Pharmacy--Start to Finish

I guess I was to be a pharmacist from the very first, though I thought seriously of Law during middle school years. It seemed as though all the male grandchildren of J.W. either were pharmacists or lawyers--even though Grandfather wanted us to be Doctors. Jerry came the closest He was a pharmacist, then went on to be a dentist when he didn't like pharmacy. John- Hal and Ross chose law. I considered pharmacy a good option because I had 3 very successful uncles who had organized a small chain of stores " City Drug Stores" and I figured if I ever wanted to leave California I could get a job in Utah . R.J., Bry, Jimmie, and myself all stayed with pharmacy--only one dissenter, Robert elected to be a petroleum engineer.

I thought I could get a jump on pharmacy in the service and that would help me later on so when I was asked what assignment I would like in the Navy - we could ask because we had signed up in our senior year of high school so we could get a job we wanted. When I said pharmacy the recruiter said, "Great! With your size and strength you will be transferred to the Marines and be a litter bearer." I said maybe I'd rather take my second choice which was radio, and that is what I got.

Southern California (USC) was trying to teach us the pharmacy we would need on graduation, but it was changing very fast and the professors were tied to the old ways. We learned how to make rose water by percolation and cough syrups and tinctures. We could make tables and powders and many kinds of lotions and creams etc. Never made any of this after graduation. We learned to identify flowers and plants by leaves and stems--never much use after graduation. We persevered and passed the exam both in California and Utah.

While I was going to school I worked in a small pharmacy (Garvanza Pharmacy owned by Al Oliver on 64^th and York). It didn't fill a lot of prescriptions, but I learned a lot that served me very well when I got my first job at Medical Arts North Hollywood--Jack Fond & Red Josephs, owners. This was a busy store in a large Medical Building It seemed large at the time, and for its day 100-150 prescriptions was a lot of RX's.

We worked different then. No computers. We stamped the RX number on a log and on the RX, filled the order and priced it as best we could. We had a chart to go by, but Jack would say, "Let's go up a quarter today." We had many for $2.00 some for $1.25. Big sellers were Empirin Cod gr 1/2-- Seconal- Nembutal- Tuinal- Phenobarbital- Thyroid, Donnatal, Penicillin tablets, Sulfa. Hardly sell any of these today. The Doctor would often write in Latin or code so the patient would not know what he was taking-- of course today that would be illegal. We made lotions and ointments and special combinations of pills, made capsules and cough and cold syrups. One we called purple passion was liquid orthoxine and syrup chlor trimeton. For cold and wheeze-- worked well too. Before cortisone was so popular, Dr Stout used Lotion 33--a mixture of Milk of Magnesia- Olive Oil and zinc oxide. It cured because it did no harm. Many doctors had their own special mixtures and formulas. There was a difference between pharmacies because some would compound and make formulas and some would not. (It was time consuming.) I always thought it made us a little better than them. We made suppositories that others wouldn't touch. Today no one does this. It is only count and pour put it in the bottle and the tech does the rest. Now the need for the pharmacist is to give council as to what the medicine does -side effects and interactions with other meds. You need a computer to keep all this current.