Charles  Pollitt

The  Shelbyville  Republican
Tuesday June 17, 1947
Page 6 column 3
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CHARLES S. POLLITT
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          Charles S. Pollitt, one of the old guards at the  H. H. Walker Wholesale Grocery Company, cut his "grocery eye-teeth" with the Walkers when the late H. H. Walker operated a retail grocery business across the street from The Democrat, and son  George was in short pants.
          Last April. Mr. Pollitt completed two dozen years with the Walkers, and crowding sixty himself, is still going strong.  He first went to work for the firm as a delivery boy while he was attending high school in what now is the Administration Building.  At first, it was an after school and Saturday job, but when his father, Obediah Pollitt, died in 1905, he left school in order to turn over a larger contribution toward the family upkeep.
          His next venture into the business world-odd job man at the old "Dinky"- netted young Pollitt a weekly five-dollar gold piece for two years.  About that time, Claude Williamson formed a horse and wagon delivery company which served Shelbyville merchants for about a year but turned again to the grocery business in the O. L. Means Department Store, located then in the southwest corner of the Public Square.  He eventually took charge of that grocery department during the years between 1910 and 1923, which he spent with the concern.
          When the employer sold out to the Index Notion Company, Mr. Pollitt worked for a brief time with  Carl Strickler, operator of a retail grocery on West Broadway, but returned to the fold of H. H. Walker in April of 1923.
          A newcomer in wholesale grocery business at that time, the Walker Company had taken over the original Kennedy Carliner building on West Washington street, but kept its former retail store as office space.  The company’s present office occupied what formerly was the old Carliner elevator, modernized now.
          The Pollitt family came to Shelbyville from Morristown in 1900, when Charlie was 13 years old.  He was born in Hanover township July 18, 1887, where his father was a farmer.
          In 1910, the Pollitt youth married his school-day sweetheart,  Opal Hubbard, originally of St. Louis Crossing, and they set up housekeeping in a little home on Walker street.  Their only daughter, Mrs. George Achenback, lives here. Since 1926, the Pollitts have lived just south of town on the Columbus Road.  They have a pet Boston Bull named  Patty who has ruled the Pollitt roost for 14 years.
          Charlie is a baseball fan. He has an ally in Mrs. Pollitt, and the pair travel often to Cincinnati to root lustily for the "Reds."  Mrs. Pollitt has yearnings for a vacation trip to California; Charlie thinks New York might be a fascinating place to go.  And so they usually spend their vacations with his sister, Mrs. Anna Pearson, in Whiteland.
Contributed by Barb Huff

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