Ex-grocer enjoyed mixing with people

10/3/2002

George Goldman, who co-owned a Dorr Street grocery for 45 years and then worked at Churchill's Super Market for more than 25 years, died Tuesday in the Hospice of Northwest Ohio in Perrysburg Township from complications of lymphoma. He was 98.

Formerly of Evergreen Road, he lived the last 21/2 years in Oakleaf Village. He had been ill about a month, his stepson, Robert Wengrow, said.

Mr. Goldman and his brother, Harry, owned George and Harry's Market, on Dorr Street near Woodstock Avenue, from 1930 to 1970. George was in business earlier with another partner.

George and Harry's was a family market with produce, a meat counter, and groceries. Shoppers would hand over their lists, and the groceries were collected and brought to the counter, where the bill was totaled on a paper bag. “There was no self-service in those days,” Harry Goldman said. “We used to wait on them for everything. He worked mostly the meat department and the grocery end. I worked produce.”

The store wasn't especially lucrative, but that didn't matter.

“We were happy,” his brother said. “We loved to be with people. We had a saying - What we didn't sell, we took home - so we always had food on the table.”

The men sold the store, but didn't leave the business. Harry worked for a food broker. George took 18 months to travel and then was hired by Churchill's, often working behind the meat counter at the former Starlite Plaza store.

“The idea of retiring and not doing anything is for the birds,” Mr. Goldman told The Blade in 1990. “If you keep yourself busy, it keeps you young.”

He retired in 1995. His brother, 94, worked for Churchill's too and now works at Farmer Jack.

Mr. Goldman was born in Poland and was 4 when he, his mother, and siblings joined his father in the United States. He grew up in North Toledo and was a graduate of the former Woodward Technical High School in downtown Toledo. He attended the University of Toledo.

He and his first wife, Sarah, were married 52 years when she died in 1978. He and his second wife, Jeannette, married Oct. 29, 1979. She died Jan. 24, 1999.

Surviving are his son, Marvin Goldman; stepson, Robert Wengrow; stepdaughter, Anne Herman, and brother, Harry.

Services will be at 11 a.m. today in the Robert H. Wick-Wisniewski Mortuary. Afterward and through tomorrow, family and friends will be received at the home of his stepson on Old Smokey Court, Sylvania Township. The family requests tributes to Congregation Etz Chayim, of which he was a member.