You could walk out of a Gibson's with a lawn chair, a sack of fertilizer, a rod and reel and a bag of candy, and the sign over the door did not say much more than the name.
The man behind it was Herbert Richard Gibson, and he did not come from anything. He was born near Berryville, up in the Arkansas hills, in 1901, third of five children of farming people, and his formal schooling stopped in grade school. At twelve his father set him up with a livestock business of his own, and the boy built it into something worth several thousand dollars before disease went through the animals and wiped it out. By the mid-twenties he was cutting hair for a living in Kansas.
Then he went into the wholesale novelty trade, and in 1934 he moved the whole operation to Seagoville, southeast of Dallas, and renamed it Gibson Products Company. That little Texas town is where the rest of it starts. For more than twenty years he sold goods to other people's stores and paid close attention to how they ran them.
In April 1958 he opened the first Gibson's Discount Center. Four years ahead of Kmart, four years ahead of Target, four years ahead of Walmart. Low prices, high volume, and a franchise setup that let local families own their own store, which is why the Gibson's you remember was probably run by somebody you knew by name. There were 138 of them by 1964. By 1968 there were 434 and a billion dollars in sales. At the peak in the seventies, close to seven hundred stores.
Sam Walton knew exactly who he was. The record makes it plain: Gibson was an early business rival whose practices influenced how Walton went about things.
Most of those stores are long gone now. But there is still a Gibson's open in Kerrville, one of only two anywhere still trading under the name. It opened in 1968 with a three-day grand opening put on by a local couple, Morris and Gloria Harris. Fifty-eight years later the lights are still on.