Pert, imaginative, Wisconsin-born Harry Gordon Selfridge is, as he likes to say, the only man ever to buy a business from five Jews and sell it to seven Scotchmen at a profit. The business was Chicago's Schlesinger & Mayer department store, sold to Carson Pirie Scott & Co. Harry Selfridge also made $1,000,000 from Marshall Field & Co., went to England with his profits. In 1909 he amazed Londoners with his magnificent effrontery by setting up a department store on Oxford Street, running it in the breeziest American tradition.
So successful was...
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