Former employee displays JCPenney collection at museum

Karen Jackson spent 23 years working for the JCPenney Co.

Some of those years were in Fremont; others in North Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas.

Born in North Dakota, she packed her possessions and moved around the north central Midwest.

“I was pretty much married to the company. Then I married a local man,” Jackson said with a grin. Husband, Mark Jackson, is editor of the Burt County Plain Dealer in Tekamah.

She remembers her career fondly -- the bonds of friendships she made, a satisfying career and the ideals of the company, customer service and living the Golden Rule.

Jackson began her career in visual merchandise and management.

“Really, what I did was visual display, interiors and windows,” she said. “Every seven years, it seemed, trends in merchandise display and marketing changed.”

She adapted and worked on the district staff. Her job was to manage displays of merchandise in the stores.

For Jackson, the company became her personal identity. Her mission was store modernization — the modernization of the small-town rural stores that made up her district.

“I worked with managers and store associates to use every square inch to show off the merchandise to the best advantage,” she said. “There was lots of painting, moving heavy objects, fixturing and I loved it. It made me happy to see the employees happy with their store.”

Jackson was the first woman in the company to be that visual person at a district office.

Along the way, Jackson collected stuff -- remnants, pieces of by-gone display fixtures, a baby mannequin, equipment and advertisements destined for the dump.

“I really didn’t realize what I owned until one of the current managers saw my display,” she said.

The “display” was her collection on exhibition at the Burt County Museum through September. She used her knowledge of how to arrange merchandise to arrange her collected discards and bring a sense of the store and the times to the project. Both the familiar and the unusual were a part of the display.

In a large cupboard were old money cups, essential pieces of any transaction, known as the “Lamsom” system. Early in the evolution of the larger department-type stores selling all sorts of merchandise, there were no cash registers. Transactions were made using a system whereby the cash and receipts were sent to a central office located on a floor above. Clerks received cash from the customer on the floor. The cash and the receipt were placed in the money cup. The clerk pulled a chain and the money cup would fly overhead to the office where a worker would make the change and return it to the clerk in the cup. This system was replaced by a brass tube cup, a pneumatic force system. Some of those cups are also a part of the exhibit. There were no credit cards, few checks.

As stores began to close in small towns, Jackson was sent to dismantle the items used for display in the store and in the windows and in some cases redistribute them.

“When I went into a store at the time it was closing, I just picked up what was destined for the trash -- memorabilia and items that had a connection to display like mannequins, advertising and packaging -- all kinds of stuff,” she said.

There was no plan to display them at the time.

When she was asked to bring her collection to the Burt County Museum, she was told the museum wanted only items pertinent to the years the store was open in Tekamah, August 1929 to August 1987.

Jackson was undaunted by the assignment. The “fun part” for Jackson was researching and archiving.

“I went back and found out that the company bought out the J.B. Byars’ Store. There were major ‘buyouts’ in 1929 all over the country. The company grew by 140 stores that year by taking over other stores,” she said. “By the end of 1929, there were

53 JCPenney stores in operation in Nebraska.”

Jackson bent to the task. She contacted the archivist for JCPenney in Plano, Texas, and got a list of every manager who worked at the store in Tekamah. She talked to every person she could find who had worked at that store.

“I just got another name the other day,” she said, obviously happy about the discovery.

Her growing list of employees shows that until the 1960s, men were the managers and women the associates.

Her display contained pictures of the associates both now and then.

“I pulled articles about people who worked at the store from the local archives” and included those in her display, she said.

If she found a photograph of an associate taken at the time they were working at the store and that former associate was still living in the area, Jackson contacted them and snapped their picture. She placed the pictures next to each other in a then and now format and attached them to the article or cut them out and glued them to wooden craft sticks in a vertical display.

She placed promotion items like rain hats, magnifying glasses, key chains and rulers in the museum room, explaining when and where they were given.

For 58 years, the JCPenney store was an integral part of the landscape of downtown Tekamah. That those years could be caught so completely by a person who didn’t come to the city until after the store closed is a testimony to the positive impact JCPenney’s stores had on their employees and the “passion” one ex-employee had for the project.