Word: kress
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Then, in New York, an eccentric old millionaire decided to give 75% of his fabulous collection of Italian art, valued conservatively at $25 million, to the gallery. While Samuel Henry Kress stripped his warehouses and the walls of his Fifth Avenue penthouse of their treasures, the gallery's decorators hastily revised their plans to provide a fitting decor for the new acquisitions. President Franklin Roosevelt wrote a grateful letter to Kress, and when the National Gallery opened, comfortably furnished with masterpieces, it was a sensation...
Talented Copyist. Sam Kress was a man who had something less than a connoisseur's feeling for great art, who often bought his treasures by the lot. And his collection had become great only a few years before he startled the art world with his huge donation...
...Kress was better known as an old master of business, but in his business as in his collecting, he was essentially a talented copyist. He was born in eastern Pennsylvania just three weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg, where his uncle and namesake was killed. His Pennsylvania Dutch family was moderately well off, and Sam, the second of six children, became a country schoolteacher at 17. After seven years of frugally saving part of his $25-a-month salary, he bought a notions store in Nanticoke, Pa.; three years later he bought out a wholesaler in Wilkes-Barre and looked...
Seven years later he had seven branches in eastern Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey, and his business was flourishing. Kress freely borrowed Woolworth's ideas, shrewdly located his first store in Memphis, where there was a ready market for low-cost merchandise-and no competition...
...Kress & Co. was a runaway success; by keeping prices down the company ultimately became tops for sales per store in its field. Last year, with 264 stores, from New York to Honolulu (most of them concentrated in the South, where "going to the Kress store" is part of the way of life), and 22,000 employees, the company grossed...