David Rosenthal: observation

Transcript context

…I love that wording. Sam and Helen get married and Sam gets posted in a bunch of places all around the country doing internal intelligence work for the army. He goes to Utah and plenty of other places. He decides that when the war ends and he gets out of the Army, he's going to go back into retailing, but now, he has the support of Helen, her family, and her father, L.S. They're financiers, so he knows, I now have access to some amount of capital. I can be an entrepreneur. I don't necessarily have to work for somebody. When the war ends, L.S. initially wants them to move back to Claremore, but Helen and Sam decide together. They're like, well, we want your support, but we don't want to be totally under your wing and in your shadow. Sam got big ambitions. He and a buddy decide that they want to buy a Federated Department Store franchise in St. Louis. They're going to be big. He comes from JCPenney in Des Moines. He wants to be a big city department store owner, magnate, and entrepreneur. Helen vetoes this outright. We would not be talking about Walmart if Sam had moved the family to St. Louis. Helen says, look, one, I don't want you doing any partnerships with non-family members. Sam says, "Her family had seen some partnerships go sour, and she was dead-set in the notion that the only way to go was to work for yourself and for your family. " Two, she says, "I don't want to live in a big city. I want to go live in a small town where I grew up just like Claremore. I don't want to live in Claremore itself, but we are not allowed to move to any town that has a population of more than 10,000 people." Her whole thing was I want to raise my kids the way that I was raised. She looked at Sam and said, you were raised the same way in a small town and that's what we're going to do. Whatever business he did had to be family owned and controlled and have a small town-based strategy. What seems so intentional and so genius actually stems from the fact that she just vetoed his original idea.…

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