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The Marstons: A California Story - Part 2
George Marston, From Baseball to Books to Babies
By Robin Lakin
September/October 2022
“Youth is wasted on the young.” Whoever made that observation, be it George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, or yet another wag, that person obviously never met George White Marston. His non-stop activities, activism, and altruism filled this extraordinary man’s life as he improved the world around him.
Born in the Wisconsin wilderness in 1850, George eventually learned the mercantile trade at his father’s knee and later developed San Diego’s first department store. “Marston’s” became a household word; a place to meet; a well-known landmark.
George Marston’s accomplishments between the ages of 10 and 32 are impressive.
A natural athlete, 10-year-old George finished a 15-mile, river skating competition in 47 minutes, placing second. At age 16, George entered Beloit Academy in Beloit, Wisconsin, where he became the youngest member of the Olympians baseball team. Classmate and pitcher Albert Spalding introduced him to the fast ball long before Spalding sold sporting goods and made his mark in the professional baseball world.
In 1870, George and his father arrived in San Diego on his 20th birthday. One of his first civic duties was to join the 1871 Independence Day festivities committee. A year later, George and his friend Charles Standart Hamilton established the first free public reading room, the forerunner to the San Diego Public Library.
 Beloit Academy, Olympian Baseball Club, 1866; George Marston, age 16, standing far right. Courtesy Marston Family Collection |
 The 1924 six-story Army-Navy YMCA building would provide recreational activities to San Diego's many enlisted military men. Marston chaired the drive to raise over one million dollars for the site and its construction. Courtesy Digital Commonwealth |
 The Carnegie Library soon after its completion in 1902. Courtesy Special Collections, San Diego Public Library |
In 1873, George and Charles bought out their employer, Joseph Nash, to establish Hamilton & Marston dry goods and grocery. That same year, George served as the secretary of the Chamber of Commerce.
Baseball arrived in San Diego in 1871, and George dabbled with the game before joining the Coronada team in 1874 at age 24. At 25, George was a Presbyterian Church elder, and at 26, a member of the San Diego Benevolent Association board.
George amicably parted ways with Hamilton in 1878 and opened his first dry goods store at Fifth and D streets, when he was 28, and lent his athletic strength and altruism to the volunteer firefighter force.
The year 1878 was especially happy. George married Miss Anna Lee Gunn, a teacher and native of Sonora, California. Their daughter Mary arrived in 1879, and the couple went on to have four more little Marstons. Family life kept George fairly busy, but that didn’t stop him from organizing the San Diego Humane Society and the S.P.C.A. By 1882, at the ripe old age of 32, George had also established the Y.M.C.A., was a trustee of the San Diego Public Library, and had become the San Diego Baseball Club’s business manager.
Generously and seemingly effortlessly, Marston set a high bar for civic leadership and encouraged others to do the same. “I say to you young men here that it should be your ideal to serve the city in which you live, to make the administration of her affairs as efficient, as accurate and as wholly business-like as those of your private interests,” Marston urged in a speech. “Your city is a representation of who you are and what you mean to do for yourselves. Why not labor to make it truly express your aims and ideals?”
As this series will continue to show, absolutely nothing was wasted on this young man, a principled and ambitious public servant and merchant.
Read the rest of the ongoing The Marstons: A California Story History Series.
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