My Father, His Drugstore, and Me

My Father, His Drugstore, and Me



      A floor of black and white linoleum tiles made a great checkerboard for my tiny feet in my father’s drugstore, and I could stand, just barely, with both feet on one tile, then I could carefully step over to the next one. Along the side was a long lunch counter with revolving stools. I would perch there sometimes, and eat a Breyer’s Dixie Cup, only Breyer’s because that was the best and that is what my father sold. Although it was not the main thrust of his business, he was a pharmacist after all, my father could also fix a foamy malted, an ice cream soda, a sundae or a cone. 

      During prohibition, my father sold bootlegged whiskey, which he bought from Sherman Billingsley, a real-life racketeer who later owned the Stork Club. Money was tight, and once Billingsley came into the store and asked my father if he would like to borrow some cash. My father was tempted, but when Billingsly laid out $100 bills one after another on the counter and said, “How much would you like?” my father got scared and backed off.  It was a good move because Billingsley was acquiring drug stores all over New York City. My father’s modest corner drugstore in Yonkers might have been the first outside of Manhattan.

      My father practiced pharmacy at a time when compounding prescriptions was the norm. I would stand on a chair and watch him work with two spatulas to mix salves on a marble slab. To add powder to the mix, he would put the required portion on a teaspoon or curved spatula and gently tap the handle with his finger as he moved the spoon around above the mixture.  I still add cinnamon sugar to my toast that way. I also remember him filling capsules with medications.

      Between customers, my father would sing to me in his off key baritone,

               He flies through the air with the greatest of ease,

               The daring young man on the flying trapeze. . . .

                         

or



                   The sergeant major once said to me

                   Who would marry you, I would like to know. . . .



These are songs embedded in my memory so deeply, that they will resonate forever.

         When I was bad, my punishment was to sit on the penny scale just outside the door of the pharmacy. When I was good, and my mother relieved him in the store, my father would take me strolling to Van Cortland Park at the city line between Yonkers and New York. Once we met his brother, Uncle Rob, who was a pharmacist in the Bronx. He had walked to the city line from the other direction. The two men looked somewhat alike, and had visible warmth for each other. I didn’t get it then, but now, growing older, and having a brother, who is the only one who shares my history, I understand.          

         Sherman Billingsley and the bootlegged liquor did not do my father in, nor did the Roosevelt Bank Holiday, though that took its toll, nor did the depression that followed. What wiped out my father and his pharmacy was the shining-new Liggett’s Drugstore that opened three blocks away on Broadway. That store sold both prescriptions and over the counter meds cheaper than my father could buy them wholesale. I don’t know if my father sold his business or closed it, but that phase of our lives was over.

         Years later when my husband, Bill, and I were newly engaged, and still learning about each other, I took him up to Yonkers to that very corner, on a cold, moonlit January night. Indeed, there was still a drugstore there, but it was after hours and it was closed. A dim night-light was on, and we peered in through the glass door. The lunch counter was gone; the checkerboard floor was gone. But for the penny scale locked inside like an artifact, it was an unfamiliar spot. Had he seen us, whoever owned it would have wondered what we were doing there.