Remembering Helen Walton: mother, matron, mentort
BENTONVILLEI, ARK. —The retail industry lost a true pioneer last month with the passing of Helen Walton, the wife of legendary Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton. She died April 19 of natural causes at her home in Bentonville.
Although she was never directly employed by the company and never served on the board, Sam Walton credited his wife in the 1992 biography “Made in America,” with shaping the company’s early strategies and ownership structure that have since enabled Wal-Mart to become the world’s largest retailer.
The most dramatic evidence of her influence on the retail industry can be traced back to Sam Walton’s decision to enter the retail business. Helen married Sam on Valentine’s Day 1943 and two years later, when Sam was discharged from the U.S. Army, he decided to pursue a career in retail. He considered forming a business partnership with a friend to buy a department store in St. Louis, but Helen was a small town girl from Claremore, Okla., who did not want to live in a town with more than 10,000 people. In addition, her father was a successful businessman who shunned partnerships and she shared that philosophy with Sam. As a result, Sam pursued a different opportunity to buy an ailing Ben Franklin franchise in Newport, Ark., that was made possible by a $20,000 loan from Helen’s father. Sam went on to learn the basics of retailing while at Ben Franklin and Helen gave birth to the couple’s four children, Rob, Jim, John and Alice, while in Newport.
Another milestone in Helen Walton’s influence on the development of Wal-Mart came again five years later when the couple’s landlord wouldn’t renew their store lease and they went looking for another location. They settled on Bentonville in part because it was closer to her parents in Oklahoma, although she was not thrilled with the notion of uprooting the young family.
“When we left Newport, it was a thriving cotton town, and I hated to leave,” she said in Sam’s biography. “Bentonville was really just a sad-looking country town, even though it had a railroad track to it. I remember I couldn’t believe this was where we were going to live.”
It was a fateful decision and one that would lead to the opening of the region’s first self-service dime store followed by the company’s first discount store in 1962. The growth that followed is well documented and Walton’s biography details how his wife wasn’t fond of the idea of becoming a public company because of the attention it attracted. However, doing so enabled the company to generate enormous wealth that was shared with front-line employees through a profit sharing program Walton created at his wife’s suggestion as well as billions of dollars that have been donated to charitable causes over the past four decades.
“We are so proud of our mother and the life she led,” said Rob Walton, the eldest of three surviving children and chairman of Wal-Mart. “She devoted much of her life to helping others and to improving the quality of life in Northwest Arkansas.”
Helen Walton was preceded in death by son, John, and is survived by brother Frank Robson, two sons, Rob and Jim, both of whom serve on the Wal-Mart board, a daughter, Alice, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.