At 25 years old, I became Walmart's corporate affairs director. My job was to handle media, government, politics, and everything else that wasn't merchandise or operations — per Mr. Walton's instructions.
I was 25. I had not fully grasped what I had stepped into.
One of my early assignments was to coordinate a professional photograph of Sam and Bud Walton together. We were wrapping up the shoot when Sam hollered at me: "Get in here, Fritz, and have your picture made with us!"
No cell phone cameras back then. There was no casual documentation of every moment. When Sam Walton asked you to step into a frame with him, you stepped in.
I think about that moment often. Not because of reflected glory — Sam Walton was not handing out prestige. He noticed the people around him. He called them in. That is the way he operated. It says something about a person, the way they treat the 25-year-old who just ran their photo shoot.
When Mr. Walton pursued me in 1979 to help launch what would become the Walmart Foundation, my father, brothers, and I had just started Steigerland Dairy. We had given it everything we had. It wasn't meant to be. The foundation opportunity came at exactly the right moment.
What followed was the chance to help build one of America's most consequential corporate philanthropic institutions. What I remember most is not the scale. It is the intention behind it — the conviction that a company with Walmart's reach had an obligation to put something back, to be a citizen of the communities it served, not merely a vendor to them.
I was 25. Sam Walton was teaching me something that most people spend their whole careers trying to understand: the purpose of enterprise is not just profit. It is people. The best businesses — the ones that endure — never forget that.