Portrait of a Pioneer

Indeed, the cataloger even sold kit homes, and customers could furnish those homes with kitchen sinks, lumber and even coal sold directly from the pages of the Sears catalog. By 1925, Sears was the largest mail order operation in the United States.

That accomplishment didn’t come easily, however. General Robert Wood, former Sears chairman and the engineering and management genius who built the Panama Canal, once said: “[At Sears,] we had a 100-percent record of mistakes. We hadn’t overlooked a single mistake. We made them all.”