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Grandma Gatewood’s Walk: The Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail

Ben Montgomery | Chicago Review Press | April 2014 | 13 minutes (3,064 words)

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For our Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share the opening chapters of Grandma Gatewood’s Walk, the book by Ben Montgomery about Emma Gatewood, the first woman to hike the entire Appalachian Trail alone—and who did so at the age of 67.

Montgomery is a writer for the Tampa Bay Times and founder of Gangrey, and his work has been featured on Longreads many times in the past. Thanks to the author and Chicago Review Press for sharing this story with the Longreads community.

* * *

1

Pick Up Your Feet

May 2–9, 1955

She packed her things in late spring, when her flowers were in full bloom, and left Gallia County, Ohio, the only place she’d ever really called home.

She caught a ride to Charleston, West Virginia, then boarded a bus to the airport, then a plane to Atlanta, then a bus from there to a little picture-postcard spot called Jasper, Georgia, “the First Mountain Town.” Now here she was in Dixieland, five hundred miles from her Ohio home, listening to the rattle and ping in the back of a taxicab, finally making her ascent up the mountain called Oglethorpe, her ears popping, the cabbie grumbling about how he wasn’t going to make a penny driving her all this way. She sat quiet, still, watching through the window as miles of Georgia blurred past.

They hit a steep incline, a narrow gravel road, and made it within a quarter mile of the top of the mountain before the driver killed the engine.

She collected her supplies and handed him five dollars, then one extra for his trouble. That cheered him up. And then he was gone, taillights and dust, and Emma Gatewood stood alone, an old woman on a mountain.

Her clothes were stuffed inside a pasteboard box and she lugged it up the road to the summit, a few minutes away by foot. She changed in the woods, slipping on her dungarees and tennis shoes and discarding the simple dress and slippers she’d worn during her travels. She pulled from the box a drawstring sack she’d made back home from a yard of denim, her wrinkled fingers doing the stitching, and opened it wide. She filled the sack with other items from the box: Vienna Sausage, raisins, peanuts, bouillon cubes, powdered milk. She tucked inside a tin of Band-Aids, a bottle of iodine, some bobby pins, and a jar of Vicks salve. She packed the slippers and a gingham dress that she could shake out if she ever needed to look nice. She stuffed in a warm coat, a shower curtain to keep the rain off, some drinking water, a Swiss Army knife, a flashlight, candy mints, and her pen and a little Royal Vernon Line memo book that she had bought for twenty-five cents at Murphy’s back home.

She threw the pasteboard box into a chicken house nearby, cinched the sack closed, and slung it over one shoulder.

She stood, finally, her canvas Keds tied tight, on May 3, 1955, atop the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, the longest continuous footpath in the world, facing the peaks on the blue-black horizon that stretched toward heaven and unfurled before her for days. Facing a mean landscape of angry rivers and hateful rock she stood, a woman, mother of eleven and grandmother of twenty-three. She had not been able to get the trail out of her mind. She had thought of it constantly back home in Ohio, where she tended her small garden and looked after her grandchildren, biding her time until she could get away.

When she finally could, it was 1955, and she was sixty-seven years old.

She stood five foot two and weighed 150 pounds and the only survival training she had were lessons learned earning calluses on her farm. She had a mouth full of false teeth and bunions the size of prize marbles. She had no map, no sleeping bag, no tent. She was blind without her glasses, and she was utterly unprepared if she faced the wrath of a snowstorm, not all that rare on the trail. Five years before, a freezing Thanksgiving downpour killed more than three hundred in Appalachia, and most of them had houses. Their bones were buried on these hillsides.

She had prepared for her trek the only way she knew how. The year before, she worked at a nursing home and tucked away what she could of her twenty-five-dollar-a-week paycheck until she finally earned enough quarters to draw the minimum in social security: fifty-two dollars a month. She had started walking in January while living with her son Nelson in Dayton, Ohio. She began walking around the block, and extended it a little more each time until she was satisfied by the burn she felt in her legs. By April she was hiking ten miles a day.

Before her, now, grew an amazing sweep of elms, chestnuts, hemlocks, dogwoods, spruces, firs, mountain ashes, and sugar maples. She’d see crystal-clear streams and raging rivers and vistas that would steal her breath.

Before her stood mountains, more than three hundred of them topping five thousand feet, the ancient remnants of a range that hundreds of millions of years before pierced the clouds and rivaled the Himalayas in their majesty. The Unakas, the Smokies, Cheoahs, Nantahalas. The long, sloping Blue Ridge; the Kittatinny Mountains; the Hudson Highlands. The Taconic Ridge and the Berkshires, the Green Mountains, the White Mountains, the Mahoosuc Range. Saddleback, Bigelow, and finally—five million steps away—Katahdin.

And between here and there: a bouquet of ways to die. Between here and there lurked wild boars, black bears, wolves, bobcats, coyotes, backwater outlaws, and lawless hillbillies. Poison oak, poison ivy, and poison sumac. Anthills and black flies and deer ticks and rabid skunks, squirrels, and raccoons. And snakes. Black snakes, water moccasins, and copperheads. And rattlers; the young man who hiked the trail four years before told the newspapers he’d killed at least fifteen.

There were a million heavenly things to see and a million spectacular ways to die.

Two people knew Emma Gatewood was here: the cabdriver and her cousin, Myrtle Trowbridge, with whom she had stayed the night before in Atlanta. She had told her children she was going on a walk. That was no lie. She just never finished her sentence, never offered her own offspring the astonishing, impossible particulars.

All eleven of them were grown, anyhow, and independent. They had their own children to raise and bills to pay and lawns to mow, the price of participation in the great, immobile American dream.

She was past all that. She’d send a postcard.

If she told them what she was attempting to do, she knew they’d ask Why? That’s a question she’d face day and night in the coming months, as word of her hike spread like fire through the valleys, as newspaper reporters learned of her mission and intercepted her along the trail. It was a question she’d playfully brush off every time they asked. And how they’d ask. Groucho Marx would ask. Dave Garroway would ask. Sports Illustrated would ask. The Associated Press would ask. The United States Congress would ask.

Why? Because it was there, she’d say. Seemed like a good lark, she’d say.

She’d never betray the real reason. She’d never show those newspapermen and television cameras her broken teeth or busted ribs, or talk about the town that kept dark secrets, or the night she spent in a jail cell. She’d tell them she was a widow. Yes. She’d tell them she found solace in nature, away from the grit and ash of civilization. She’d tell them that her father always told her, “Pick up your feet,” and that, through rain and snow, through the valley of the shadow of death, she was following his instruction.

* * *

She walked around the summit of Mount Oglethorpe, studying the horizon, the browns and blues and grays in the distance. She walked to the base of a giant, sky-reaching monument, an obelisk made from Cherokee marble. She read the words etched on one side:

In grateful recognition of the achievements of James Edward

Oglethorpe who by courage, industry and endurance founded

the commonwealth of Georgia in 1732

She turned her back on the phallic monument and lit off down the trail, a path that split through ferns and last year’s leaves and walls of hardwoods sunk deep in the earth. She walked quite a while before she came upon the biggest chicken farm she had ever seen, row upon row of long, rectangular barns, alive with babble and bordered by houses where the laborers slept, immigrants and sons of the miners and blue-collar men and women who made their lives in these mountains.

She had walked herself to thirst, so she knocked on one of the doors. The man who answered thought she was a little loony, but he gave her a cool drink. He told her there was a store nearby, said it was just up the road. She set off, but didn’t see one. Night fell, and for the first time, she was alone in the dark.

The trail cut back, but she missed the identifying blaze and kept walking down a gravel road; after two miles, she came upon a farmhouse. Two elderly folks, a Mr. and Mrs. Mealer, were kind enough to let her stay for the night. She would have been forced to sleep in the forest, prone to the unexpected, had she not lost track.

She set off early the next morning, as the sun threw a blue haze on the hills, after thanking the Mealers. She knew she had missed the switchback, so she hiked back the way she had come for about two miles and all along the roadside she saw beautiful sweetshrub blooming, smelling of allspice. She caught the trail again and lugged herself back up to the ridge, where she reached a level stretch and pressed down hard on her old bones, foot over foot, going fifteen miles before dark. The pain was no problem, not yet, for a woman reared on farm work.

She stumbled upon a little cardboard shack, disassembled it, and set up several of the pieces on one end to block the angry wind. The others she splayed on the ground for a bed. As soon as she lay down, her first night in the woods, the welcoming party came calling. A tiny field mouse, the size of a golf ball, began scratching around her. She tried to scare the creature away, but it was fearless. When she finally found sleep, the mouse climbed upon her chest. She opened her eyes and there he was, standing erect on her breast, just two strange beings, eye to eye, in the woods.

* * *

A hundred years before Emma Gatewood stomped through, before there was even a trail, pioneers pushed west over the new country’s oldest mountains, through Cherokee land, the determined Irish and Scottish and English families driving toward the sinking sun, and some of them falling behind. Some of them settling.

They made these mountains, formed more than a billion years before of metamorphic and igneous rock, their home. Appalachia, it was called, a term derived from a tribe of Muskhogean Indians called the Appalachee, the “people on the other side.”

The swath was beautiful and rugged, and those who stayed lived     by ax and plow and gun. On the rich land they grew beets and tomatoes, pumpkins and squash, field peas and carrots. But mostly they grew corn. By the 1940s, due to the lack of education and rotation, the land was drained of its nutrients and crops began to fail.

But the people remained, buckled in by the mountains.

Those early settlers were buried on barren hillsides. The threadbare lives of their sons and daughters were set in grooves, a day’s drive from 60 percent of the US population but cut off by topography from outside ideas. They wore handmade clothing and ate corn pone, hickory chickens, and fried pies. The pigs they slaughtered in the fall showed up on plates all winter as sausage and bacon and salted ham. They went to work in the mines and mills, risking death each day to light the homes and clothe the children of those better off while their own sons and daughters did schoolwork by candlelight and wore patches upon patches.

Mining towns, mill towns, and small industrial centers bloomed between the mountains, and the dirt roads and railroads soon stitched the little communities together. They were proud people, most of them, the durable offspring of survivors. They lived suspended between heaven and earth, and they knew the call of every bird, the name of every tree, and where the wild herbs grew in the forest. They also knew the songs in the church hymnals without looking, and the difference between predestination and free will, and the recipe for corn likker.

They resisted government intervention, and when taxes grew unjust, they struck out with rakes, rebellion, and secrecy. When President Rutherford B. Hayes tried to implement a whiskey tax in the late 1870s, a great fit of violence exploded in Appalachia between the moonshiners and the federal revenuers that lasted well through Prohibition in the 1920s. The lax post–Civil War law and order gave the local clans plenty of leeway to shed blood over a misunderstanding or a misfired bullet. Grudges held tight, like cold tree sap.

When the asphalt was laid through the bottomland, winding rivers of road, it opened the automobile-owning world to new pictures of poverty and hard luck. The rest of America came to bear witness to coal miners and moonshiners, and a region in flux. Poor farming techniques and a loss of mining jobs to machines prompted an exodus from Appalachia in the 1950s. Those who stayed behind were simply rugged enough, or conniving enough, to survive.

This was Emma Gatewood’s course, a footpath through a misunderstood region stitched together on love and danger, hospitality and venom. The route was someone else’s interpretation of the best way to cross a lovely and rugged landscape, and she had accepted the invitation to stalk her predecessors—this civilian army of planners and environmentalists and blazers—and, in a way, to become one of them, a pilgrim herself. She came from the foothills, and while she didn’t know exactly what to expect, she wasn’t a complete stranger here.

* * *

Her legs were sore when she set off a few minutes after 9:00 am on May 5, trying to exit Georgia. She hiked the highlands until she could go no farther. Her feet had swollen. She found a lean-to near a freshwater spring where she washed out her soiled clothes. She filled her sack full of leaves and plopped it on a picnic table for a makeshift bed.

The next morning, she started before the sun peeked over the hills. The trail, through the heart of Cherokee country, was lined by azaleas, and when the sunbeams touched down they became flashes of supernatural pinks and purples in the gray-brown forest. Once in a while, she’d stop mid-step to watch a white-tailed buck bound gracefully across her path and disappear into the woods. Once in a while, she’d spot a copperhead coiled in the leaves and she’d catch her breath and provide the creature a wide berth.

That night she drank buttermilk and ate cornbread, the charity of a man in town, and spent the night at the Doublehead Gap Church, in the house of the Lord. That’s how it was some places. They’d open their iceboxes and church doors and make you feel at home. Some places, but not all.

She was off again the next day, past a military base where soldiers had built dugouts and stretched barbed wire all over the mountains, a surreal juxtaposition of nature and the brutality of man. She pressed on through Woody Gap, approaching the state line. She was joined there by an old, tired-looking mutt, and she didn’t mind the company.

She climbed a mountain, cresting after 7:00 pm, the sun falling. She’d have to find a place to stay soon. She followed the bank of a creek down into the valley, where several small houses stood. They were ugly little things, but there was a chance one would yield a bed, or at least a few bales of hay. Anything was better than shaking field mice out of her hair in the morning.

In the yard of one of the puny homes, she noticed a woman chopping wood. It looked as if the woman’s hair had not been combed in weeks, and her apron was so dirty it could have stood on its own.

Her face was covered with grime and she was chewing tobacco, spitting occasionally in the dirt.

The woman stopped as Emma approached.

Have you room for a guest tonight? Emma asked.

We’ve never turned anyone away, the woman said.

Emma followed her onto the porch, where an old man sat in the shade. He wasn’t nearly as dirty as the woman, and he looked intelligent—and suspicious. This was the tricky, treacherous part of the trail, scouting for a bed among strangers. She had not prepared for this part of the experience, for she never knew these negotiations would be necessary. There, on the strangers’ porch, she wasn’t afraid so much as embarrassed. She told the man her name.

You have credentials? the man asked.

She fetched her social security card from her sack and handed it over. He studied the card as the mutt that followed her down the hollow sniffed out a comfortable spot on the porch. Emma fished out some pictures of her family, her children and grandchildren, and presented those, too, for further proof that she was who she said she was. But the man was suspicious.

Is Washington paying you to make this trip? the man asked.

No, Emma said.

She told him she was doing it for herself, and she had every intention of hiking all 2,050 miles of it, to the end. She just needed a place to spend the night.

Does your family approve of what you’re doing? asked he.

They don’t know, said she.

He regarded her, an old woman in tapered dungarees and a button-up shirt, her long, gray hair a mess. Her thin lips and fat, fleshy earlobes. Her brow protruding enough to shade her eyes at their corners. She hadn’t seen a mirror in days, but she reckoned she looked hideous.

You’d better go home, then, he said. You can’t stay here.

There wasn’t any use in fighting. She knew where she was. She hefted her sack onto her shoulder again, turned her back on the man and his worn-out wife, and started walking.

* * *

2

Go Home, Grandma

May 10–18, 1955

The Cherokees were gone, most of them relocated at gunpoint to Oklahoma, but their stories still whipped through the passes of the ancient Blue Ridge Mountains of North Georgia.

In the beginning, as the native creation story had it, the earth hung from the heavens by four cords and the surface of the earth was covered by water until a beetle dived down and brought up mud, creating land, which spread in every direction. One by one, emissaries visited from the sky realm to see if the earth was inhabitable, until a great vulture made an exploratory trip. When he tired, he flew so low his wings brushed the earth, punching valleys on the down thrust and bringing forth mountains, these mountains, on the updraft.

When the land finally dried and plants and animals came they were given instructions to stay awake for seven nights, to keep watch over their new habitat. Nearly all were awake the first night, but several had fallen asleep by the next, and more by the third, and then others. By the seventh night, only the pine, spruce, laurel, holly, and cedar plants had stayed awake to the end, and they were rewarded medicinal properties and evergreen foliage; the rest were punished and made to lose their “hair” each winter. Of the animals, only the panther, owl, and a few others remained alert; they received the power to see in the dark, to own the night.

Darkness was falling. Emma walked as fast as she could, feeling alone, and the trail carried her over the mountain until she finally found a narrow logging road and hurried down it, keeping in the middle, until she came upon some large machinery and a shed about 10:30 pm. She crept inside, spread her blanket on the floor, and secured the door. She heard dogs barking, then a pickup truck, but she stayed still. In the morning, when she finally woke, she stepped outside. In the soft light of dawn, she could see that she’d found her way into the middle of a summer camp, but it appeared to be vacant, no camp counselors blowing whistles and no children doing morning exercises.

Her own children had no idea she was here. She wasn’t even sure if all eleven of them knew about the Appalachian Trail, or how the footpath had been calling her, how she’d been captivated by the fact that no woman had yet hiked it alone.

They knew she loved to walk, that she’d stalk through the hills of Gallia County, awed by the stillness and quiet of the forests. They remembered stomping through the woods with her when they were young, when she’d urge them to listen for birdsongs and teach them to watch for snakes around blackberry bushes and point out the medicinal properties of wild plants, as if she were preparing them for their own journeys.

Her resolve, hardened by years of white-knuckle work, was intact. She trod along, through the ferns and galax, ground cedar and May apple, through great patches of oak and hickory and poplar trees. The flowers were popping: the bloodroot, trillium, violets, bluets, lady’s slipper, and beardtongue. As she approached the edge of the forest she saw something that beckoned her on, something she wouldn’t see again for another two thousand miles, like a gift from the Cherokee: a pink dogwood.

She had told no one of her plans for the long walk that year, for fear they’d worry or try to stop her. She hadn’t even told them about the year before, about her failure. That would be her secret, too, a pact between her and God and the park rangers in the Maine wilderness who saved her life.

* * *

She first laid eyes on the trail in a doctor’s office back home, inside a discarded National Geographic from August 1949, and the nineteen-page spread with color photographs was a window to another place. The photos showed a bear cub clinging to a tree by a trail blaze, shirtless men scrambling up lichen-speckled boulders above the tree line in Maine, teenaged hikers atop rocks at Sherburne Pass in Vermont, hikers on an overlook at Grandeur Peak, a “girl hiker” inching through a crevice near Bear Mountain in New York. She read that a hiker in the Great Smoky Mountains had looked down into a deep canyon and had seen a lank man hoeing a corn patch. The steep cliffs made the hollow seem inaccessible, so the hiker shouted, “How’d you get down there?” “Don’t know,” came the reply. “I was born yere.”

She read that the “soul-cheering, foot-tempting trail” was as wide as a Mack truck, that food was easy to come by, and that trailside shelters were plentiful and spaced within a day’s walk from one another.

“The Appalachian Trail, popularly the ‘A.T.,’ is a public pathway that rates as one of the seven wonders of the outdoorsman’s world,” the article gushed. “Over it you may ‘hay foot, straw foot’ from Mount Katahdin, with Canada on the horizon, to Mount Oglethorpe, which commands the distant lights of Atlanta.”

The old woman had been captivated.

“Planned for the enjoyment of anyone in normal good health,” it read, “the A.T. doesn’t demand special skill or training to traverse.”

By the time the article was published in 1949, just one man, a twenty-nine-year-old soldier named Earl V. Shaffer, had officially reported hiking the trail’s entire length in a single, continuous journey. In the seven years since Shaffer’s celebrated hike, only five others had achieved the same. All were men.

Emma intended to change that.

“I thought that although I was sixty-six,” she would write later in her diary, “I would try it.”

She didn’t tell anyone what she planned to do and she gathered what she thought she could not do without, not what one was supposed to take on a two-thousand-mile hike. Those who had come before arrived with mail-order rucksacks and sleeping bags and tents and mess kits. Not Emma. Her little sack weighed seventeen pounds.

Since it was July 1954 by the time she was ready to set out on the five-month journey, she decided to start in the north and race the cold south. She caught the 6:15 am Greyhound out of Gallia County for Pittsburgh, and there caught the New York Express to Manhattan, then another bus to Augusta, Maine, arriving early the following morning. She caught another bus from Augusta to Bangor and checked into the Hotel Penobscot for the night and gave the man behind the counter $4.50.

The next morning, July 10, she caught a cab to Pitman camp and arrived about 10:30 am, then climbed Mount Katahdin, the northern terminus of the trail. Three and a half hours later she was back down, just before dark. A young couple invited her to share broiled hot dogs and pea beans baked with molasses and salt pork. Then she spread her blanket and drifted off to sleep under a lean-to at Katahdin Stream Campground, where the creek sings all night.

The next morning, before the sun peeked into the valley, she left her suitcase with a park ranger, gave him a dollar, and asked him to send it back to Ohio. Then she set off for York Camp, a sporting cabin on the west branch of the Penobscot River. A few miles in, she realized she had packed too many clothes so she emptied her bag, stuffed her extras into a box, and asked the folks at York Camp to mail them back to Ohio.

She hiked from there to Rainbow Lake, some thirteen miles farther, and a nice family at the campgrounds treated the bedraggled old woman to roast beef and pie. She decided to take the next day off and stayed two nights.

The next morning she started early. When she came to a weather-rotted sign, she took the wrong trail. She didn’t know that the Appalachian Trail was marked with white blazes and wound up walking far off course. Just before noon, she popped out of the forest and into a patch of bracken and realized she had lost her way. She searched for an hour and a half in the wilderness but couldn’t find the path. She climbed a knoll in an open space and built a fire and lay on the ground. She whistled and sang a little and nibbled on the raisins and peanuts she’d brought along.

“I did not worry if it was to be the end of me,” she wrote in her diary. “It was as good a place as any.”

After lunch, she went in search of water and disappeared deeper into the wilderness, following game trails through thick summer vegetation. As night fell, she found a rock and lay down to try to rest. When bands of rain blew through, she stood until they passed.

She tried more paths the next morning, exerting precious energy on a second wasted day, none leading her to the trail she had taken in, her food supply running short. She uprooted bracken to make a bed under an overturned rowboat she found leaning against some evergreen trees. She lit a fire, filled a coffee can with water, and doused the flames, hoping the smoke signals would alert other hikers or the rangers at Baxter State Park, but no one came.

She decided to take a bath in a small pond and she placed her eyeglasses on a rock. She forgot where she’d put them, and took a bad step, crushing a lens. She tried to patch it with a Band-Aid, but she could barely see.

She kept the fire going a few more hours, until eleven o’clock, but the wood was running short and she was growing tired. She ate the last of her food and lay down to rest, covering her face to keep the black flies away. Then she heard it.

An airplane came into view, flying low above the trees, the thump of its propeller echoing off the mountains. She jumped to her feet and waved a white cloth to try to flag the plane. And then it was gone.

She lay back down and closed her eyes. She was out of food, and almost out of hope, lost in a vast wilderness not even thirty miles from where she had begun. What would she say when she got back home, if she made it back home? What would she tell people?

She didn’t know it, but the ranger at Rainbow Lake had radioed the next camp, eight miles away, asking for an update when Emma arrived. When she didn’t come, the foresters launched a search.

Emma looked around for wood sorrel, which could be eaten for nourishment, but couldn’t find any. Nor could she find early chokeberries, blueberries, or cranberries, which had yet to bloom. She decided to try to find the trail one more time. She collected her things and started back the way she had come. By luck or miracle, she found the path back toward the camp and set off. She hiked for hours and finally arrived at Rainbow Lake by 7:00 pm, where she found a group of men throwing horseshoes.

Four Baxter State Park rangers had been frantically searching for her. They’d come across her camp while she was out scouting and they found traces of her fire. They had combed the woods, calling out for her, but she never heard them.

Welcome to Rainbow Lake, one of the men said. You’ve been lost.

Not lost, Emma said. Just misplaced.

The rangers, all men, were annoyed. They started telling her she should go home.

I wouldn’t want my mother doing this, one of them said.

She had broken glasses, no food, and not much money. Maybe they were right. Maybe she should quit.

Two of the rangers helped her into their monoplane and flew her to a nearby lake where the Baxter Park superintendent was waiting. He took her to the railroad station in Millinocket and put her on a train back to Bangor where she staggered through the streets, people casting sideways glances her way, and into the Penobscot Hotel, the same place she’d stayed seven long days before.

The man behind the counter said the hotel was full.

Have you tried any other place? he asked.

No, she said. I stayed here last week.

The man scratched around in some papers on the counter.

They won’t want that room tonight, he said. You can have it.

A bellboy escorted Emma upstairs.

Don’t you remember me? she asked him.

Yes, he said.

I’ve been climbing mountains, she said.

She closed her door and dropped her bag and walked to the mirror. She barely recognized the woman staring back at her. Broken glasses. A black fly had bit her near the eye and it was bruised. Her sweater was full of holes. Her hair was a mess. Her feet were swollen. She thought she looked like a drunk out of the gutter. A vagabond. A sixty-six-year-old failure.

She’d tell no one about this.

* * *

This time would be different. She had learned hard lessons.

She had been on the trail eight days when she caught a ride, from a man and woman named Jarrett who were picking up fertilizer near where a truck had spilled its load. They allowed her to stay the night at their home and drove her back to the trail the next morning, to the same spot from which she’d left, and sent her packing with a mess of corn pone. She walked twenty miles that day, finally reaching Hightower Gap as a spring thunderstorm moved in. She made her bed on some boards under a cement picnic table, but she rolled back and forth all night, trying helplessly to stay out of the rain.

She set off the next morning and at long last, on May 14, she crossed the state line and left Georgia behind. She started up the first mountain in North Carolina and the sun beat down upon her neck. She was tired. She raked together a bed of leaves and settled in for a nap; when she woke, she felt a little like Rip Van Winkle.

That afternoon, as another storm approached, she heard a cowbell clanking in the forest and a man calling hogs in the distance. She thought there might be a place to stay nearby, but when she walked down into the gap she didn’t see a soul. No homes. No hogs.

She was walking through a part of the world that was full of secrecy and distrustful of outsiders, the broad and beautiful setting for a never-ending game of cat-and-mouse between the people of the hills and the government stiffs. In these secluded hills, a man could scrape out only a meager living through lawful ways. If he wanted to get ahead, he needed more than a few hogs and a rocky plot of corn. The mountains were both a curse and a blessing, though, and the thick woods, tall peaks, and skinny valleys provided natural coverage for an assortment of clandestine entrepreneurialism. Chief among them was moonshining. It started with the water, pure and cold, which bubbled up endlessly out of limestone springs. It was aided by the blue haze that hung low and camouflaged the hickory smoke from the fires that cooked the mash. So out flowed secret streams of illegal moonshine, 100-proof white lightning, in the trunks of jalopies destined for the big cities of the Midwest—Detroit, Chicago, and Indianapolis. The local lawmen tended to look the other way. Cutting stills was impolitic. The state, however, saw opportunity—specifically the opportunity to tax and tax often. And if it couldn’t tax, it could handcuff—and thus raged a battle that occasionally sent bullets whizzing through these hollers.

Emma was a teetotaler. She didn’t even drink coffee, and she took great pride in that fact, making a point to turn it down outright, a hidden lecture buried in her refusal. But she knew of the battles that had seized the region and she tried to be careful as she plodded through.

She was startled when a man stepped from behind a tree.

Are there any houses around here? she asked.

Not around here, he said.

The man introduced himself as Mr. Parker, and another man walked up to them, Mr. Burch. They told her they had been checking on their hogs, which roamed free in the woods, each wearing a cowbell, and they were camping at a lean-to a few miles away. If she could walk there, she was welcome to stay, they said.

They seemed nice enough. She agreed, and Mr. Burch took her pack and carried it toward the shelter. When they arrived, another man, Mr. Enloe, joined them. They gave Emma straw for a bed and let her dry her wet clothes by their fire.

In the morning, two of the men left after breakfast and said they’d return by dinner, leaving Emma alone with Mr. Burch. She had decided to take the day off to give her aching legs time to recover. They asked her to make cakes out of the stewed potatoes left over from breakfast, so she mixed the potatoes with flour and eggs and fried the loose patties in a skillet over the fire. She’d come to the trail for solidarity with nature, for peace, and here she was, doing chores for a group of men.

That afternoon, the forest warden and game warden stumbled upon Emma and Mr. Burch. They though Emma was Burch’s wife. She was embarrassed, but didn’t correct them. She didn’t want to explain what she was doing out on the trail. She didn’t want to talk about why she was walking, or what she had walked away from.

* * *

He found her in the dark.

She was walking home from church in Crown City, Ohio, on a chilly night. He rode up beside her on his horse, Dick. Her cousin, Carrie Trowbridge, knew him from town and introduced them.

P. C. Gatewood was the catch of Gallia County, Ohio. He was slender, with a soft tan complexion and short brown hair. He was a strident Republican, and he came from plutocrats—regional royalty, or at least they presented themselves in that fashion. His family owned a furniture factory in Gallipolis. At twenty-six, he was eight years older than Emma, and he seemed worldly, aristocratic even. He had earned a teaching degree from Ohio Northern University, making him one of a handful in the region with a college diploma, and he taught children to read and write at the one-room schoolhouse nearby.

He asked if she wanted a ride and she accepted. He helped her up onto Dick. She had never ridden behind a man before, and as they galloped down the road she could scarcely stay on the horse. There was no way she was going to put her hands around P.C.’s waist.

He carried her home several times that winter, through the barren trees that cast crooked shadows on the hollows, but she never grew bold enough to slide her hands around his body. That wouldn’t be proper. One night, she fell off—slid right off the back of the animal. P.C. stopped long enough to give her a hand back on.

Winter turned to spring and P.C. began making more advances. Emma hadn’t spent much time thinking about a future with him, but in March he suddenly grew more serious. Out of the blue, he asked her to marry him. For the life of her, she couldn’t understand why he was rushing. He seemed to want to get married right away. She wasn’t ready. She bided her time and put him off for two months.

They’d come from different lives, raised in close proximity but worlds apart. She’d been born in October 1887, in a puny house near Mercerville, a mile from where the creek forked. The house had a barn, a well, and a terrible view of an ugly bluff, but the children played over the hills. There were twelve in all at the time, and their parents shoved them off to the one-room Cofer School when they didn’t have chores at home, which was rarely.

Her father, Hugh Caldwell, was a Civil War veteran, Union tried and true, whose parents had come from Scotland to farm. He was famous for having raised his head above a stone wall in the heat of battle to see where the enemy was. He was wounded later and then lost his bad leg, and after the war he was considered an old reprobate with an affinity for gambling and a taste for whiskey. Her mother, Evelyn Esther Trowbridge, was of British decent, offspring of a clan of Trowbridges who came to America in the 1620s. She was not far removed from Levi Trowbridge, who fought in Capt. Thomas Clark’s Derby Company in the Revolutionary War, and with the Green Mountain Boys under General Ethan Allen.

Emma had lived a dozen lives by eighteen. She still bore the scars from the day her sister, Etta, was heating water to wash in a kettle and a spark jumped out of the fire and caught Emma’s clothes. Her mother applied medicine with a feather. Emma ate fruit from the blackhaw tree and chased her cousin around the barn. When her family moved to Platform, in Lawrence County, near Guyan Creek, her father intended to build a new house. He set the stone but never got around to erecting the rest. They stayed instead in a log cabin, and her father built an extra bedroom on the front porch. The children slept four to a bed, and in the winter the snow on the clapboard roof would blow in on them and they’d shake the covers before it could melt. They peed off the front porch when their parents weren’t looking.

Her mother birthed three more children in that house, making fifteen in all, ten girls and five boys. On hot afternoons, they waded into the creek to get their clothes wet before they took to the fields to hoe corn or plant beans or worm and sucker tobacco or harvest sugar cane and wheat. They’d work until their clothes had dried, then repeat the cycle. Once, when Emma was instructed to plant pumpkins, she grew tired of the monotonous chore and planted handfuls of seeds in each hill. Every plant came up and her little secret was out.

On Sunday mornings, they put on their best clothes and walked a mile to Platform to Sunday school, and after church, the children would climb into the fingers of young trees and ride them to the ground. They hunted wildflowers and climbed all the cliffs they could find, and on one they held firm to a bush and rappelled down its face to peek into a small cave. Once, Emma’s older sisters told her she could catch sparrows at the cattle barn if she threw a little salt on their tails. For hours she worked that Sunday, trying to salt the birds’ tails.

The children would take a jug of water and set it by a bumblebee nest, then punch the nest. The bees flitted out of the nest and went straight into the jug, and the children plunged their hands into the nest for raw honey.

They went to school just four months a year, due to their farm work, and sometimes that dwindled to two. A gander stood guard outside Guyan Valley School, and when he saw the kids coming he’d stretch out his neck and flap his wings and hiss. Occasionally he’d make contact and bring tears.

In 1900, when Emma was thirteen, her father sold the farm and bought another on the Wiseman’s side of Raccoon Creek, a mile above Asbury Methodist Church and a mile below the Wagner post office. They sent the children to Blessing to school, but all were behind in their grades. They tried hard and finally caught up, but the school only went to eighth grade.

When Emma was seventeen, her father fell at work and broke his good leg. Her mother took him to Gallipolis and he was hospitalized for two months. Emma stayed home from school and did the work. She milked the cow before breakfast and did the washing on Saturdays. The boys killed hogs and Emma had to make the sausage, lard, and head cheese. Her mother was surprised that things were in such good order when she returned. Emma had done all the mending, cooking, and cleaning, too.

In 1906, when she was eighteen, she left home for eight weeks to work as a housemaid in Huntington, West Virginia, across the Ohio River. She hated it and came home as soon as she could. That summer, her cousin Carrie Trowbridge asked her to come and stay with Mrs. Pickett, her grandmother, who lived near Sugar Creek. Mrs. Pickett paid Emma seventy-five cents a week and she was responsible for the milking, washing on the board, ironing, cleaning, shelling corn for the chickens, bringing in coal for the cooking, and washing dishes.

That’s when she met P.C.

There she was, away from home, him asking her to marry and her keeping him at arm’s length. But he’d had enough of this game of hard-to-get. He threatened to leave, to head west and never come back, if she refused to be his wife. She begrudgingly said yes.

She quit school and collected some clothes and went to her aunt Alice Pickett’s house, where Perry was waiting with her uncle, Asa Trowbridge. On May 5, 1907, the two exchanged vows and Emma Caldwell became Mrs. P. C. Gatewood.

They celebrated with a large dinner, then rode in a covered buggy up the Ohio River to Gallipolis and out to her mother’s place above Northup, where they spent their honeymoon night in a room fashioned out of bedsheets, before heading up to the little log cabin he owned on a hillside above Sugar Creek.

It wasn’t long before the honeymoon was over. P.C. began treating Emma as a possession, demanding she do his work. Mopping, building fences, burning tobacco beds, mixing cement. It wasn’t what she had in mind, but she tried hard to make the best of it.

They were married three months before he drew blood.

* * *

Standing Indian Mountain jutted from the earth nearly a mile, the highest point on the trail south of the Great Smokies. Emma, after a full day of rest and a good night’s sleep on a bed of hay in the lean-to, saying farewell to the men and pigs, and having a breakfast of leftover potato cakes, pushed forward, canvas Ked in front of canvas Ked, until she crested the mountain in the mid-morning.

The mountain was named by the Cherokee, who told of a great winged creature that made its home here. A bolt of lightning shattered the mountain and killed the creature, but it also struck a warrior, who was turned to stone. The mountain was named on account of a peculiar rock formation that used to jut from the bald precipice and looked very much like a man.

It took her an hour and a half to ascend, and behind her was a superb view of the Georgia Blue Ridge Mountains from which she’d come, through Deep Gap and Muskrat Creek and Sassafras Gap and Bly Gap. She needed to doctor her feet, but it was too early to stop, and even without a map she knew the toughest part of the journey so far was just ahead of her.

After a long trek through Beech Gap and Betty Creek Gap she began to climb Mount Albert, scrambling much of the way over steep rocks, and it was indeed the hardest climb yet in the thirteen days she’d been hiking.

That evening, after twenty miles of walking, she ventured two miles off the trail to find a place to stay. She discovered an empty lean-to at White Oak Forest Camp. The night was cold and she tried to build a fire, but her matches were wet and would not strike. She squirmed into a corner of the shelter and shivered under the blanket until she fell asleep.

She was greeted by rain the next morning, so rather than set off she walked to the game warden’s house and introduced herself. The warden’s name was Waldroop, and he and his wife drove Emma two miles back to the trail on their way to town. She started off slow, rain falling all day, and she arrived at Wayah Camp at 4:00 pm and built a small fire to dry her clothes. The nearest lean-to had an earthen floor, which was cold, so she heated a long board over the fire and rested atop it for warmth. When the board cooled, she did it again.

She left ten minutes after six the next morning, greeted by the early birds of the Nantahala—a Cherokee word meaning “land of the noonday sun”—a vast and dark forest visited by Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto in the sixteenth century and the naturalist William Bartram in the eighteenth. When Bartram came through, he “beheld with rapture and astonishment a sublimely awful scene of power and magnificence, a world of mountains piled upon mountains.” He continued:

The mighty cloud now expands its sable wings, extending from North to South, and is driven irresistibly on by the tumultuous winds, spreading his livid wings around the gloomy concave, armed with terrors of thunder and fiery shafts of lightning; now the lofty forests bend low beneath its fury, their limbs and wavy boughs are tossed about and catch hold of each other; the mountains tremble and seem to reel about, and the ancient hills to be shaken to their foundation: the furious storm sweeps along, smoking through the vale and descending from the firmament, and I am deafened by the din of thunder; the tempestuous scene damps my spirits, and my horse sinks under me at the tremendous peals, as I hasten for the plains.

Here walked a new pioneer, her swollen feet inside worn-out tennis shoes, climbing up to Wayah Bald, and up the steps of a stone fire tower built twenty years before by the Civilian Conservation Corps, spinning now, absorbing the breathtaking views of the surrounding range, the world of mountains piled upon mountains, alone, happy.

* * *

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Alexander Woollcott and Harpo Marx: A Love Story

Ned Stuckey-French | culturefront | 1999 | 21 minutes (5,289 words)

Our latest Longreads Member Pick is “Alexander Woollcott and Harpo Marx: A Love Story,” by Ned Stuckey-French, originally published in 1999 in culturefront, the former magazine for the New York Council for the Humanities. It’s a story that takes a closer look at the dynamics of a friendship, and the roles we play in each other’s lives.

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* * *

Alexander Woollcott fell in love with Harpo Marx the first time he saw him. It was the evening of May 19, 1924, and the Marx Brothers were making their Broadway debut in the slyly titled musical comedy I’ll Say She Is. Woollcott was there, reluctantly, to review it for the Sun. Another show, a much-hyped drama featuring a French music-­hall star, had been scheduled to open the same night, but when it was postponed at the last minute, the first­line critics decided to take the night off. Except for Woollcott. His career was in the doldrums, and hoping against hope for a scoop, he dragged himself over to see what he assumed were “some damned acrobats.” Read more…

Is This Rothko Real?

Longreads Pick

For nearly 30 years, a collector has been trying to prove his painting is a Rothko—potentially worth $20 million or more. Now, he’s got new evidence.

Douglas Himmelfarb spotted the painting in 1987 at an auction preview in South Los Angeles. The offerings that day were a mix of furniture and no-name artwork. This canvas was large and dirty, and depicted three rectangles of color stacked on top of one another. A handful of people stood clustered around it as someone pulled it off the wall and turned it around. On the back was a signature:

MARK ROTHKO

CAL. SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS

EX. NO. 7

A woman scoffed, Mr. Himmelfarb recalls: “Mark Rothko did not paint in California, and there is no such thing as the California School of Fine Arts.”

Published: Apr 24, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,911 words)

The Last Hand-Me-Down: Retracing My Brother’s Life Through His Clothes

Tom MolanphyLoud Memories of a Quiet Life (OutPost 19) | May 2012 | 18 minutes (4,652 words)

Tom Molanphy earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. He freelances for 10Best/Travel Media Group at USA Today and teaches creative writing, composition and journalism at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. This essay previously appeared in “Loud Memories Of A Quiet Life,” published by OutPost19, and our thanks to Molanphy for allowing us to reprint it here.

Many things conspired
To tell the whole story.
Not only did they touch me,
Or my hand touched them:
They were
So close
That they were a part
Of my being,
They were so alive with me
That they lived half my life
And will die half my death

– from “Ode to Things” by Pablo Neruda

***

 for Paul

It’s dark and quiet in my brother’s closet. Brian, my other brother, rummages through bathroom drawers, rattling painkillers in their bottles. He’s checking for used razors, combs, brushes — anything with hair or skin or “part of Paul.” My Dad, on his knees in the living room, jimmies the lock on a long, black trunk, a keepsake of Paul’s from our Uncle Jack. He clears his throat in the deep, rumbling way he does before diving into a tough job. We’re each looking for what to take and what to leave. Read more…

Certifiable

Longreads Pick

How a squad of self-appointed experts quietly took over the billion-dollar autograph industry:

Today, few autographs are bought or sold without the blessing of either Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) or its competitor, James Spence Authentication (JSA). The two companies have come to dominate the market, verifying hundreds of thousands of signatures each year.

Business is so good that they use garbage cans to hold the cash they collect from reviews at hobby conventions. EBay, the world’s largest facilitator of memorabilia auctions, endorses both companies to its customers. Nothing seems beyond the scope of their expertise, from Frank Sinatra’s scrawl to baseballs defaced by Mickey Mantle.

Published: Mar 27, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,661 words)

How to Fail in Business While Really, Really Trying: The True Story of J.C. Penney

Jennifer Reingold | Fortune | March 2014 | 29 minutes (7,108 words)

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When you find a savior, you don’t quibble over details. So it was that J.C. Penney, the long-stagnating mid-tier department store chain, announced in June 2011 that it was hiring Ron Johnson, the man in charge of Apple’s wildly profitable retail stores and a Steve Jobs acolyte whose golden halo also included past triumphs as an executive at Target. The news sparked euphoria, but conspicuously absent from the media coverage was any mention of how Johnson planned to save this faltering retailer in a fading industry. That’s because there were no plans. His mandate could be reduced to a single word: change. What that entailed could be figured out later.

That fall Johnson began unveiling his planned strategy to Penney’s board, culminating in a big presentation on Dec. 7. By then CEO for just a month, Johnson laid out his vision of a more upscale, more youth-oriented Penney, weaned of its addiction to price promotions.

Johnson demonstrated that he’d learned a thing or two about stagecraft from his legendary former boss at Apple. He had commandeered a large basement studio at Penney’s Plano, Texas, headquarters and had workers construct two rooms. (Johnson wanted to go further and install floating stages in the company cafeteria, but the fire marshal nixed the plan.) After he had made his presentation, the new CEO brought the directors downstairs to deliver the coup de grâce in the form of a sound and light show. In the first room was the taped commotion of shouting voices and visual noise: a profusion of signage, coupons, offers, and clutter. This was the off-putting cacophony of J.C. Penney at that moment. Johnson then ushered the directors into the next room, which was white, tastefully austere, and had a celestial serenity: the new JCP.

Finally Johnson led the board members into the cafeteria, where 5,000 employees, who had been waiting on their feet for hours, greeted the group with a raucous ovation. Then it was party time. Officially the fete was intended to bid farewell to Johnson’s predecessor, Myron “Mike” Ullman III, but it felt more like an ecstatic celebration of the company’s rebirth. With nary a whisper of opposition, the 109-year-old retailer had decided to abandon not only its strategy of many decades but arguably its fundamental way of doing business.

Just 16 months later Johnson was out. Penney was hemorrhaging cash; it lost $1 billion during his one full year as CEO. Its shares were hurtling downward. The press had turned against him. One of the two investors who installed him had fled. As fast as they had once anointed Johnson a messiah, Penney’s directors turned their backs on him.

Since his departure the company has behaved as if Johnson’s entire tenure was a coup rather than a strategy blessed by the board. The retailer has renounced his philosophy, restored Johnson’s predecessor, Ullman, as CEO, and reverted to its old ways. If we’re heading for oblivion, the board seems to be saying, let’s at least try to get there slowly. Some observers think bankruptcy is a possibility, despite improved results of late (at least compared with the previous bloodletting).

This era has seen some truly epic corporate conflagrations. There was the precipitous collapse of Lehman Brothers, which came to symbolize the greed and corruption of Wall Street, and the multidecade decline and, finally, bankruptcy of General Motors, which seemed to embody the slow death of American manufacturing. But for its stomach-churning mix of earnest ambition, arrogance, hope, and delusion — along with a series of comic and tragic miscues — it’s hard to top J.C. Penney.

“I came in because they wanted to transform,” the former CEO told me before his fall. “It wasn’t just to compete or improve.” (Johnson was interviewed for this article but declined to be quoted beyond saying, “I do not want to interfere with Penney’s attempts to succeed.”) He and his team did indeed transform Penney — from a sleepy behemoth known for serving the needs of Middle America into something quite different: an ambitious wannabe startup that fancied itself cool, with a radical pricing and merchandising model that had never been pulled off before. The outcome was doubly disastrous: Penney alienated its traditional customers without attracting new ones.

Everyone understands that the Johnson revolution ended in catastrophe. But the full story has never been told. The reality, it turns out, is even worse than many people imagine — and in a few respects, very different. What follows is the story of what actually happened at J.C. Penney, based on months of interviews with 32 current and former executives and vendors and more than 20 investors, analysts, and competitors.

It’s a saga with a swirl of overlapping forces. It stars a charismatic leader bent on radical change and features a failed attempt to Apple-ize Penney, a mission that ended up being every bit as crazy as it sounds. There’s a board of directors who sometimes seemed more concerned with what they’d be served for dessert than with the fate of the company. Then there’s the mistake that cost the company $500 million — and the fact that Penney actually began retreating from its controversial pricing strategy even before Johnson left, raising the question of whether the company can even truly be said to have tried his approach. Throw in a hedge fund titan who always knew better — except when he didn’t. The result: Billions in revenue were vaporized, and more than 20,000 people — many of whom embraced the new Penney — lost their jobs, seeming to hasten the decline of American brick-and-mortar retailing. This is a tale with very few heroes.

Into the cube

They called it a “cleanse.” On Feb. 6, 2012, a clear, acrylic 10-by-10-foot cube was installed in the area between the two cafeterias in Penney’s headquarters. It was a three-dimensional version of the retailer’s new square logo. Johnson told staffers that he didn’t want to see the old logo anywhere in the building. He thought it would be a useful ritual to have employees discard symbols of the stodgy old Penney. In theory, the cube was a giant time capsule, and the old Penney would be buried (exactly where, nobody said). In reality, it was a stylized, transparent dumpster.

For the next week people lined up to shed the evidence of Penney’s century-old history. Into the cube went T-shirts, mugs, stationery, pens, and tote bags. A few people even dumped the Chairman’s Award, the highest honor in the company, a glass plaque bestowed by former chairman and CEO Ullman on his most valued employees. As staffers pitched their corporate junk, they were invited to select a few replacement items with the new logo in exchange. By the time the purge was complete, 9,000 pounds of detritus had filled the cube.

The transformation had started with a single phone call a bit more than a year before. At 4 p.m. on Oct. 7, 2010, the phone rang in the office of then-CEO Ullman. The screen flashed “Vornado,” the name of the $2.8 billion (revenues) REIT run by investor Steven Roth. Ullman, a veteran of takeover attempts at Macy’s, had noticed that Penney’s stock had jumped 10% in the 10 minutes before the call, to $32. He had a pretty good idea of what was going on. “Do you come in peace?” he asked Roth, with whom he had worked on a past deal. Responded Roth: “I’m your new best friend.” And there was a second best friend: Roth had teamed with Bill Ackman, the head of hedge fund Pershing Square Capital, to buy more than 26% of the company’s stock. They believed Penney could easily be a $60 stock — if, of course, some changes were made. Could they meet to talk?

Ullman had run Penney since 2004. He had had a fantastic start, driving the stock to an all-time high of $86 in 2007 on innovative ideas such as bringing cosmetics seller Sephora inside Penney in a “store within a store” and opening some outlets outside traditional, and declining, malls. But when the Great Recession hit, Penney’s core customer — the middle-class mom — suffered more than most. Even when competitors began to pull out of the decline, Penney lagged. One reason: Ullman’s massive deal with Ralph Lauren to launch American Living in 2008, a Polo-lite brand sold only at Penney. It failed, in part because Penney was not allowed to use Ralph Lauren’s name or the Polo logo.

Penney was clearly in need of rejuvenation. Revenues had dropped from $19.9 billion in 2006 to $17.2 billion in 2011, taking the stock price along with it. Rather than resist Ackman, a brash, aggressively charming billionaire who likes to make huge bets on big companies and doesn’t hesitate to wage proxy battles against those that rebuff him, Penney invited Ackman and Roth to join the board. “I said, ‘These are two of the smartest people in their industries in America,'” Ullman recalls. “Why wouldn’t we want them in the boardroom?”

In February 2011, Ackman and Roth attended their first board meeting. At dinner afterward, Ackman gave an emotional speech, hailing the company’s potential. Almost instantly, fate intervened. As Ullman’s driver pulled out of the parking lot after the meal, his car was sideswiped. Ullman, then 64, was knocked unconscious. He had multiple fractures where his skull attaches to his spine and spent 12 weeks in a neck brace. Even before that he had battled health issues. For years Ullman had suffered from nerve damage that makes it hard for him to walk (he moves around the offices by Segway). He had endured two major surgeries during his Penney’s tenure.

The accident intensified the board’s concern over Ullman’s health — as well as the undercurrent of dissatisfaction that the new directors felt with his leadership. As director Geraldine Laybourne told me in 2012, “You know you’ve done something wrong when you wake up and someone has bought 26.8% of your stock.”

There were no obvious successors at Penney. Ullman says he thought instantly of Ron Johnson, the Minneapolis native who had helped bring great design to Target before he was recruited by Apple to create its retail stores. Under Johnson they became the most profitable stores in the country, making him a star at what was then the hottest company on the planet. Ullman had called Johnson about a director position a few years back, but Johnson had rebuffed him. Now, however, with Steve Jobs ailing, a recruiter told Ullman that Johnson might be more amenable.

Beginning in March 2011, Johnson met with Ackman and Roth and separately with Ullman. Soon the conversation moved from a role as a director to the possibility of becoming the next CEO. Johnson, who started his career at Mervyn’s and had always loved the retail business, had been pondering the lack of innovation in department stores. He had a vision of a new type of store — a destination rather than simply a repository for product. Well-liked and relentlessly positive, Johnson, then 53, seemed to offer the kind of can-do Silicon Valley spirit that hadn’t been seen in the retail world since, well, Apple. “I just believed in the guy,” Ackman told me at the time. “I had a man crush on him.”

With Ackman as head cheerleader, Penney’s board offered Johnson the CEO position. When the announcement was made, on June 14, 2011, the retail world was astounded — and thrilled. Although Johnson wouldn’t start as CEO until Nov. 1 — he said the cancer-stricken Steve Jobs had asked him to stay longer — Penney’s stock rose 17% on the news. It was as if a triple-A team had just signed Babe Ruth.
When Johnson eventually unveiled his strategy, it centered on a few points. The biggest, perhaps, concerned Penney’s incessant price-slashing promotions — 590 in 2011 alone. The new JCP would have virtually none. There would be three prices for an item: the original price, which was far below the typical marked-up price; a month-long value price for certain items; and a twice-monthly “best” price for things that needed to move. No more clearance racks, no more mess, just an honest — or as a later slogan put it, “fair and square” — relationship between the customer and the store. In a retail world full of illusory market-share gains based on which retailer offered the lowest clearance prices, it felt like a welcome way to stop the madness.

The second component of his strategy was equally radical. Johnson wanted to remove the “department” from the department store, recasting each store as a collection of 100 separate boutiques, with a kind of town square in the center. The product mix would change too. The new JCP would feature a much higher percentage of branded merchandise — modern, higher-end, youth-oriented — compared with house brands. This was a very big move for Penney, which got 50% of its sales from its own brands and tended to display most of its products by classification (such as bath mats) rather than by collection (such as Martha Stewart).
The new strategy made sense if Penney could attract many top brands, which would lure consumers without the catnip of frequent sales. Clearly, the approach worked for iPhones. Would it work for mattress pads and pantyhose?

Johnson wasn’t going to wait around for an answer. When a director asked when he planned to test the notion, Johnson scoffed. Never mind that other retailers had tried such pricing only to see customers vanish. He had made his decision. After all, his hero, Jobs, disdained tests and instead relied on his gut. At the same time, Johnson didn’t seem particularly interested in how Penney operated, according to Ullman. The outgoing CEO noted in a regular update to the board that the new CEO had not asked a single question about how the business was currently running.

Meanwhile, there were hints that the board was not as focused as it could be.

Ackman had consistently complained about the chocolate-chip cookies served at Penney’s board meetings. Rather than soft, gooey orbs, Ackman grumbled, these were rock hard. To assuage him, say three people involved, Penney began ordering fresh-baked cookies delivered from local bakery Tiff’s Treats. Other Penney directors also expressed concern about the caliber of cuisine served at their meetings — so much so that on at least one occasion a senior executive personally sampled the food before it was served. (Ackman declined to comment on the company’s baked goods; Penney denies that an executive served as a food taster.)

The revolution begins

Johnson showed up in Plano on Nov. 1, 2011, ready to lead a transformation at the speed of light. By Jan. 25, 2012 — less than three months later — the new JCP would unveil its new look. A week later the new pricing strategy would be revealed. By the fall of 2012, hundreds of stores would be revamped. And by the end of 2015, if all went according to plan, the transformation would be complete. The timeline was beyond aggressive, but Johnson thought speed would be a great motivator and unifying force.

Johnson himself moved with alacrity. In his second week on the job, he met in San Francisco with Chip Bergh, the new CEO of Levi Strauss. Penney already sold the company’s jeans, but Johnson wanted Levi’s to open boutiques within Penney locations. He asked Bergh where his most innovative outlet was located, and Bergh said Tustin, in Orange County, Calif. “I’ve got a plane,” Johnson said, enthused. “Let’s go right now!” A few hours later Bergh led Penney’s CEO through the Tustin store. Johnson loved the layout, which included a “denim bar,” mobile checkout, and dedicated “fit specialists.” By the end of the day Johnson and Bergh had agreed to open 700 similar Levi’s boutiques inside Penneys in time for the back-to-school season in 2012 — less than a year later. Most of the cost would be borne by Penney.

Money seemed to be no object. It cost Penney some $120 million to build the Levi’s boutiques, according to one person involved. Johnson was also trumpeting a major new investment in Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and an agreement to open Martha Stewart stores within Penney.

Meanwhile, Johnson was recruiting a team of high-priced all-stars from the outside. He’d hired Michael Francis, the head of marketing at Target, who was credited with bringing the low-end retailer its signature hip cachet. Francis became Penney’s president and head of both merchandising and marketing. Johnson plucked Apple alum Mike Kramer from apparel-maker Kellwood as COO, and Dan Walker, also an Apple veteran, as chief talent officer. Francis, Kramer, and Walker received a total of $24 million in cash signing bonuses, along with millions of stock options.

It was now Johnson’s show. The board had been stunned by the breadth of his planned transformation. But nobody insisted he slow down or test his theory that customers were sick of price confusion. He had a new team, an adoring board of directors, and a mission to reinvent his company.

Now it was time for his public debut at the official JCP launch party, which took place at New York City’s Pier 57 on Jan. 25 and 26, 2012. The cavernous shipping pier was bathed in white, with the new JCP logo omnipresent inside giant neon cubes. The lighting was perfect, the music appropriately ambient, the food top quality. A bevy of retail cognoscenti, including Martha Stewart, lent credibility. (She feted Johnson onstage, despite the fact that Macy’s had just sued her company, claiming that the new deal with Penney violated Stewart’s contract with Macy’s.) Calvin Klein, Mickey Drexler, Cindy Crawford, and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen were all in attendance.

Johnson presided with a beatific smile. Clad in a V-neck sweater over a button-down shirt, he waxed eloquent on the lessons he’d learned from Steve Jobs. Seemingly in perfect sync, Johnson and Francis — the two looked almost like brothers — rolled stylish, funny clips that featured Ellen DeGeneres, the company’s new spokesperson, and promised a world of fresh, compelling Americana. Fusty old J.C. Penney’s was no more. The company had rebranded itself with a sleek modern name — JCP — to match its new aesthetic. Ackman and other directors sat in the front section, beaming.

Many in the audience admired Johnson’s passion and nerve, even as they doubted that his plan could succeed. Johnson himself told me that day that J. Crew CEO Mickey Drexler had cautioned him, “Be very careful. You don’t have to be that bold. There’s only one Steve.” (Comments Drexler today: “I’m not sure that he heard me.”)
There was a fair amount of eye rolling in the audience. As Johnson talked about the “six Ps” driving the plan — product, place, presentation, price, promotion, and personality — Adrianne Shapira, then a Goldman Sachs analyst, said, “One ‘p’ that seems to be missing is people.” Kramer, the COO, added to the swagger with his refusal to provide sales projections because “we don’t want to cap what we think it could be.” Penney’s stock vaulted from $34 to $41 the next day.

Back in Plano, the employees were excited too. Many acknowledged that Penney needed an infusion of energy. On Feb. 1 an ebullient Johnson hosted a $3 million extravaganza to salute the company’s workers. Stages were constructed onsite, with four areas meant to conjure a particular season. In “winter,” set up in the cafeteria, there was a snowmaking machine. “Summer” boasted grass for a picnic, and “spring” had a wall of water. There were margarita bars, live bands, and caramel apples mounted on long poles. Hung on the walls were photographs of employees that had been taken at a welcome picnic on Johnson’s first day.

Still, the moment was fraught. The company had announced $900 million in planned cost cuts, and everybody knew that meant looming layoffs. Many of the people celebrated in photos would soon lose their jobs. Some of their images remained on the walls for months, ghostly reminders of the human costs of radical change.

The cool kids take over

The era of good feelings would be measured in nanoseconds. Indeed, the only thing speedier than Johnson’s planned changes was the velocity with which they unraveled. Inside Penney, the conflict started almost instantly. Johnson “wanted to do this as a mixed marriage,” says former COO Kramer. “He wanted to prove that we could do this with new people as well as the older management. But it was very clear that it was oil and water from day one.”

It was all well and good that Johnson wanted to, as he frequently proclaimed, run Penney like a startup. But it was a venerable company with 159,000 employees and 1,100 stores. It already had a culture, for better or worse.

The newcomers distanced themselves from the holdovers, starting with the fact that a cadre of new top executives refused to move to Dallas and instead jetted in weekly. The Ritz-Carlton, where Johnson and some of the most senior executives stayed, became an unofficial club and meeting spot for the people at the top. Johnson, Francis, and Walker each remained in other cities, and several created powerful satellite operations there; only Kramer moved to Dallas.

Those who were not part of this new team, with a few exceptions, found themselves out of the loop and, increasingly, out of a job. “You felt like you were back in high school with the cool kids and the noncool kids,” says one senior old-guard executive. “I felt slow, dumb, and weak.”

Many of the former Apple-ites looked to implement what they viewed as streamlined Silicon Valley ways. HR chief Walker eliminated performance reviews, which he saw as useless. That happened to make it that much easier to ax people, because all decision-making was up to the boss and there was no need to consult any performance-assessment data. Says Walker: “I abhor make-work HR bureaucracy that doesn’t really improve the capabilities of the people and the company.”

Johnson’s character shaped the tone of Penney’s transformation. As genial as he is — he is the quintessential cheerful Sunday-school teacher and kids’-little-league-coach kind of dad — he has the personality of a zealot. Johnson displays the sort of enthusiasm and unwavering commitment that inspires followers. (And he showed his belief in his own plan by investing $50 million in Penney warrants that would pay off only if the stock rose.) There were only two kinds of people in Johnson’s world — believers and skeptics. “I choose to inspire and create believers,” he told me at the time. “I don’t like negativity. Skepticism takes the oxygen out of innovation.”

Criticism, valid or otherwise, marked you as a skeptic. Executive vice president Steve Lawrence joined that category when he suggested that Johnson should conduct tests before eliminating price promotions from one day to the next. When a decision was made to reduce the top merchants from two to one at the end of February, it was Lawrence who was cut rather than Liz Sweney, who publicly supported the new plan.

Some 60 top performers from the old regime did have a chance to be part of the revolution via a new program called (naturally) the iTeam. The group brainstormed ways to improve the company and visited famous retailers like Selfridges and Printemps for inspiration. But when the firings began in April, many of the iTeam members were purged, causing a vacuum of talent who understood Penney’s business.

Employees who remained say the new leadership team seemed to have little respect — in some cases, they had outright contempt — for the holdover employees. Michael Fisher, the chief creative officer and another Apple veteran, lectured his team that they needed to learn more about fashion, according to two employees. Each, he said, should wear at least one piece of camouflage clothing every day, as he did. Fisher went so far as to deride the holdovers as DOPES, or dumb old Penney’s employees, according to six staffers. (Fisher declined to comment.) Some veterans retaliated by calling the new team the Bad Apples.

The contempt seemed to extend to customers. As JCP spent more and more on new collaborations with higher-end brands such as Vivienne Tam and Nanette Lepore, the company abandoned previous mainstay labels. Southpole, a clothing brand that appealed primarily to black and Hispanic customers, was dropped. The women’s line for St. John’s Bay, a drab private-label brand — but one that generated $1 billion in annual revenues — was eliminated.

Johnson was totally absorbed in his quest but, say numerous insiders, relatively removed from many specifics of how his team was forcing through the change. It’s hard enough for CEOs to get honest information when they ask for it, since nobody wants to displease the boss. But when you announce that you don’t want to hear skepticism, you’re doubly isolating yourself. In Johnson’s mind, everybody was behind him.

Ellen and the white picket fence

Johnson and his team knew that sales would slide in the short term. Penney had internally projected a 10% to 15% drop in same-store sales for the first quarter after the relaunch. But when the results were tallied in May 2012, they were dismaying: Stores open for at least a year had sold 19% less than in the previous year’s first quarter. Penney customers were bolting, with no sign of replacements, despite millions spent on new marketing that depicted white-picket-fence Americana with great prices and gorgeous products.

Instead of resonating, the ads sparked a firestorm. The company had named Ellen DeGeneres — a popular celebrity and an out and proud lesbian — as its spokesperson. A conservative group, One Million Moms, threatened a boycott.

“DeGeneres is not a true representation of the type of families that shop at their store,” the group claimed. “The majority of J.C. Penney shoppers will be offended and choose to no longer shop there.” The company was deluged with enraged letters after a Mother’s Day circular included a photograph of two moms. Johnson, who had supported the marketing as inclusive, began to fret.

When Johnson found out that a Father’s Day ad featuring two dads was also in the works, he decided the messaging had gone from inclusive to political. Too late, Francis told him. The photos had already been printed. Johnson went to the board, which supported going ahead with the ads. He then told Francis he wanted more say over marketing — much of which happened in Minneapolis, where Francis had built a large communications and advertising operation.

Quickly the mood shifted. “Do we need two cooks in the kitchen?” Francis asked. Within days of the meeting he was gone. DeGeneres stopped appearing in most Penney ads. (A source in her camp says the relationship ended amicably.) Says Francis: “I will forever be proud of the remarkable body of work, and I believe it delivered on the mandate.” Johnson himself decided to take on Francis’s duties. So hands-off in many realms, the CEO would become intensely hands-on when it came to marketing. “Ron read every single line of copy,” says Greg Clark, a former senior vice president in the marketing group. “He wrote half of it. He reviewed every single page, every single photograph.”

Internally the changes were hitting hard. The first round of layoffs had begun in April, with 19,000 employees losing their jobs over several months. Soon afterward, Johnson held a Q&A session. The mood was somber. People knew that the company’s results had been worse than expected, and they’d anticipated some cuts. Were more layoffs coming? Johnson remained unruffled. He joked that he had worn his Nikes “in case they chase me out of here.”

By May, less than four months after JCP’s gala launch, a few directors were already getting nervous. Debates over pricing policy began erupting. (On the plus side, the menu options at a board meeting that month — including New Mexican rubbed beef tenderloin with bourbon-ancho sauce and saffron poached sea bass — didn’t seem to rile the directors.) For the moment, they were boxed in. Johnson had warned that the transition would be painful, and the board had greenlighted his plan. There was little it could do at that point besides acquiesce.

Penney’s spending continued to mount. Johnson wanted to make checkout easy for customers by deploying Apple-style roving clerks who could take customer payments on iPads. To do that, Johnson spent millions to equip stores with Wi-Fi and mandated that every item have an RFID tag by early 2013. (As money grew scarce, the plan was shelved.) At Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in July 2012, Johnson was calm and blithely confident, despite growing negative press and a stock price that had halved since the New York show. He reminded everyone that it had taken several years for the Apple retail stores to succeed.

Yet oddly for a former executive of a tech company, Johnson also made a crucial mistake relating to the Internet. He decided to separate JCP.com’s buying groups from the store buying groups — the way Apple did it — severing coordination between what was stocked for the website and what was available for stores. The dotcom decision-making team was based in Silicon Valley, while the store buyers were in Plano. As a result, a customer could no longer find, say, four colors of underpants in the women’s department and be confident that the four colors would also be available online. Ullman had consolidated the teams. All of a sudden the website found itself stripped of support and leadership. Johnson was focused on getting the right look and feel into the physical store. “The first thing is to fix the store,” he said at the time, though he added, “It doesn’t mean online isn’t an equally big opportunity.”

But by the quarter ending in October 2012, dotcom sales had plunged 37% compared with the previous year’s quarter. Just as the rest of the retail world was scrambling to boost mobile and online buying, the Silicon Valley executive was going in the other direction. Penney lost $500 million on that one decision, according to Ullman.

Other Johnson initiatives backfired. In his well-intentioned desire to build trust with customers, the CEO loosened Penney’s exchange policy, allowing customers to return merchandise — without a receipt — and receive cash. Almost instantly, some people began to abuse the policy, grabbing items off Penney’s shelves, bringing them to the register, and then trading them in for cash. At least one popular item was “returned” so frequently that its total sales turned negative for a time.

A second component of Johnson’s strategy — the headline-generating plans to put Martha Stewart stores inside Penney’s — also blew up. In August 2012, Macy’s followed through on its threat and sued Penney. Already Macy’s had managed to temporarily block the new stores. Stock speculators began licking their chops, with short interest that month hitting 40% of the total float.

Quietly, an even more fundamental part of Johnson’s strategy — the moratorium on sales promotions — began to be pared back. Between the rising resistance from the board and the terrible customer response, Johnson had gotten the message. He authorized a return to limited sales and promotions like free haircuts for kids, for example, which weren’t called sales but were certainly promotional. The word “clearance” began trickling back into use.

By Thanksgiving, Johnson — who had always said the transformation would take four years — had started to sound as if he were bargaining for more time. He claimed, on CBS This Morning, that Penney’s benchmark would come in February 2013. “It’s going to take a year to teach people how to respond to the new pricing,” he said. “We will return to growth next year.” He laughed off a question about the increasing pressure. “I’m trying to position JCP for the next 100 years,” he said, “not this year.”

The overthrow

Despite Johnson’s public optimism, the ground was quickly shifting beneath him. Penney’s board had begun splintering into two factions: a pro-Ackman “New York” contingent and a larger cohort led by chairman Tom Engibous, the former CEO of Texas Instruments. Johnson “is still the right man for the job,” Ackman proclaimed publicly. “We don’t walk away.” Still, he was so worried about JCP’s accelerating cash burn that he threatened the board that he would sell all his shares if he was not made the head of the finance committee. Ackman got the appointment — and hired investment bank Blackstone and AlixPartners, a firm best known for advising distressed companies, to explore ways to raise cash.

When 2012 results came out in February, they were atrocious. The company’s revenues had plunged by $4.3 billion, with same-store sales falling 25%. Penney recorded a $1 billion loss. The stock tumbled to $18 — less than half its value a year earlier, even as the overall stock market continued to surge. Cash fell from $1.5 billion to $930 million, and Standard & Poor’s cut the company’s debt rating to CCC+, deep in junk territory, based on concerns about Penney’s liquidity.
Johnson’s job was clearly in jeopardy. He offered to resign. But Engibous assured him of the board’s support.

Amid this turmoil the Martha Stewart case went to trial, and Johnson was forced to take the stand. He looked naive at best, arrogant at worst, as his emails revealed his belief that he could intimidate Macy’s CEO, Terry Lundgren. The best way to stop Macy’s from renewing its agreement with Martha Stewart, Johnson wrote to his team, “is to make our offensive so strong they simply pick up their toys and go home.” After the announcement, he gloated in an email to Ackman: “I’m inclined to let the press run and let [Lundgren] stew for a bit. The more this is seen as brilliant for JCP and Martha, the more he won’t want to interfere.”

The bad news was cresting. And almost simultaneously came the stiletto in Johnson’s back — from the very investor who had paved the way for Johnson’s accession. In March 2013, Penney director Steve Roth, the CEO of Vornado, suddenly sold 43% of his Penney shares at a loss of nearly $100 million. It was a long way from the email he wrote Johnson on Dec. 7, 2011: “Amazing to me how much you’ve gotten done in such a short time, not to mention the quality of the work and genius of the ideas.” Penney CFO Ken Hannah couldn’t make sense of it. “Steve was as supportive and as constructive in [the most recent] board meeting as he had ever been,” he explained at an investors’ conference. “There was not one indication coming out of that meeting that he was going to do anything with his position.”

Why did Roth bail out? The investor declined to be interviewed, but he was facing myriad pressures of his own. The CEO of Vornado had stepped down abruptly, and Roth, already the chairman, had re-assumed the position. Vornado’s shareholders were unhappy with the stock’s performance and questioned why the REIT had invested in retail companies at all. No matter the particulars, the message was clear: Roth had lost faith.

The noose was tightening around Johnson’s neck. Once again he offered to step down, and once again the board told him to stay. (The latter meeting occurred in Ackman’s conference room, which ironically is equipped with a vintage nuclear bomber’s ejector seat.)

In the midst of the turmoil, Johnson embarked on a family vacation in the South of France. When he returned, he got a call from Engibous, according to two executives. The chairman told Johnson that the board would, in fact, be accepting his resignation on Monday, April 8. Less than a year and a half after embracing Johnson’s vision, the board had renounced it. Penney quickly announced that Johnson was “stepping down.”

Most startling was the man chosen to replace him: Mike Ullman, the chief of the J.C. Penney that presumably had been left behind. Previously portrayed as infirm and on the point of retirement, Ullman was now Schwarzenegger on a Segway, back with a vengeance. Johnson never returned to the Plano office. Within weeks, all but one of his disciples were gone too.

The grand experiment was over — just as much of Johnson’s new merchandise was beginning to appear. On May 1, the company ran an apology ad for misleading the customer. “We learned a very simple thing,” an earnest female voice said, “to listen to you.” In June, Johnson’s baby — the renovated home department — finally opened, with quirky Jonathan Adler lamps, mod Conran tables, and Pantone sheets. It was gorgeous, but the items were far beyond the budget of the traditional Penney’s customer. It bombed.

With Penney stuck in limbo by the court case, the company’s Martha Stewart stores were reduced to displaying things that didn’t compete with Macy’s, such as a few party supplies and window treatments. And in what seemed like a cruel joke, a new billboard erected in Culver City, Calif., to announce the Michael Graves home collection featured a teakettle that, viewed from on its side, inexplicably evoked Adolf Hitler, moustache and all, his arm in Nazi salute. The topic “This kettle looks like Hitler” trended quickly on social media site Reddit. There was at least one upside. Unlike Graves’ other wares, the Hitler teakettle immediately sold out.

The unwinding

With Ullman back, it was only a matter of time before Ackman was gone. The investor initially resisted, demanding that the board quickly find a replacement for Ullman. When he was rebuffed, Ackman dispatched two caustic letters to the board, which found their way to the Wall Street Journal. “Sometimes being ‘disruptive’ is exactly what a company and board needs at a critical time,” he wrote. But by now the other directors were aligned. On Aug. 12, 2013, Ackman resigned from the board. He sold his Penney stake at a loss of $470 million.

For his part, Ullman took a giant eraser to just about every plan of Johnson’s. The new home store was jettisoned; by summer I saw 50% to 70% markdowns on newly introduced products. They ended up piled toward the back of stores. Many of the brands that were promised prominent placement found their wares tossed on clearance tables, prices slashed. That in itself caused headaches for Penney. One such brand, Bodum, sued for breach of contract in December. (Penney declined to comment.) Once again, customers’ mailboxes filled with “the noise” of multiple promotions.

Ullman began shoring up Penney’s finances, but not without a stumble: The company stated that it was “comfortable” with its liquidity — and then, only a few weeks later, announced an 84-million-share offering. (The news of the highly dilutive offering walloped Penney’s shares yet again.) The Securities and Exchange Commission briefly investigated Ullman’s U-turn before closing the inquiry with no action.

The company website, reintegrated with the stores, again became a major contributor and helped make up for still-anemic in-store sales. Finally, on Feb. 26, 2014, Penney reported its first glimmer of good news: increases in same-store sales for the first time in two years, up 2% over the prior year’s fourth quarter (which, let’s not forget, was down 32%).

Earnings, however, were even worse than the previous year. The company lost $1.4 billion. Still, Ullman has stabilized the business, slowed the sales skid, and hired a marketing executive who at least seems to be matching the products to customers’ desires. But if Penney has pulled back from the brink of extinction, it remains a long, long way from thriving.

Returning to the pre-Johnson status quo is not a solution. Brick-and-mortar retail remains in deep trouble. During the recent holiday season industrywide in-store traffic slumped by 6.5%, according to RetailNext, even as spending surged online.
Was Johnson’s plan doomed to fail? It’s easy to say virtually nothing would work. For starters, there are far too many stores in America. In early March alone, Radio Shack announced plans to close as many as 1,100 stores, and Staples said it would shutter 225, or 12% of its total. And there are no obvious giant candidates to take over the mall spaces, diminishing the value of real estate for companies like Penney.

Of course, much of Penney’s failure was self-inflicted: the bold attempt — blessed by an impulsive board — to wave a magic wand and make a deeply embedded culture disappear, not to mention the rejection of its own customers. Says one executive brought in by Johnson: “It’s akin to people who try to remodel a house when their family is living in it. What we did was try to remodel 80% of the house and, by the way, try to host Thanksgiving and Christmas and a wedding in the backyard.”

Some acolytes fiercely defend Johnson and maintain that his plans would have worked if given enough time. “I think the strategy was right on the money,” says former HR head Walker. “We’ll never know what the results would’ve been if we’d gotten to the point where the stores had been largely transformed. Then it becomes a different store. We don’t get to replay that.”

Indeed, several Johnson initiatives have paid off. The Levi’s stores have had healthy sales (as have similar Disney boutiques). Penney is also holding on to another Johnson favorite, Joe Fresh. And Penney’s wider aisles and polished concrete floors do make the stores look and feel more contemporary.

What Johnson hoped to do was laudable. He wanted to conjure the elusive magic that delights customers at Apple stores, or at a handful of brick-and-mortar retailers such as Burberry, H&M, Target, J. Crew, Lululemon, and a few others devoted to the art and design of the product and the space. Says analyst Brian Sozzi of Belus Capital Advisors: “I will give Johnson this: He did things too quickly, but at least he was trying to set up a company to thrive in terms of where the future of retail was going. He just didn’t go about it the right way.” It’s impossible to know whether Johnson’s reforms could have succeeded, but he does leave one legacy: Nobody will be attempting something similar for a very long time.

Reporter associates: Marty Jones and Susan Kramer

Originally published in Fortune, March 2014. Subscribe to the magazine here.

Photo: idovermani, Flickr

The Dilemma the Food Movement is Facing: Can We Really Be 'Conscientious Carnivores?'

The dream of the “Food Movement” is for all meat to be humanely raised and locally sourced so we can all be “conscientious carnivores.”

In The American Scholar, James McWilliams looks at a dilemma the Food Movement is facing: Can animals be raised humanely if the end goal is not for animals to live a full life, but to be butchered for human consumption?

Research shows that veganism, which obviates the inherent waste involved in growing the grains used to fatten animals for food in conventional systems, is seven times more energy efficient than eating meat and, if embraced globally, could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from conventional agriculture by 94 percent. Any pretext to explore meat eating’s moral underpinnings—and possibly land upon an excuse for pursuing a plant-based diet as a viable goal—would be consistent with the movement’s anticorporate, ecologically driven mission.

But with rare exception, those in the big, lumpy tent have thrown down a red carpet for “ethical butchers” while generally dismissing animal rights advocates as smug ascetics (which they can be) and crazed activists (ditto) who are driven more by sappy sentiment than rock-ribbed reason. It’s an easy move to make. But the problem with this dismissal—and the overall refusal to address the ethics of killing animals for food—is that it potentially anchors the Food Movement’s admirable goals in the shifting sands of an unresolved hypocrisy. Let’s call it the “omnivore’s contradiction.”

Conscientious carnivores will argue that we can justify eating animals because humans evolved to do so (the shape of our teeth proves it); that if we did not eat happy farm animals, they’d never have been born to become happy in the first place; that all is fine if an animal lives well and is “killed with respect”; that we need to recycle animals through the agricultural system to keep the soil healthy; that animals eat animals; and that in nature, it’s the survival of species and not of individuals that matters most. These arguments create room for a productive conversation. But none of them carry real weight until the Food Movement resolves the contradiction raised by Bob Comis: How do you ethically justify both respecting and killing a sentient animal?

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Photo: Jeffrey

How a Barista Deals With Bad Customers

Over at The Awl, Molly Osberg examines the service economy and recounts her experience working as a barista at various coffeehouses. Here, she discusses dealing with difficult customers:

I transferred stores twice, and though I wouldn’t recognize it until later, there was already something uniquely banal about my interactions with the customers at Starbucks. The robotic and infinitely scaleable details, our uniforms and employee numbers, the pre-calibrated automatic espresso machine, all contributed to a general sense of interchangeability. I had exhausting customers, but their demanding nature didn’t feel personal. I had no doubt the pudgy businessman would have told any woman where to put that whipped cream, or that the undergraduate with the fancy handbag, detailing last night’s party to a friend on the phone, was the kind of girl who would’ve shouted down any one of her servers for ostensibly placing a half-pump more white mocha in her beverage. If a customer was particularly bad we exercised one of the only powers we possessed and “decafed” them. To covertly rob a caffeine-addicted asshole of their morning jolt was truly one of the sweetest pleasures of baristahood, and one that my subsequent professions haven’t come close to replicating.

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Photo: BigBirdz

The Secret Behind Pixar's Storytelling Process

Fast Company has an excerpt from Creativity, Inc., the book by Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull (with Amy Wallace), which goes inside the creative process at the studio. Catmull attributes much of their creative success to their internal process for continually refining stories. It includes meetings with the Braintrust, a group of executives, directors and other storytellers who are assigned to objectively critique the work—but only as suggestions for the director to accept or dismiss on her own:

To understand why the Braintrust is so central to Pixar, you have to start with a basic truth: People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of things–in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence. But it is also confusing. Where once a movie’s writer/director had perspective, he or she loses it. Where once he or she could see a forest, now there are only trees.

How do you get a director to address a problem he or she cannot see? The answer depends, of course, on the situation. The director may be right about the potential impact of his central idea, but maybe he simply hasn’t set it up well enough for the Braintrust. Maybe he doesn’t realize that much of what he thinks is visible on-screen is only visible in his own head. Or maybe the ideas presented in the reels he shows the Braintrust won’t ever work, and the only path forward is to blow something up or start over. No matter what, the process of coming to clarity takes patience and candor.

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Remembering the Life and Work of Journalist Matthew Power (1974-2014)

Matthew Power

Matt was the bravest writer I’ve ever known. He covered conflict, climbed mountains, and followed in the exploratory footsteps of so many unfortunate travelers of yore in order to write his own account of what such trips felt like today, to a modern consciousness. This last piece was his specialty. They were why we read him, why people sent him places. He did those pieces better than anyone. Matt was living testimony to a core belief of mine, a belief shaped by my many conversations on the subject with Matt: If you travel, you must trust. Openness is not gullibility. A willingness to be vulnerable does not endanger you.

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