#434 Sam Walton

0:00For his first 50 years, Sam Walton was not at all a national figure.

0:03He remained in the shadows off the beaten track.

0:06It was only in the early 1980s that a startled public discovered that the richest man in America was not a Rockefeller, a DuPont, a Trump, a Kennedy, a Getty, or a Perot, but an unglamorous guy from Arkansas named Sam Walton.

0:20Reporters discovered that he was ordinary, that he grew up in Missouri in the Depression, worked his way through college, lived a clean Christian life, served stateside in World War II, married an Oklahoma banker's daughter, opened up his first five-and-dime store in Backwater, north central Arkansas, and raised four healthy kids.

0:37Pretty darned ordinary, but only on the surface.

0:40Sam Walton, underneath, was no ordinary man.

0:44It's one of my favorite paragraphs in the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Sam Walton, The Inside Story of America's Richest Man, and it was written by Vance Trimble.

0:52So this book is almost 40 years old.

0:54It's actually written before Sam's famous autobiography, Made in America.

0:59And what I want to do, this is like the third or fourth time that I read the book.