The Adventurous Spirits of Rick and Anne Pollitzer

Growing Up on the River 

Ricky, as his friends call him, can hardly remember a time growing up when he wasn’t on the water. At four, he was going out with his father in a duck boat to fish. His cousin Henry Chambers (Beaufort’s former mayor) taught him as a youth to sail. During the summers he would go to regattas in Charleston and Savannah with friends.

“Beaufort in the 1950s was a boys’ town. In junior high, my friends and I were ‘going down the river’ to camp, fish and hunt on Goat Island or Morgan Island for days at time. Our parents never worried about us,” Rick explained.

He grew up in the Point neighborhood in a home on the green near historic Tidalholm, the childhood home of USCB history professor emeritus, Larry Rowland. The two boys met during sixth grade and became life-long friends. They played baseball and football on the green together and spent as much time on the water boating and sailing as they could. When Rick was 13, he joined Larry and his family on their 44-foot sailboat on Lake Huron, sailing and living on the boat that summer. Over the years, the two men bought, built, modified and owned many boats together—tug boats, shrimp boats, outboards, motor cruisers, and sailboats.

Rick learned to fly in a Cessna single-engine plane while he was in college. In 1963, he joined the South Carolina Air National Guard and trained to fly F-102 fighter jets. Many of his friends in the Guard were going to work for the airlines, so Rick decided to become a pilot for Eastern Airlines. He was based out of Atlanta, however, he continued to live in Beaufort and commute from Savannah for his flights.

Anne’s Early Years

Anne was born in Columbia, S.C. and at the age of two, her parents moved back to Beaufort where both had been raised. Her mother, Eleanor Christensen, was a teacher and librarian in town. Anne Christensen and Rick Pollitzer did not know each other during their school years because they were not in the same class, but they did know of each other—after all Beaufort was a very small town then.

Anne lived in Pigeon Point on Lafayette Street from grade school until she went to college. As kids, Anne and her sister Barbara and brother Chris would spend summer days in the water. They’d walk the short distance from their house to Pigeon Point landing and jump into the creek to swim. In high school, she had a close circle of girlfriends. “We pretty much ran the school’s social events,” she laughed.

Anne graduated from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, a small private liberal arts school, and earned her Masters’ degree from Emory University in Atlanta. After marrying, she and her first husband joined the Peace Corps and served in Nepal together for two years. Anne taught English (as a second language), math and science in a mud schoolhouse in a small village there. While they were married, the couple had two boys, William Ide (born in Nepal) and Stratton (Stratty).

After her divorce, Anne visited Beaufort in the spring of 1970 to look for a teaching position so she could move back to her hometown. Her cousin Carol Sommerville had a dinner party while Anne was here and that’s when she met Rick Pollitzer. “We knew right away there was a connection,” she said. “Rick took my two boys, Ide and Stratty, and me flying in a small plane. He did acrobatic tricks in the air and then landed on Pritchards Island beach. “I thought to myself, ‘Whew, here we go!’ and that’s when the adventures began!” Anne moved back to Beaufort, took a teaching position, and she and Rick were married only a few months later in December 1970.

The Pollitzers’ Adventures Begin

Anne and Rick began their married life together living on St. Helena Island as parents to Anne’s sons Ide and Stratty, whom Rick adopted. She was teaching at Beaufort High School in the early 1970s when the three area high schools were combined to comply with the 1954 Supreme Court decision requiring racial integration. Rick continued to commute to Atlanta to fly for Eastern Airlines.

Anne Pollitzer, like her great-grandmother Abbie Holmes Christensen, was a pioneer in education in Beaufort. Anne founded the first Montessori School here. She saw a need to provide early-childhood education because there were very few day care centers at that time and only one kindergarten in town. Rick helped her get the building at Duke and West Streets ready to open its doors in 1973. The Eleanor Christensen Montessori and Grade School was the first racially integrated private school in Beaufort.

Their sons Richard III and Charles (Chuck) were born in 1974 and 1977, so Anne and Rick became the parents of four sons. The Pollitzer family continued to focus their lives around education and the water as the children grew up.

Rick bought the Egret, a 42-foot motor sailer in 1985. During the summer break from school in 1986, he and Anne, along with three of their sons, Ide (18), Richard (12), and Chuck (9), sailed the Egret to the Bahamas for a month with Larry Rowland and his 12-year-old son, Lawrence.

Rick had flown for Eastern Airlines for 23 years when it suddenly ceased operations in 1991, but he readily admits, “My first love has always been boating.” One afternoon not long after Rick lost his job with Eastern, Anne came home from school and announced, “I know what we’re going to do. We’ll take the boat and Chuck and go on an adventure!”

After almost two decades of heading the school she founded, in the fall of 1991, Anne advised the Board of the Montessori School that she would be leaving the following fall. During the year that intervened, Rick prepared the Egret for the Pollitzers’ Central American adventure.

The Adventure of a Lifetime

In early September 1992, Anne, Rick and their youngest son Chuck, who was then 14, set sail on a voyage to Guatemala that would last more than 10 months and would take them worlds away from the Lowcounty. They traveled via the Intracoastal Waterway, stopping first in Key Largo for six weeks to relax. By the beginning of November, they had reached Key West. Next they sailed 70 miles west to the Dry Tortugas, a U.S. National Park with an enormous historic brick fort, Fort Jefferson, and pristine reefs for snorkeling.

The Pollitzers encountered problems on the next leg of their voyage. The seas were so rough that they had to crawl, instead of stand, inside the cockpit of the boat, and one of them needed to hold the wheel at all times—day and night. “I was at the wheel of the Egret one night en route to Cancun, Mexico, when our boat barely missed hitting a freighter!” exclaimed Anne. Earlier in their journey, the Pollitzers met two retired Navy men who had a boat called Ragtime. As both boats, the Egret and Ragtime, were headed to Cancun, the Ragtime’s rudder broke and the Pollitzers came to the rescue, towing the disabled boat for two days until they reached a port.

Anne, Rick and Chuck spent Christmas in Cancun. From there, they headed south to Belize, and finally went on to Guatemala, where they visited Tikal and the Mayan cities, and Livingston at the mouth of the Rio Dulce river. They motored up the river to Lago de Izabal, spending four months, from February to May, in the lake region. They visited Antigua, a city surrounded by volcanoes, and traveled across the country on Chicken Buses—old school buses from the U.S. that were used to transport people and even their caged chickens. During their stay in Guatemala, all three of Anne and Rick’s other sons and Rick’s mother, Madeleine Pollitzer, flew down to visit.

The entire trip was an educational experience. The trio studied Spanish, learned about Guatemala, its people and their culture, and learned how to function in the local marketplaces, as well as how to survive sailing across the Gulf of Mexico.

Still “Going Down the River”

The Pollitzers are a close, laid-back and loving family who live on the water. On weekends, you can find Rick and Anne, often with their sons and grandkids, on their 34-foot trawler, Southern Gig, anchored at the sandbar on the Morgan River. Or you may see Rick and Larry Rowland tacking back and forth across the river in Anna, the 24-foot sailboat they own together. Anne and Rick have four sons, six grandchildren (with another on the way), six step-grandchildren, and a step-great-grandchild—and all of them love the water.

Rick built a 28-foot outboard motor boat, Sunday Man, with son Richard in the late 1990s. Anne and Rick like to trailer that boat to Florida for outings with the family, which they plan to do again soon. At last count, six boats were tied up at the end of the 850-foot dock at the Pollitzers’ home. While he still flies several times a month as a corporate pilot, being on the water is Rick’s first love.

Anne ran for political office in 2002, continues to support education in Beaufort, and has spent a great deal of her time over the past 15 years researching the histories of the Christensen and Pollitzer families.

Rick and Anne Pollitzer have adventurous spirits—whether they’re on the water, in the air or transforming education in Nepal or here in Beaufort.