Financial History Issue 126 (Summer 2018) | Page 30

An early family photo of Josiephine and Luther Turner with a dapper young Calister Turner. own business. In the meantime, he learned all he could and saved his money. It says a great deal about Luther Turner that he was able to turn his third-grade education into a plus. He was convinced that everyone he met was smarter than he, and that he needed to learn something from each of them. He became a first-rate observer, a great listener and a dedicated student of life. What he practiced was more than empathy. It involved valuing the other person and his or her informa- tion, insight and perspective. With a steady job and a son who had just turned 10, Luther decided the family needed the advantages of a town. The clos- est one was Scottsville, and that’s where they moved. Luther found and bought the cheapest house on the best street in town, putting his wife and son in the finest sur- roundings he could afford. Living on $125 of the $225 he earned monthly from Neely Harwell, Luther used the rest to open Turner’s Bargain Store on South Court Street. That was where Cal, who helped out when he could, took his first independent step into the world of retail in the summer of 1929. He and his friend Howard Shrum, whose father owned the shoe store next door, teamed up and sold lemonade on the sidewalk. It was all you could drink for a nickel. They gave people plenty of ice, knowing that the colder the lemonade, the better the chance their customers, gulping in the hot sum- mer sun, would get a “brain freeze” after half a glass or so. Cal and Howard couldn’t help it if “all you can drink” didn’t turn out to be very much. They made $12. A few months later, the stock mar- ket crashed on Black Friday, and the Great Depression soon followed. It would be much worse than the downturn of a decade earlier, but Luther was much better prepared. His years on the road, in and out of the little department stores found in nearly every town, had taught him volumes. He had seen the business as a wholesaler and a retailer, from the perspectives of owners and customers, in good times and bad. He knew their mer- chandise, their cash flows, their strengths and weaknesses. He was by this time part psychologist, part philosopher and all businessman. When the Great Depression hit, Cal was in the eighth grade, which meant he had completed four more years of schooling than his father. He was especially good with numbers, and Luther began taking him on the road. Cal was a quick study. He picked up on what made customers’ eyes light up and what left them cold. No one in those little towns had much money. They wanted value and knew how to spot it. Luther saw that many of these stores weren’t going to make it. They had 28    FINANCIAL HISTORY  |  Summer 2018  | www.MoAF.org mortgages, utilities, vendors and other creditors to pay, but their customers lacked cash, so they simply couldn’t move their merchandise at anything close to what they had in it. What had happened to him and his two little stores in the early 1920s was happening all over the rural South in the 1930s. He also knew that where there was failure, there was oppor- tunity. He had opened that first store with merchandise from a failed retailer. Here was the chance to do that with store after store. Someone would be buying the merchandise at bargain-basement prices, on the courthouse steps if nowhere else. It might as well be Luther. In photos from that era, with his suit and tie, slim build and glasses, Luther looked like a young Harry Truman. But behind the glasses, there was a fatherless farm boy who started with nothing, fac- ing the early days of the worst depression in the country’s history. If there was ever a test of a man’s mettle and a nation’s promise, this was it, but it was clear that he had already come a great distance from his days of walking behind a mule in that Tennessee dirt. As the Great Depression deepened, Luther began buying the inventories of failed stores, often competing with other bidders to do so. He and Cal would show up early on auction day, and Cal learned quickly from Luther how to size up mer- chandise and assign value. It helped that Cal was a whiz with numbers. He’d walk around with a pad and pencil, listing items and doing the figuring. “I count 62 pairs of shoes,” Cal might say, “and it looks like an average price of a dollar twenty-five.” He’d go through as much as he could this way—sacks of sugar, baby dresses, rolls of wallpaper, whatever they had—writing his approximations on a note pad. He might determine that the entire stock was worth $4,500, and Luther would try to buy it for $2,000 or so. My father is no longer here to ask, but I won- der now whether my practical grandfather took cash with him to those sales, since A peaceful Cal Turner, Sr. in the yard at home.