Sebastian Spering Kresge

Background

Sebastian Spering Kresge was born on July 31, 1867 in Bald Mount, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the son of Sebastian Kresge and Catherine Kunkle.

Education

Kresge attended the Fairview Academy in Brodheadsville, Pennsylvania, and the Gilbert Polytechnic Institute. In 1889 he graduated from Eastman Business College in Poughkeepsie, New York. His parents were poor during his school years, but they agreed to his proposal to turn his entire salary over to them until he reached the age of twenty-one if they would finance his education.

Career

In 1886 Kresge taught at Gower's School and Monroe Academy.

He worked as a deliveryman and clerk for Patrick Ward in Scranton, Pennsylvania. During 1890-1892 he was a bookkeeper in the Howley Brothers Store, Scranton. He also sold industrial insurance and owned a half-interest in a bakery, which failed. From 1892 to 1897 Kresge sold tinware and hardware specialties in New England and the north-central states for the W. B. Bertels and Sons Company of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. During this period he met F. W. Woolworth, the dime-store merchant, and determined to follow his business example.

During the 1890's, a time of economic depression, Kresge saved $8, 000, which he invested in the company of J. G. McCrory, an early chain-store merchant. After learning the business in McCrory's store in Jamestown, New York, he joined him as an equal partner in opening stores in Memphis and Detroit. Kresge managed the Memphis store, but in 1899 traded his half of it to McCrory and took full possession of the Detroit store. This was the beginning of the S. S. Kresge Company, which in time became the largest chainstore company in the country. A large sign on the Detroit store proclaimed: "Nothing Over 10 Cents in Store. " Soon after it opened Kresge formed a partnership with his brother-in-law, Charles J. Wilson, and they opened a second store in Port Huron, Michigan, in 1900.

In 1907, when Kresge bought out Wilson, they also owned stores in Indianapolis, Toledo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, and Chicago. When the company was incorporated as S. S. Kresge in 1912, it then operated eighty-five stores with an annual business of $10 million. When Kresge stepped down as president in 1925 to become chairman of the board, the company was operating over 300 stores, and his personal fortune exceeded $200 million. In 1920 Kresge acquired the Mt. Clemens Pottery Company in Michigan as a subsidiary; half its production was sold in Kresge stores. He also was president of the Kresge Realty Company, and in the 1920's he acquired other stores--the Palais Royale in Washington, D. C. ; the Fair in Chicago; Steinbach-Kresge in Asbury Park; Stern Brothers; and the L. S. Plant Store in Newark. At this time he had a $30 million brokerage account in Wall Street and was very visible to the public because of the breakup of his first two marriages and his passionate support of the Anti-Saloon League and the National Vigilance Committee for Prohibition Enforcement, which he organized when the Eighteenth Amendment was adopted.

In the next decade he abandoned public crusades and the stock market. The ten-cent limit was maintained in the Kresge stores until 1920, when the company opened the first of its "green front" stores, which sold items worth up to one dollar; after World War II, Kresge stores were selling a wide range of goods at various prices. Finally in 1961 Kresge approved an $80 million deal for financing a line of discount stores called K-Marts. In 1963 the company transformed unprofitable stores with long leases in deteriorating neighborhoods into Jupiter stores, which sold both variety and discount goods.

By 1966 the Kresge company operated the second-largest chain in the country and employed over 4, 200 people in 670 variety stores, 150 K-Mart department stores, and 110 Jupiter discount stores. Annual sales for 1965 totaled $851 million.

After Kresge's death the chain passed Woolworth to become the largest in the country. Almost to the end of his life Kresge was involved with his company. When illness forced him to retire four months before his death, he had been chairman of the board for forty-one years, attending every board meeting and studying every monthly report.

Achievements

• Kresge established the Kresge Foundation with an initial gift of $1. 3 million. During the next thirty-three years his endowments to the foundation totalled over $60 million. The Kresge Foundation made grants to a number of American institutions, including Children's Village near Detroit, a home for dependent children; the Newark Museum; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Harvard, Michigan, Michigan State, Northwestern, Wayne, and Columbia universities. Other gifts aided overseas operations, including a program to train flying doctors in Kenya. At the time of his death Kresge had given the foundation the bulk of his personal fortune, including 2. 5 million shares of Kresge stock worth $100 million. The foundation by that time had assets of $175 million and had given away $70 million.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The S. S. Kresge Story

    (Dust jacket notes: "Detroit is the automotive capital of ...)

Religion

Kresge was a devout Methodist who never used alcohol or tobacco, refused to give financial support to any church if he knew the minister used tobacco, considered playing cards a "frivolity, " and gave up golf because he claimed he could not afford to lose so many balls.

Politics

Kresge was a staunch Republican.

Views

Kresge was convinced that men of wealth were obliged to return to society the money they amassed.

Kresge engaged in many philanthropic enterprises. During World War I he was active in the National War Work Council of the YMCA and the International Methodist Centenary Movement, and he regarded his defense of Prohibition, though it was doomed to failure, as work in the best interest of the public.

Kresge was noted among his friends, associates, and employees as an eccentrically frugal man. Believing that money should not be wasted on clothing, he wore his suits until they were threadbare and he was known to line his old shoes with paper. The same frugality was expected of his employees, but he was also distinguished for enlightened personnel policies. Early in the century, when absence because of sickness was often grounds for dismissal, he gave his employees sick leave and paid holidays, and earlier than most employers he gave employees profit-sharing bonuses and retirement pensions. Although his first two wives accused him of miserliness, he was generous in his divorce settlements. He reportedly gave $10 million to his first wife and their children and another $3 million to his second wife. Kresge combined shrewd merchandising methods, an uncanny ability to pick talented subordinates, and a spartan capacity for hard work to create a great chain of stores and a huge personal fortune. At Harvard in 1953 to dedicate Kresge Hall at the university's Graduate School of Business Administration, he was asked to speak. His address was just six words: "I never made a dime talking!" All his life he embodied traditional virtues, often in ways that seemed odd to those who did not understand his personal philosophy.

Quotations: "I can get a greater thrill out of serving others, than anything else on earth. I really want to leave the world a better place than I found it. "

"I think I was successful because I saved and because I heeded good advice, " he once said. "I worked sometimes eighteen hours [a day]. When one starts at the bottom and learns to scrape, then everything becomes easy. "

Connections

His first wife, Anna Emma Harvey, whom he married in 1897 and by whom he had five children, divorced him in 1924. That year he married Doris Mercer, who divorced him in 1928, the year that he married Clara Katherine Zitz.

Father:

Sebastian Kresge

Mother:

Catherine Kunkle

Spouse:

Anna Emma Harvey

Spouse:

Clara Katherine Zitz

Spouse:

Doris Mercer

References

• Carollo (Grayce) v. S.S. Kresge Co. U.S. Supreme Court Transcript of Record with Supporting Pleadings