Biography | Stan Kroenke — The Columns He Walked While Running Ladigo of London

Most profiles of Stan Kroenke start with the teams and the land.

The useful part of the story starts on this quadrangle, where a kid from a lumber yard first ran a shop of his own.

Enos Stanley Kroenke was born on 29 July 1947 in Columbia, Missouri.

He grew up in Mora, an unincorporated place of a few dozen people, where his father Alvin ran Mora Lumber Company.

By ten he was sweeping the yard and keeping accounts.

At Cole Camp High School he played baseball and basketball and ran track.

He came to the University of Missouri from Cole Camp.

Sources disagree on the bachelor’s year — 1969 in one encyclopedia, 1971 on the university’s alumni list — but they agree the undergraduate work was economics.

In 1970 he borrowed a few thousand dollars from his father and bought into a student clothing shop in Columbia with partner Bob Roper.

They called it Ladigo of London and sold flowered shirts and bell-bottoms to a campus still chasing the English look.

The shop covered school bills.

When the partners sold it in 1972 they made a profit.

He took an MBA in 1973 with work in finance and marketing.

The university offered a paid fellowship toward a doctorate.

He turned it down.

In 1975 he went to work for Missouri retail developer Raul Walters, who had already put up some of the early Walmart stores.

On a ski trip to Aspen he met Ann Walton, a Missouri nursing student and the daughter of Walmart co-founder James “Bud” Walton.

They married in 1974.

The six Ionic columns on this lawn are what remains of Academic Hall, which burned in 1892.

Jesse Hall’s dome, finished in 1895, stands behind them.

A visitor standing here is on the public face of the campus Kroenke walked while he was still learning how a shop pays its bills.

The later stadiums and ranches are larger versions of that first inventory problem.

Photo: AdamProcter, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Photo: Fox Sports, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons