James Cash Penney was born in Missouri and founded his first J.C. Penney store in a tiny mining town in Wyoming in 1902. His first paying job was with a local dry goods firm at a salary of $2.25 per month and his first true business venture was the opening of a short-lived butcher shop in Colorado. He returned to Wyoming and opened his Golden Rule Store on a “cash only basis.” He attributed his success to this policy, and to the profit sharing plan with employees which he developed in 1907. Mr. Penney neither drank nor smoked and built his empire on uncompromising, stiff principles. Mr. Penney called his first biography The Man With a Thousand Partners and wrote other books including Main Street Merchant and A View from the Ninth Decade.