Rash's Surname Index
Notes for George Stockton STRAWBRIDGE
As a boy, George Stockton Strawbridge dreamed of a life in the clouds, a dream propelled by a three-minute plane ride paid for with $10 from his allowance.
But his destiny lay on the ground, feet firmly planted in Philadelphia retail history as the third-generation patriarch of the venerable Strawbridge & Clothier's department-store chain.
The family store died last summer with its sale to the giant May chain, 128 years after two Quaker merchants founded S&C at 8th and Market streets.
The life of G. Stockton Strawbridge seemed to end with it.
Strawbridge, a feisty patrician who was listed in the Social Register yet could stoop down to pick up a gum wrapper off the sidewalk to keep Market Street clean, died Saturday at the family home, Cross Brook Farm, in Newtown Square. He was 83.
His attorney, Peter Hearn, called it "significant" that Strabridge died so soon after the sale of Strawbrige & Clothier's.
"He was the store, and the store was him," Hearn said.
It was a lifelong allegiance for Strawbridge, who despite bouts of memory loss as he advanced into his 80s, fought the sale of the family business tooth and nail.
"I can never forgive it," Strawbridge said in an Inquirer interview after the sale last July. In his 70s, 10 years before, he'd succesfully rallied the family to beat back a hostile takeover bid by a New York financier.
Young Strawbridge's love affair with flying couldn't help him talk his parents into letting him drop out of William Penn Charter School to get his pilot's license. But he persuaded his father to pay, instead of college, for advanced aviation training.
Still, Strawbridge, known to family and friends as "Stock," had to go to work in the family store.
He began as a $14-a-week clerk and salesman. With that salary, he married his sweetheart, Mary "Polly" Lowry. Together they raised two girls and four boys.
One of them, Peter S. Strawbridge, the last chairman of Strawbridge & Clothier, along with Stockton's nephew Francis, had to break the bad news to his father of the sale.
Peter and Stockton reconciled their differences over the sale only recently, family friends said.
Strawbridge's dreams of flying took wing during World War II.
Although he came from the pacifist Quaker tradition, days after Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Navy and flew 4,000 hours as a transport pilot as far afield as Newfoundland and Brazil.
Hearn said Strawbridge, known for a sly sense of humor, as well as a stubborn streak, once told him chuckling that he had been "thrown out of the Quaker church."
Although he was an Episcopalian, Strawbridge and his wife were said sometimes to address each other by the Quaker terminology, "thee" and "thou."
The adventurous streak fed by service in World War II never dimmed. At 77, Strawbridge was photographed in blue jeans and denim shirt bungee-jumping from a hot-air balloon. That was just months after he toured the Antarctic by boat.
At age 80, he parachuted from an airplane.
After the war, Strawbridge considered becoming a commercial pilot, and received several job offers. But with a wife and growing family, he settled instead into the family business.
He ran the business with a tough Quaker integrity and a love of family that included S&C employees. He is said to have addressed workers at the Market Steet store by name and inquired after their families.
On his return from the war, Strawbridge immediately set about modernizing the store, which harked to the era of cash-only sales and "cashboys" who rushed about giving customers their change.
"Our ready-to-wear floor could be characterized as appealing to middle-aged ladies . . . not to attractive young women," was his appraisal.
He carried the fight for modernization out of the store and into downtown Philadelphia.
Strawbridge was a driving force in the $14-million restoration of East Market Street. He once told a reporter he wanted to make the street the "Champs-Elysees of Philadelphia."
The restoration provided a model for the Center City District.
Strawbridge also was a force behind construction of the Gallery, pushed for the commuter rail tunnel and was an active civic leader, running United Way campaigns and serving on boards from the Philadelphia Zoo to Children's Hospital.
Hearn recalls his suprise the first time they met at seeing the aging Strawbridge bend down and pick up a gum wrapper off Market Street, which was regularly patrolled by street cleaners.
He said Strawbridge told him, "As the fellow who is leading this, I'm not above bending down to pick up a gum wrapper. We're all part of this."
Strawbridge also was responsible for expanding S&C into the suburbs in the 1950s. Strawbridge & Clothier's then had only three stores, Center City, Ardmore and Jenkintown.
He also helped develop the Cherry Hill Mall, the first enclosed mall east of Chicago.
He scored another coup by moving into discount retailing with the Clover chain in 1969.
Strawbridge worked his way up through the ranks in the family business.
He started as a clerk in 1934, tracing customer complaints. "I was probably the lousiest tracer they had . . . I really wasn't the slightest bit interested in retailing," he said in an interview years later.
He became president of Strawbridge & Clothier in 1955 and spent 12 years in that positon, 12 as board chairman and 12 as head of the executive committee.
By company tradition he retired at 75, but still often sat in on board meetings as a non-voting member.
After retirement, he continued to go to the office every day for years, even on Fridays in mid-summer, when the rest of the Strawbridges were summering in Maine.
Hearn said that as the sale of S&C became imminent, Strawbridge harked back to his second love, aviation.
"He was constantly saying, 'Well, if the store is sold, what I'll do is become a pilot, because I'm about the best pilot around.
"You and your wife can go with Polly and me, and we'll fly around the world."
Besides his wife and son Peter, he is survived by three other sons, Steven, Michael and Arthur; two daughters, Susan Williams and Polly Carpenter; 14 grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.
Funeral services are private. A memorial service will be held at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday at the Church of the Redeemer, Pennswood and New Gulph roads, Bryn Mawr.
Copyright (c) 1997 Philadelphia Daily News
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