The General
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1879, Robert Elkington Wood graduated from the US Military Academy in 1900. Following gradua- tion, he served in the US Army in various capacities until he was sent to the Panama Canal Zone for ten years starting in 1905. In 1915, Wood retired from the army with the rank of major and went to work in the business sector until the United States entered World War I in 1917, at which point Wood rejoined the military. After the war, he retired from the military again, this time as a brigadier general. A civilian once again, Wood went back into the business world in
1919 and took a job with Montgomery Ward as a general merchan- dise manager. He soon became vice president in charge of merchan- dising, and despite having no experience outside the mail-order world, he developed an entirely new retail business model that he then encouraged Montgomery Ward to adopt. Wood was aware that during the 1920s the size of America’s urban population was making great gains. This fact, along with the rise in the popularity of the automobile, led him to determine that the future of Montgomery Ward’s sales lay in the building of large retail stores surrounded by huge parking lots outside city limits in residen- tial areas that would come to be known as suburbs. Conventional wisdom, however, said that large retail stores were fixtures of big cities, and when Montgomery Ward’s leadership refused to adopt Wood’s vision for the company’s future, Wood left Montgomery Ward to become vice president of Sears, Roebuck and Co. in 1924.
A New Direction
As vice president of Sears, Wood immediately began campaigning for the construction of retail stores in the suburbs, an idea that was fully supported by then Sears President Charles Kittle and eventually
Robert E. Wood (left) poses for a photograph at the opening of a new Sears store in Houston, Texas, in 1939. Standing with Wood are the manager of the Dallas Sears store, Richard Taylor (center), and Sears’ auditor in Dallas, R. B. Munson.
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PHOTO: © 2012 SEARS BRANDS, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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