S.S. Kresge, the architect of the KMart retailing chain, is born in Pennsylvania.

Sebastian Spering Kresge, know for most of his life by the name of his company, S.S. Kresge, was born this day at Bald Mountain, Pennsylvania, near Wilkes-Barre.  He attended public schools, then worked his way through business college in Poughkeepsie, New York before becoming the part owner of a five and dime store in Detroit, Michigan.  Over the next decades he built a retail empire that already by 1922 contained 180 stores spread across North America making the notoriously parsimonious Kresge a billioniare in modern terms.  His company began to convert its 915 stores to the KMart brand in 1962, four years before Kresge died in 1966, six weeks after his ninety-ninth birthday.  (By John Osborne)

Source Citation

Clarence Monroe Burton, William Stocking, Gordon Miller (eds.), The City of Detroit, Michigan, 1701-1922 (Detroit, MI: S.J. Clarke Publishing, 1922), 172-174.
John N. Ingham (ed.), Biographical Dictionary of American Business Leaders (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), II:737-739.

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