For National Mom and Pop Business Owners Day, we’re celebrating folks who ran family businesses.
For decades, my grandparents ran a neighborhood market that was attached to their home. It was a “Mom and Pop shop,” though truth be told, I don’t ever recall seeing Grandpap in the store. Grandma ran it with help from my dad, her other children, and the next generation of offspring, including me.
On National Mom and Pop Business Owners Day, March 29, we’re taking time to celebrate Moms and Pops who ran family businesses in their communities. Here are a few of the many who died recently.
George L. Bair Sr. and his wife Jean “were the original Bair’s of the Bair’s Grocery on South Campbell,” per his obit in the Springfield (Missouri) News-Leader.
They opened Bair’s in 1962, and the store moved to its current location in 1967. Though the Bairs sold the store in 1972, it continues to operate under their name (see photo above) and is “the last ‘mom and pop’ neighborhood grocery to exist in Springfield.”
Nellie Flores Morales and her husband, Pete, operated a “mom and pop: neighborhood store, Tilden Grocery on Stafford and Tilden Streets in San Antonio for many years,” according to the obituary published in the Express-News of San Antonio, Texas.
An “active member of a neighborhood watch program and community action group (COPS),” Nellie “loved to dance” and in her later years “delighted sharing riddles, with children and strangers she met.”
Nellie’s belief in God “manifested itself in the love, kindness, and generosity she shared with all who knew her, and in her daily prayers for family, friends, and strangers.”
Lloyd Reinwald “ran Bob & Lloyd’s, a meat counter/locker business,” with his first wife, Myrtle, and close friend, Bob Pitzer, according to his obit in The Statesman Journal of Salem, Oregon.
After selling insurance for a few years, he opened his own butcher shop, Lloyd’s Custom Meats — “a mom and pop business for more than 20 years.”
“Even after his retirement in 1983, he fondly introduced himself as ‘Lloyd the Butcher’.”
Kazuko Swauger and her husband, Charles, were known as “Mom and Pop Judo” during the 16 years they served “as sensei of the Judo program at Norton Air Force Base,” teaching men, women, and children.
Kazuko was a “San-Dan” (third-degree black belt in Judo) according to the obituary in the San Bernardino (California) Sun, and worked with Fukuda Sensei — “the pioneer of women’s Judo.”
Together Kazuko and her partner and friend Elizabeth Lee were “renowned fixtures in the women’s Judo community,” champions of the sport who “traveled the nation together and won the Ju-No-Kata division of the AAU Judo Championships for two consecutive years in 1972 and 1973.”
This post was contributed by Alana Baranick, a freelance obituary writer. She was the director of the Society of Professional Obituary Writers and chief author of Life on the Death Beat: A Handbook for Obituary Writers before she passed away in 2015.
