The Untold Story of Sam Walton and How Wal-Mart Is
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In Sam We Trust: The Untold Story of Sam Walton and How Wal-Mart is Devouring America CHAPTER Chapter One 129 Billion Reasons to Live Imminent death has a way of clarifying one's thoughts. So it was with Sam Walton, who discovered how short his thread was running thanks to a seemingly minor screwup on a fine November day in 1989, on a remote stretch of the Rio Grande Valley, in Texas. Walton had come back from a full day of tromping through the prairie grass and mesquite, hunting for quail, only to find that he'd locked himself out of the ice house at one end of his hunting camp. Walton's Campo Chapote was not the sort of place likely to be featured on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous--just several battered trailers ringing a barbecue pit, with a few water wells, a dog kennel, a barn where he kept his truck and supplies, and the ice house, which was more of a shed, really. The camp moldered away on a 31-square-mile tract of land about 80 miles southwest of Corpus Christi. One indication of how crazy Walton was about the place was the fact that this otherwise frugal billionaire had happily dished out about $120,000 a year to lease the tract from a local rancher since 1983, when he'd hunted in Texas for the first time. It was the hunting he cared about, not the ambiance. By contrast, his brother Bud's digs, on another nearby ranch, included a stone mansion with a swimming pool. The land in that part of Texas is wide open and flat enough that, usually, the hunters would climb up onto a bench mounted on the bed of a four-wheel-drive pickup truck and roll slowly along the prairie, watching for the dogs to point quail. Walton would walk for stretches too. At seventy-one--even after having fought leukemia into remission a few years earlier--he was still athletic, fit, able to set a strong pace, though in recent months he'd felt some odd aches and pains. A slender, balding man with white hair, a sharp nose, and a sun-beaten, wrinkled face, Walton loved to hunt quail. He had, ever since his father-in-law had introduced him to the sport more than forty years earlier, around the time Walton opened his first business, a little five-and-dime store in Newport, Arkansas. Hunting was the one passion that could tear him away from work, though, typically, he found ways to combine the two. It would have been inconceivable for him to go hunting without stopping off at a Wal-Mart store or two along the way. 1 These days, he often used the camp for business. A few times a year, he'd fly down Wal-Mart managers, two dozen at a time, for a weekend. He'd say he wanted to let his managers get to know each other outside of the usual business setting--though some of his executives suspected it was just an excuse to squeeze in a few more weekends of working and hunting, for the talk around the campfire at dusk revolved around Wal-Mart business as invariably as if the men were sitting in a boardroom back at headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. Even after a day of hunting, Walton just didn't make idle chatter. Often, though, he would fly down with just a friend or two for company, or hunt on his own. Walton could be surprisingly absent-minded. One of the chores of Walter Schiel, a former rodeo cowboy from Waller, Texas, who now worked as the ranch's hunting guide and dog handler, was to retrieve shotguns Walton left behind. After seeing Walton get lost or run out of gas a few times on the vast prairie, Dick Jones, the ranch owner, had talked him into putting in a two-way radio; and it had proved its worth time and again. On this late November afternoon, Walton stood outside the ice shed with Schiel. Noticing a small window was open, the slim Walton clambered up onto the cowboy's shoulders and tried to squeeze through. He made it, but the dog whistle around his neck caught on the window and jammed painfully into his sternum. The next morning, he still felt sore, but shrugged it off to go hunting anyway. By the end of the day, though, he was still in pain, and the ache had spread to his upper arm. This was worse than any of the other inexplicable aches he'd felt in recent months. Reluctantly, Walton decided he'd better check in with his doctors. He hopped in the twin-engine Cessna he'd picked up a few years earlier (used, of course) and flew to Houston. * * * Walton had been commuting to Houston for medical care regularly since 1982, when he was diagnosed with hairy cell leukemia, a type of blood cancer that destroys the body's white blood cells. Walton had always been an active and energetic man, usually up and working long before dawn, but that year he had been feeling increasingly tired and run down. At first, he had thought that maybe, as his wife Helen kept claiming, he was just working too hard; so, though it cut against his grain, he began delegating more work, cutting back on his busy travel schedule, and trying to relax more by hunting and playing tennis. But that hadn't helped. So, reluctantly--Walton had always hated seeing doctors--he'd gone in for an extensive physical checkup. His doctors in Arkansas discovered he had a disturbingly low white-cell count. They told him that he had a chronic type of leukemia that had been developing for at least six or seven years. What caused it? They didn't know. Could it be cured? They couldn't say. But Walton, of course, could afford the best treatment money could buy, so they referred him to Houston's M.D. Anderson Hospital, one of the country's leading cancer research centers. There, an oncologist named Jorge Quesada was testing an experimental treatment for hairy cell leukemia using interferon, an astonishingly expensive substance painstakingly 2 extracted from white blood cells. At the time, it took 300 donors to provide enough interferon to treat one patient for three months, at a cost of about $10,000 a month. Quesada wasn't the type to sugarcoat matters. The standard treatment, he said, would be removal of Walton's spleen, followed by chemotherapy. But, he told his unhappy patient, this procedure only had about a 25 percent success rate (with "success" meaning the patient was still alive five years down the road). Walton had loathed the idea of going under the knife, and he had been almost combative. Surgery, he said flatly, was absolutely out of the question. Any other options? There was really only one alternative, Quesada said: He could become an interferon research patient. There would he risks, such as the possibility of hemorrhage and of opportunistic infections; there were potential side effects, including flulike symptoms and fatigue. But even though Quesada had given interferon to fewer than ten hairy cell leukemia patients up until then, he was obviously very enthusiastic about the initial results. It seemed to help these patients maintain their white-cell counts, and to bolster their immune systems, he told Walton. Still, he added, it was an experimental treatment, and the results so far, while encouraging, had to be considered preliminary. Anyhow, he shrugged, at worst, if it didn't work, they could fall back on surgery and chemotherapy. Become an experimental subject? Walton didn't care much for that idea either. He'd need to think about it, he said. "Predominantly, he wanted to be sure the treatment wouldn't interfere with his extraordinarily busy schedule," Quesada recalled. Walton had flown home to Bentonville, discussed the situation with Helen, and, in October 1982, even published a letter in his company's internal newsletter, Wal-Mart World, telling all 41,000 company employees, or associates, about the diagnosis. With his usual mix of businesslike purpose and folksy manner, he tried to downplay the significance of the illness. Noting that he was otherwise in good health, he had written: I've got lots of odds going to have successful treatment. So, my friends, I hope you'll excuse my referring to a personal matter of this type, but we've always believed in communicating with one another for better or for worse, and in being up front and open about everything that affects our Company and our Wal-Mart family. If I'm to have a health problem, I'm really fortunate to have this type of disorder. I'm completely confident, too, that with the right treatment I'll be able to continue doing the things I enjoy most for at least another 20 or 25 years. I'll be coming around--maybe more infrequently--but I'll be trying and wanting to see you. You know how much I love to visit with you all on how you're doing and how we can further improve our Wal-Mart Company, so I'll he stopping by. Let's put this subject to rest. 3 I am, and have been, so blessed to have enjoyed the support, affection and loyalty of you wonderful Wal-Mart associates through the years. Together, we can be more than a little proud of our accomplishments. You know we are, and will continue to be, partners.