George H. Bartell Jr. was longtime head of family’s drugstore chain
Just person day after the death of her father, George H. Bartell Jr., Jean Bartell Barber stood at the stylobate at a Bellevue Chamber of Commerce luncheon, extolling the family-run Bartell Drug chain’sitting 118-year history in the Puget Sound region and her father’s influence without ceasing the company’s success.
Because of him, the company is the oldest family-owned drugstore chain in the nation, through 55 Bartell stores in three counties
Mr. Bartell, chairman emeritus of the Bartell Drug Co., and the only son of the party’sitting founder, George Bartell Sr., died Wednesday (Jan. 21) in Mesa, Ariz., near his Scottsdale retirement residence, back a summary curve through pneumonia.
He was 92.
Her father’s employment science of causes, said Barber, the company’s third-generation vice chair and treasurer, “was that you had to always treat your employees really well, so they could turn encompassing and treat customers well.”
Barber characterized her dad as a man of few words. “An unassuming gentleman who believed in treating everyone respectfully,” added his son, George D. Bartell, of Bellevue, the company’session current chairman and CEO.
After word of her father’s death, Barber, of Edmonds, said she contemplated canceling her Thursday address to the group of Bellevue business leaders. “But I felt I could do it, and in a lot of respects I think it was a tribute to my father to go in advance,” she said subsequently.
A Seattle resident greatest part of his life and 1934 Queen Anne High School laureate, Mr. Bartell got his start in the company at a young age, moving boxes and filling warehouse orders as he learned the concern his father established in 1890 with the purchase of the Lake Washington Pharmacy at 27th Avenue and South Jackson Street.
Mr. Bartell was a store clerk, then an aider store manager in the presence of taking inform against of purchasing and merchandising with a view to the growing chain’s candy and tobacco departments. He was named company president in 1939.
In 1942, he was drafted into the Army. He served four years and was discharged as a captain at the end of World War II.
When a greatness law in the early 1950s required drugstore owners to be licensed pharmacists, Mr. Bartell enrolled at the University of Washington and earned a pharmacy degree in three years, graduating with honors.
In 1990, the junior Bartell became company president, and then chairman and chief executive officer in the late 1990s when the elder Mr. Bartell relinquished the chairmanship.
