover that he was awake. A feeling came over him that something momentous was going to happen. He stumbled out into the hallway and shuffled off to the dining room for breakfast. It was too early, and no one was there. Penney later wrote, “I felt as though an immense loneliness closed me in. I stood there, uncertain in an emptiness that seemed to me to have no horizon.”
Softly, “the thread” of a favorite hymn of his mother and The Bowery Mission wafted into the dining room. “Be not dismayed whate’er betide. God will take care of you.”
Penney entered a chapel off the dining room, and, as the doctors and nurses sang, “Lean weary one,” he sank down in the back. That moment was “the definite turning point in my life.” Later, he reflected, “something happened to me…I had the feeling of being lifted out of an immensity of dark space into a spaciousness of warm and brilliant sunlight.”
The patient instantly knew why he was there at the sanitarium. It was to gain a type of life that went deeper than he had ever experienced. He cried out, “Lord, I can do nothing. Will you take care of me?”
He realized that it wasn’t everybody else’s fault for his problems. “The thought flashed through my wearied mind that, if I had held myself responsible for such success I had achieved, so too was I, and I alone, responsible for all the troubles that had descended upon me. But the great thing was that now I knew; God with His boundless and matchlessly patient love was there to help me.”
Penney started to recover rapidly and was able to go home for Christmas.
His ethical pride had been crushed by accusations over his failures; even his compassionate interests had been stripped from him. Neither of those — ethics or compassionate behavior — was able to fill the void. But now he discovered a new stage of being: the power of the personal love of Jesus, the Christmas gift that opens the heart. Penney opened his heart to become familiar with God, with others, and with himself — ” for a human’s end is not in defeat, but victory.”
It took time for Penney to change a lifetime of putting up walls and filling in moats to keep others out. But he came to rest on this deep source of life and strength that he discovered back in Michigan. He was a poor man at the altar on his way to better things.
A special note: thanks to the tremendous help of The Bowery Mission; and the extraordinary help and knowledge of Archivist Joan Gosnell, Director Russell L. Martin III, and staff at DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. They made A Journey‘s visit to the library a delight.
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