George Parsons, Businessman, Golfer And Avid Competitive Sailor

George Parsons, businessman, golfer, and one of the Seattle area's most avid competitive sailors, died Sunday (Feb. 24) after a short illness. He was 80.

Mr. Parsons, who grew up on Queen Anne Hill only a block from the home of the woman he married, ``kind of lost interest in sailing when he sold the boat in 1959,'' said his son, George III of Honolulu.

The boat was the Red Jacket, a 65-foot wooden-hulled schooner ``that took a lot of sanding and polishing every spring to get ready to sail. Everyone wanted to sail on it, but it got harder and harder to get people to work on it sometimes,'' the son said.

Eventually ``Dad decided he had had his fun with it. He took beautiful care of it, and he wanted someone to enjoy it and take care of it,'' he said.

A crew of 14 was needed to handle the Red Jacket in overnight races.

Mr. Parsons was the skipper, and Talcott Ostrander the tactician. ``We never won anything with that boat because it was not designed for racing. It even had a bathtub in it,'' Ostrander said.

``Dad had tears in his eyes when he chartered the Red Jacket on his 78th birthday and got his old crew for a sail around Lake Washington,'' his son recalled.

George III recalls that as he learned to sail, his father ``let me have it right away when I did something wrong, but he never held a grudge.

``But George was one of the greatest competitors I have ever seen. We played golf a lot, and I never saw anyone work harder to win 50 cents (in golf) than he did.''

As a golfer, Mr. Parsons played in 14 consecutive pro-am tournaments in Honolulu. He continued golfing until he was struck by a golf cart last year, breaking both legs.

Mr. Parsons graduated from Lakeside School and Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., before earning a bachelor's degree from the University of Washington and then attending the Harvard Business School.

In 1940, he started the Retail Service Bureau, which issued what is believed to be the first credit card in the area. That effort was ended by World War II.

After the war, Mr. Parsons joined his father, Reginald Parsons, in the family's 250-acre pear-orchard business near Medford, Ore. The business later became known as the Hillcrest Corp., and expanded into real estate and industrial parks in the Seattle area.

Until his golf-cart accident, Mr. Parsons had remained active in his business, Parsons Hart, a family investment company, with offices in the downtown Seattle Tower, said his daughter, Nancy McDonald of Tacoma.

Mr. Parsons would go to the office every day. ``He managed the orchards from there,'' said his daughter. ``He was the strong, quiet type,'' she said.

Mr. Parsons ``had a very dry sense of humor. He would come up with some great one-liners and some subtle things that were very funny,'' said his son.

Survivors also include his wife of 57 years, Elizabeth; another son, Judson of Medford, Ore., and daughter Alice Petrich of Federal Way; 11 grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. Also surviving is a sister, Anne Frame of Seattle.

-- Times staff reporter Charles E. Brown contributed to this report.