Aaron Gitis spent his entire career as a butcher — cutting up whole sides of a cow, packaging special cuts for customers at his retail stores, even teaching meat cutting courses at a technical college. Then one day, he just up and became a vegetarian.
"He never made any particular declarations," said his daughter, Joline Gitis. "It was a few years before he retired. I think he just got tired of it. He didn't want to eat the flesh of other animals anymore."
Gitis, of Roseville, died at the age of 90 on March 31, a few months after having a heart attack.
A first-generation American whose parents lived in Eastern Europe between wars, Gitis was born in Minneapolis and grew up in a Jewish neighborhood on the North Side, where he liked to say that everyone knew everyone — and everyone's business.
When he got out of the Army in 1946, Gitis went to college on the GI Bill and before long found his way to Los Angeles. He took a job at an animal hospital where he sometimes delivered pets to their owners after grooming. Gitis delighted family with stories such as the time a Great Dane got spooked and jumped into his lap as he tried to navigate the twisted roads of Hollywood Hills.
A man so gentle might have been better suited as a veterinarian, his daughter believed. But Gitis went to work at the family business, A. Gitis Grocery on 8th Street and Hennepin Avenue, and life unfolded. He married the cousin of a friend, a gal named Loraine who had never dated anyone else. They started a family, mourned the death of an infant son, and Gitis kept cutting meat.
He later opened a handful of Sonny's Meat Shops around St. Paul and the east metro area. Toward the end of his career, he got a job at a chain grocer as a union meat cutter and made more money than he ever did when he was wearing himself thin running his own business.
"It was a difficult life," Joline Gitis lamented. "Today he would have been an artisanal food purveyor. He was a little ahead of his time."
