FRED WALKER, FUHS 1934?

Fred Walker, who ran the well-known Walker's Market in Santa Ana for generations.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE WALKER FAMILY.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Fred Walker, owner of Walker's Market, dies
He started with a roadside produce stand and went on to open a market that was a Santa Ana fixture for generations.
By DOUG IRVING
The Orange County Register

SANTA ANA – Fred Walker, who went from hawking fruit from the back of a pickup truck to running a well-known market that served generations of shoppers, has died. He was 96 years old.
Walker's Market was an old-fashioned establishment, a place where the produce was always fresh and the labels on the canned food always faced forward. It opened in 1951, surrounded by orange groves on the border between Santa Ana and Tustin.
It was an early supermarket, with a full butcher's department in the back and a deli where chickens turned on a rotisserie and the mashed potatoes were made fresh daily. But it was a small-town market, too, and Walker kept a pot of coffee brewing for his customers.
"It was absolutely a landmark grocery store," said Tim Rush, a former vice president of the Santa Ana Historical Preservation Society and a resident of the city for 21 years. "The business they did and the way they served their customers was what made it memorable."
Walker grew up in Canada, so poor that he and his sister took turns going to school and going to work in the fields. The family moved to California when he was a teenager, and he graduated from Fullerton High School.
He scratched out a living during the Great Depression selling produce from roadside stands. Later, after he took over a wholesale market, he would shake himself out of bed at 4 a.m. to pick up fruits and vegetables from local farmers.
He opened Walker's Market on the corner of Tustin Avenue and 17th Street, long before suburbia had reached that part of town. Former customers remember it as a cross between a specialty Whole Foods Market and a Trader Joe's. When life-long resident Tom Lutz, 63, needed some veal shanks for a recipe, he recalled, Walker's Market was the place to go.
Walker would walk the store, dressed in knit shirts from golf tournaments he had played in, greeting customers by name. If a child started crying, he would walk over, hands clasped behind his back, then lean down and announce: "No crying is allowed in this market."
Walker sold the market and retired in 1982; it closed several years later. He kept golfing until about a year ago, refused to move into an assisted-living center, refused even to have a nurse care for him until recently.
He died of heart failure last week at the Lemon Heights home where he had lived since the 1940s. Services will be at 12:30 p.m. Wednesday at Fairhaven Memorial Park, 1702 Fairhaven Ave., in Santa Ana.
Walker is survived by his son, Fred Walker Jr.; his daughter, Elaine Walker Moore; eight grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.
"He was a character," said granddaughter Laura Moore, 40, of Los Altos. "Everybody adored him. Everybody was charmed by him…. He was really a very chipper man, very optimistic, very positive, very hopeful."
Contact the writer: 714-704-3777 or dirving@ocregister.com

Connie can't find his obituary in the Register yet.