The Rise and Fall of Montgomery Ward The Catalog King That Invented Rudolph

The most careful merchant in America was built on thrift, and that same caution kept it standing still every time its customers moved on. In 1872 a traveling salesman named Aaron Montgomery Ward mailed a single price sheet to the farmers of the Middle West and started the country's first great mail-order house. Ward's grew into a catalog giant, gave away the booklet that introduced Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in 1939, and then watched its chairman sit out the postwar boom waiting for a depression that never came. Oil money, a record buyout and the big-box specialists followed, and in 2001 the last stores went dark. In this episode: How one printed sheet of 163 items and a money-back promise won the trust of rural America The Grange, a libel fight with a Chicago newspaper, and the catalog that lived on the farmhouse table The general Ward's fired for wanting stores, and the late, costly rush to build them Robert L. May, a grieving summer, and the 1939 giveaway booklet that created Rudolph Sewell Avery, the 1944 Army seizure, and the photograph that ran on front pages everywhere The postwar cash pile that handed the suburbs to Ward's rivals Mobil, GE Capital, the 1985 end of the catalog, and the announcement that closed every store How the name survived as the one thing the company had thrown away Subscribe to Mainstreet Memories for more stories of the American stores and brands that filled a nation's shopping lists and then slipped off them. #MontgomeryWard #MainstreetMemories #RiseAndFall #RetailHistory #MailOrder #Rudolph #ChicagoHistory #SewellAvery #AmericanHistory