Mister Walton's Store

Notes from Lynn:

Sam Walton began his Wal-Mart journey in 1951 as an obsessed skinflint, an owner-manager far more concerned about the bottom line than the bottoms of people invited into his tiny office in Walton's 5 & 10. The proof is a Sweet Sue apple box in Bentonville, Arkansas. We saw it next to his battered old desk and a nail-keg wastebasket in his first store, now a museum and shrine to the late Samuel Moore Walton. Preserved behind glass, like George Washington's bedroom, Sam's old office is now an exhibit for parsimony.

The apple box was a seat for his guests.

Another kind of exhibit is planned these days in Bentonville by Alice Walton, youngest of Sam and Helen's four children. She was 18 months old when her dad furnished his office with an apple box. He went on to found a worldwide chain of 8,055 (at last count) of enormously profitable Wal-Mart discount stores, Wal-Mart supercenters, Sam's Clubs and thousands of huge stores with assorted names in 15 countries (Bhati in India, ASDA in Britain, etc.) When he died in 1992, he was the nation's richest multibillionaire.

After leaving the shrine, we walked down a curving bike path to an observation deck above what would have been known, in the the Ozarks not too long ago, as some dark holler. It is filled now with earthmovers, concrete trucks, two towering cranes, a regiment of men in hard hats and the columns of a temple under construction.

The temple is not for Alice's guests. It's for art.

Parsimony is never mentioned. The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a nonprofit project envisioned and mostly financed by Sam's very rich daughter, is budgeted at $417 million – with about $350 million for the complex of galleries, auditorium, fountains and gardens. Alice, whose wealth is said to be $18 billion or so, now lives among the horsey set in Mineral Springs, a Texas town near Dallas.

She paid $35 million for "Kindred Spirits," an 1849 painting by Asher B. Durand, and more millions have been spent on one of Charles Willson Peale's portraits of George Washington and paintings by John LaFarge, Thomas Eakins, George Bellows, Eastman Johnson, Charles Bird King, Jasper Cropsey, Winslow Homer, Marsden Hartley and many other American artists.

Will art lovers find their way to the Ozarks when the museum is ready in a year or two? Who knows? Four years ago, we made our way through Spain's Basque country to visit the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, also an unlikely place for a world-class museum. (The cost of construction in 1997, including Frank Gehry's shimmering outside walls of titanium, is estimated at a mere $100 million.) Other Guggenheims are under construction in Guadalajara, Bucharest, Lithuania and Abu Dubai, but none in so isolated a town the size of Bentonville.

If you build it, according to Shoeless Joe Jackson in W.P. Kinsella's "Field of Dreams," they will come. But first the art lovers and tourists will have to find Bentonville in the once-rural slurbs of northwest Arkansas. It's now a land uglified by an acne of strip malls, industrial parks and dying villages along U.S. 540 and U.S. 62 from Rogers to Springdale to Fayetteville.

Exceptions include Bentonville's tidy courthouse square (at left). The centerpiece is the statue of a Confederate lieutenant in the 18th Arkansas, James H. Berry, later a governor and senator. Mounted on a cenotaph, he can look down on the 5-and-10 where Sam once touted his retail system as a way to encourage American-made products and to breathe life into the downtowns of America. But in 1962 he opened his first Wal-Mart in a bigger store away from the courthouse square. Then he built his own store on the edge of town, a strategy applied to all but a few of the 8,055 stores that would follow. And rare is the merchandise that isn't imported from China. (The first Wal-Mart storefront is now a heating and cooling outfit, at right.)

Bentonville's downtown is so pretty, painted and pristine that I wondered if the Walton overseers, conscious of the corporation's reputation as a destroyer of Main Streets, own or somehow subsidize buildings on the square. It's not typical of the half-abandoned downtowns so common in the 4,142 American communities where Wal-Marts are installed on the outskirts.

The story means little to friends and neighbors back in the inner Bay Area, one of the world’s few regions where Wal-Mart is known only by its reputation as an enemy of the people. That's balderdash. Sam Walton and his successors are hardly responsible for America's love of the automobile, our understandable quest for low prices and our indifference to the poverty-level wages, anti-union ferocity and ruthless business practices.

After all, Wal-Mart is no different from Home Depot, Target, Lowe's, Costco, Kroger, Levitz and other retail vampires that drain economic blood – and city sales tax revenues – from the downtowns of America. Let's not forget McDonald's, Denny's, Applebee's, Waffle House and all the other out-on-the-highway franchises that stuck a knife in the heart of the mom-and-pop cafes of yesteryear. The list goes on. Don't blame Sam or Alice or the other heirs for the devastation of Main Street, but few of Wal-Mart's workers will be able to afford entrance fees to the Crystal Bridges Museum. They are the ones sitting on apple crates.


Notable: On a street called Desire, we saw so many damaged houses that we remain in a state of shock.

Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005 with hurricane winds and flooding that broke though inadequate levees. It devastated the Crescent City and displaced thousands of people, mostly from the poorest wards.

Four years have gone by in the world's most affluent nation, and on a drive-around through the Ninth Ward we saw hundreds of homes that have been restored or rebuilt and occupied (at right is one).

And we saw hundreds more where nothing has been done to repair homes damaged by wind, flood, mold and bureaucratic apathy. We saw countless empty lots and apartment complexes with no signs of life except for official graffiti (at left) that declare a house to be uninhabitable.

At first we were just curious, interested to see the area that we'd watched on TV during the hurricane's aftermath. Then we were horribly saddened. "Each boarded up house, each barren foundation, was the end of someone's dreams," Margo said. Words don't mean much. Snapshots tell the story.