Sam Walton

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the nation's largest retailer, has started building its first Wal-Mart in the county in Glen Burnie.Workers have demolished all but a shell of a former Ames store at East Park Shopping Center, also called Park 97, at Crain Highway and Interstate 97.Bulldozers, cranes and other heavy equipment sit in the dirt of whatonce was a parking lot.Files in the county's Permit Application Center show that the 30-year-old discount chain from Bentonville,...

"Anyone willing to work hard, study the business and apply the best principals can do well," Sam Walton once observed. "We learned from everyone else's book and added a few pages of our own."Those few pages profoundly shaped the course of American retailing. Sam Walton, 74, who died Sunday in Little Rock, rewrote the rules of retailing, fusing discount pricing on brand-name goods and small-town locations into an extraordinarily successful merchandising story. His "low prices always" slogan and habit of calling employees "associates" have become standards in the industry.

Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and one of the most successful merchants of his time, died yesterday at the University of Arkansas Medical Sciences Hospital in Little Rock. He was 74.A spokeswoman at the hospital, where Mr. Walton was admitted a week ago, would not disclose the cause of death, nor would a Wal-Mart spokeswoman.Mr. Walton, declared the wealthiest man in America by Forbes magazine in 1985, had long struggled against two types of cancer, hairy-cell leukemia, which weakens the immune system by attacking white blood cells, and a bone-marrow cancer called multiple myeloma.

JODIE FOSTER, cited for her role as a psycho-stalking cop in the movie "Silence of the Lambs," plus her film directorial debut in "Little Man Tate," was picked as Entertainer of the Year in this week's Entertainment Weekly."

Wal-Mart, far and away the best performing retailer in the nation by all standards, will likely reach annual sales of $96 billion by the year 2000.Without a doubt Sam Walton has one of the most outstanding performance records of any leader. And all of this grew from Walton's first store, a Ben Franklin, which ended 1945 with sales of $80,000.Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Vance Trimble, in his unauthorized biography "Sam Walton," records the major reasons for Walton's success:* Sincere customer appreciation.