The day Lefty Louie was executed, sorrow descended upon our neighborhood like a fog. Lefty was a Jew. He had committed a murder, and he was being punished. Lefty was one of the neighborhood boys. His mother was like all the mothers. She shopped in our stores, she made her fish on Fridays, she gossiped with her neighbors, she went to synagogue on the Holy Days. She was good, but her boy was bad. And every Jew mourned for a strayed son.
The troubled fog crept into my father's drugstore early. All morning long, little groups of people gathered in front of the counter. To me, it seemed that even the medicines on the shelves looked lower in their bottles.
I was very small then, and, troubled and only half-understanding, I sat quietly on a stool in front of the soda counter and watched the neighborhood come in. The rich Mrs. Mandel, whose husband made men's suits downtown, bought a few things, lingering over each item. Mr. Feigen, the cigar-store owner, came in and stood in a corner of the store, puffing nervously on his cigar. Mrs. Katz, the butcher's wife, entered in a hurry, her shawl over her head, her apron hanging like a badge. She rushed over to my father, running on her heels as always. “My husband feels bad, Doctor. It's this killing business. What should I do for him?”
The man who ran the recreation hall over our store was there. He was an aristocrat in our neighborhood, a man who ran sumptuous affairs: weddings, balls, dinners, a man of sophistication and big operations. We used to stand outside the ballroom entrance to watch the people in evening clothes embark on their mysterious, high class revels. Mr. Siegel was the lord of that great world, but now he was here in our store, deeply agitated, talking to my patient father. He, too, looked as though he felt bad. He glanced at Mrs. Katz. Then he turned to my father, patient behind the counter, and said, “We are all in trouble today.”
The haberdasher's wife came in, too, with her little four-year-old Hymie, sighing, groaning, calling on her God. She came straight to my father and said, “Nu, what do you think? A bad time we have, no?” She stood there as though confident he would prescribe for her.
Across the street, I could see Martin A—, the great Jewish actor, step down from the curb and start to cross Lenox Avenue. Would he, too, come? He walked to the entrance door, pushed it open. He was so tall that he could look over the heads of the others, shake his own large head at my father, and murmur, “It's bad, bad.” He turned and went out again, his face as tragic as the sad muse he often played.
My father listened all day as they came in, the people of our neighborhood, in sorrow, in heaviness, in fear of an unknown destiny, in guilt of things they never did. My father did not have an answer for them because he knew that there was no answer, and that only by huddling together in their misery could they find comfort. So he let them come in to talk to him and to each other. He himself said very little. Once or twice he tried to say something like this: “You must learn to feel differently about a thing like this. It is not a Jewish crime. It is a social disease.” But that was as difficult for them to comprehend as it was for me. They listened to him with respect, for he was their man of learning, but they shook their heads with weariness and went on out, carrying the ancient burden of oppression.
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Lefty Louie isn't important to this story. But the tidal hysteria of the neighborhood is. During those early years, a great many emotional crises swept through our neighborhood. Sometimes they were big, most times small. But whatever they were, inevitably they crossed the threshold of our drugstore. Birth, death, sickness, tragedy, comedy—following the pattern of behavior characteristic of every Jewish neighborhood at that time. Most Jewish druggists knew this, accepted it, and gave as much as they could of the advice, help, and comfort that people needed in the years of their newness and segregation in this country.
Our neighborhood was lower – Harlem. From the park at 110th Street to 116th Street, it bordered Lenox Avenue, a broad and hospitable street lined with elms under which we children played summer and winter. For the most part it was a respectable section, but it had its shady spots. If you walked up the Avenue anywhere from 110th Street to 115th Street, you felt safe among the familiar stores with their open doors and friendly owners. But the minute you crossed 115th Street, the territory became dangerous—everyone knew that the gangsters hung around the streets and stores on 116th Street. I never went beyond 115th Street unaccompanied. And after the Lefty Louie episode, we had proof that the gangster myth was true, for Louie lived on 116th Street.
In the early 1900's, our neighborhood was an almost homogeneous group of first generation immigrants not far removed from the pogroms. They made their livelihoods in the neighborhood, lived, shopped, ate, slept, and had their children there. They had their places of worship there, their doctors, their dentists. And they had the “drugstore man.”
The drugstore man was an immigrant also, circa 1880. But although he was one of them, they considered him one of the top layer. In the little world within the large world that they inhabited, this man became their specialist in everything—health, emotions, finance, family relationships.
You may ask, why did they go to the druggist? Why not the rabbi, learned in spiritual problems? Or the doctor, learned in the healing of the body? The answer lay, I think, in the druggist's open door. The rabbi was hidden behind the sanctities of his synagogue. The doctor could be seen by appointment only. But the druggist was as accessible as one's own family. All one had to do was open the door, step to the counter, and there he was, a man of learning, a wise man. For did he not have a college degree, and a diploma proudly framed upon his wall for all to see? This was an educated man, whom one called “Doctor.” This was indeed a man to be sought out in time of trouble.
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How my father escaped insomnia would puzzle anyone who did not know his complete faith in himself. He was asked to take responsibilities that would run anyone else into a nervous breakdown. But not him. My father was perfectly cast in his role, enjoyed thoroughly the power it gave him, and played the role with a courtly, old fashioned dignity.
He had a kind heart, but a quick temper. Let a child or one of the Polish servant girls (fifteen dollars a month!) come into the store and he was all smiles and graciousness. “He treats me like a lady,” the girls would say. “My best friend,” the kids felt. Anyone in trouble melted him down to a helpless desire to do something for them. But let one of his intellectual equals make a mistake, and he'd jump on him with withering scorn. “Ridiculous!” he'd cry. “Childish!”
To me, he seemed rigidly patterned and severe, but he was really only very polite and full of formal manners. I recognized his charm and could not help succumbing to it, but I thought I had to live up to his wisdom and intelligence, and it gave me a rather uncomfortable childhood.
He was not tall, but he seemed tall. It was the way he held his head, high as though he were looking down, never up. He was gray, quite bald, with heavy black brows above a commanding nose, and a soft gray mustache that hid a sensitive, thin-lipped mouth almost as though he were ashamed of it.
Several pictures of my father's youth come to my mind. One is a boy of fourteen dressed in the uniform of the Gymnasium at Kiev. This was strange garb for a Jew. Only because of his exceptional mind had he been admitted to the higher schools of learning, which were almost exclusively Gentile. I see this boy suddenly grown stout with the family silver under his uniform coat, tearing through the streets of Kiev toward the house of a Gentile friend, running before the Cossacks. Through the Jewish quarter, the cry “pogrom” had flown faster than wings, and every Jewish door was bolted, every Jew trembling in a dark corner. But little Piotr runs with impunity, because of his Gymnasium uniform, through the deserted streets.
Still another picture—a group of the twelve sisters and brothers of this lad. They are organized into a family choral society. Piotr, by no means the oldest, stands before them, cajoling, commanding, finally leading them triumphantly in the melodious harmonies of their native Russian songs. Even on the boat that brought them here in the steerage, the family chorus sang away their poverty and anxiety.
One more picture pushes forward. It is of a young medical student who faints repeatedly in the operating room and who finally has to resign his hopes of becoming a doctor.
In retrospect, I can see that it must have been easy to recognize in my father a highly sensitive, but also highly egotistical and self-confident personality. He brought to the profession of pharmacy every facet of his make-up, and the result was as variegated a professional, life as any pharmacist has ever seen. He bestrode the professional life of the store, the lives of his customers, and the channels of organized pharmacy with equal ease.
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So Far as the store and its customers were concerned, I never knew him to hesitate in the line of what he thought was his duty, whether it was in the small task of taking a cinder out of someone's eye or the greater one of advising him where to go for a major operation. He gave personal advice with great facility and assurance, and it was accepted as readily.
Little Moey Epstein went to high school and college instead of taking out his working papers—on my father's advice. Little Boris Cohen had his appendix removed instead of dying from the overdose of castor oil his mother would have given him. Mrs. Aronoff stayed with her philandering husband for the children's sake and ran the candy store herself. And Mr. Schmulewitz sank all his savings in that new venture of the times, a garage. All because the druggist on the corner of 114th Street and Lenox advised it.
Many of the ordinary remedies were made right in back of the drugstore. Druggists of that day made their own cough syrups, magnesia, simple headache-powders. Every day people would ask for “something for a headache,” or for indigestion, or a sore throat, and he would prescribe for them. But he was also often able to recognize a serious illness and was quick to advise competent medical attention. It's a failing of human nature, then and now, not be be too eager to pay doctor's fees. And if advice can be had free from the corner druggist, why not get it?
Sometimes he would be awakened from his few hours of sleep by a hysterical person needing medicine in the middle of the night. Everyone knew where we lived and no one hesitated to ring our bell at any hour.
Often it was only panic that caused these nocturnal crises. I remember one woman who got my father out of bed, shrieking at the top of her lungs that her husband was dying. By the time he had dressed and gone down our three flights of stairs, she was so hysterical that he had to give her a sedative before he could find out that her husband had a plain, ordinary bellyache. He said, “Give him some of this bicarbonate of soda, and see what happens in the morning.” The woman said, “Thank you, Doctor, God bless you, but I have some bicarbonate at home. Good-by.” My father went wearily upstairs to bed without even selling ten cents worth of bicarb. (Was he lucky or wise? Such patients never turned out to have appendicitis.)
When real tragedy struck—fire, accident, poisoning, asphyxiation—the first place everyone headed for was the drugstore. At such times, my father shut out the public, called doctors and ambulances, and gave first aid until the proper help came.
Sometimes on a warm evening, when my friends and I were playing in front of the store, the summer night and crowded streets would be torn by the screaming panic of a street accident. A man, woman, or child run down by a car would be carried in, bleeding or unconscious. Before the ambulance came, or the doctor down the street, my father would work over the prostrate victim, sometimes fighting off death. The crowds gathered outside the door, nervous and excited, listening for the siren of the ambulance, but confident that in the meantime the druggist would do all that was possible. The ambulance would come, the white-coated figures would go to work and finally carry the victim off on a stretcher. Then the doors would open, and the crowd would come into the store and talk to my father in hushed tones, asking his opinion of the victim's chances of recovery.
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My Father was variously called “Doctor,” “Mr. D.” and “Uncle Peter” by the neighborhood people. From my very biased point of view, his attention was too divided. I resented the customers, and I was even jealous of the store itself that took so much of his time. I never had enough of him. But as I look back, I can now forgive him for giving me so little of his life.
It was the children who drew most of my resentment. They were the ones who called him “Uncle Peter,” and who could instantly destroy his formal manner. To them, he was a kind, charming, and enchanting man who spoke their own language, whose jokes were funny, whose candy was delicious, and who would even give one a surreptitious dish of ice cream behind a mother's back—that is, if one were feeling fine that day. Many a time I would ostentatiously act the daughter of the house, just to show them who had first call on his affections. It did little good, for he sometimes brought children home with him and would sprawl on the floor with them in fascinating games of his own invention.
It was the custom for local merchants to give annual May parties. My father's were the biggest and most satisfying. Children from other neighborhoods as far as a mile away waited every year for this great event. We'd get the little toughies from 116th Street and Fifth Avenue, and the prissies from Mt. Morris Park. The colored boys and girls would drift down from above 125th Street. Our own neighborhood turned out solid. When the big day came, a long line formed on Lenox Avenue. Canopies, maypoles, children dressed in paper frills and flowers, mothers frantically watching for slipping dresses or running noses, policemen turning traffic aside, people hanging out of windows, calling, laughing. Finally the line would start to move, down the Avenue toward the entrance to Central Park, and through the Park to the green meadow where a hundred other May parties were fighting for room.
My mother and father would run up and down the line of march, keeping order, helping stragglers, singing with the children. As befitted my station, I was always the Queen. The King was either my cousin Billy or my cousin Danny. We'd head the long column, very proud and important under our canopy of paper roses. Came the potato and obstacle races and I was swept under by the proletariat, but I soon learned not to compete in such undertakings, so that my regal standing was no longer jeopardized.
Late in the afternoon, my mother and father, hot and flushed in the late May sun, would start to dish out hundreds of portions of ice cream and cake. Finally the last dish was empty, the last Maypole dance over, the last strayed child found, and the happy, weary line would reassemble for the march back to Lenox Avenue.
There was another project of my father's that I hated cordially. That was the Beautiful Baby Contest. After reaching too advanced an age to compete, I found the contests dull and unnecessary. But the windows of the store must have been rare and gay with hundreds of baby pictures during the month of the contest. Anyone could enroll his baby upon the purchase of an item from the store. It was a feverish time for the neighborhood parents, and the day of the judging brought its quota of fights, But a board of judges in solemn conclave finally reached its verdict and there was no appeal. The Most Beautiful Baby of Lower Harlem, bordering Lenox Avenue, had been proclaimed for the year.
When I was ten, I'd say to my friends, “I'll treat you to a soda,” and we'd leave our games of “potsy” on the broad tree-lined sidewalk and march in and sit on the high wire-stools to get free ice cream. I didn't know about profits, and it was wonderful for me. It was much better than “My father's a policeman.” I had prestige in those days.
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The soda fountain, a four-stooler tucked away neatly in a corner, was a concession to the necessity of making a living, but it was a real nuisance to my father and his clerk, who worked it themselves. The pharmacy proper was a fine-looking affair, comfortably large and square, with a well rounded personality, and none of the righteous quality of the “ethical” drugstore or the sideshow atmosphere of the modern one. The prescription department, although mysteriously closed off from the public, was large and prominent. Shelves lined the entire store, filled with white medical bottles labeled in Latin. Showcases held the usual assortment of sundries: hot-water bottles, syringes, ice bags, and a sprinkling of “patent” medicines, not highly prized by the profession. Beauty aids were almost negligible, confining themselves to cold creams and powders. There was a white glassed-in cabinet for “laboratory products,” where surgical instruments, anti-toxins, etc., were kept for physicians only. The candy department consisted of Repetti and Huyler. I preferred the rock candy, kept in a jar and used for coughs.
Narcotics were under lock and key. There were no restrictions on the sale of narcotics, but my father was always on the watch for addicts. Laws were finally passed making it illegal to dispense narcotics without a physician's prescription—but not until a long battle was fought by many organizations, including the pharmacists'. Before this, my father tried in his own way to limit the use of these drugs. One of his customers had become addicted to morphine as a result of an illness for which it had been prescribed. Her husband and family suffered with her, and finally my father decided to try to cure her without telling her. Had she known, she would have resisted strenuously. Every time she renewed her prescription, he took it upon himself to reduce the dose of morphine until, after a year, she was taking a harmless powder containing no morphine at all. It took a while to tell her about it because of the psychological complications, but she was finally told, and could never do enough for my father after that.
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Seen from the outside, the store had a solid and reassuring air. The big corner windows were always dressed with care. Displays were changed once a week. But what never changed were the huge blue and red glass show-globes standing in the corner of each window, as they stood in the windows of every drugstore of that age.
The store employed only one clerk, whose ambition to go into business for himself was always being realized, to the inconvenience of my father. There was also George, the old Negro porter, as familiar to the customers as we were. George's smile never failed. His task was to clean the store, carry supplies from the cellar, make deliveries, and take me to and from school every day until I was ten years old.
Seven o'clock saw my father or his clerk in the store. They closed at midnight. At mealtimes, the clerk and my father would relieve each other, and my father would run up to the flat to eat. Often, after closing, there were meetings of the newly formed druggists' associations, to which all the tired pharmacists of the city dragged themselves after midnight. My mother's nights were lonely, and my life with my father was limited, except for meals, to those afternoons when I hung around the store.
I can remember, however, the noisy nights of debate and struggle in our flat when committees met, and my father's leadership became increasingly apparent and was at last recognized without doubt. The smoke of cigars and battle would drift down the hall to the other end where I lay in my bed.
In later years, my father became the first Jewish president of the State Pharmaceutical Association.
My mother was a registered pharmacist also, but worked in the store only on the clerk's day off. On those days she would carry lunch and dinner down to the store for my father. Often the food would get cold because, although my mother would wait on customers in order to give my father a chance to eat, the customer would insist on the services of my father. Most people had no use for a lady druggist.
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My Mother was indeed among the first of the emancipated of her sex. She was that anomaly in any age, a beauty who wanted a career. However, when she walked into my father's life with a proposal to buy one of his two stores, my father's moral code reared up at the temerity of such a project. His solution to this proposed public scandal was to fall in love and marry her. She surrendered her independence, not without protest. But she had her choice, and she apparently made it.
At first we lived in back of the store, but soon moved up three flights of stairs to a flat where the bedrooms clung to the long hall like drops of water on a swan's neck. At one end was my mother's department, the dining-room and kitchen, and at the other was the parlor, filled with my father's objets d'art. These included ancient oil-paintings of questionable talent, and a phonograph whose Louis Quatorze body of rosewood and glass, overlaid with an elegant design in brass, was the envy of all our friends and relatives. In any spare moment he had at home, my father would lovingly select one of his favorite Caruso or Sembrich records, wind the handle vigorously, release the starter, and as the golden voice emerged from the rampant tin horn, raise his own voice in enthusiastic accompaniment. I can still sing arias from Italian operas without the slightest idea of what it is I am singing.
With prosperity, we moved to one of the new elevator apartments on 113th Street, and the first flickerings of snobbishness entered my bosom. Our routine of life, however, remained the same, even though it operated from a level three flights higher.
The long workday of the retail druggist was a perennial concern of the druggists' associations formed at the turn of the century. But nothing came of it—to this day, the twelve to sixteen-hour day hounds the life of the average pharmacist. Unless he has enough capital to open several stores, and to operate all of them successfully, he is chained to a business that gives him just enough profit for a modest living, and not enough margin to hire clerks to permit him the luxury of a private life.
The personality of the modern drugstore—a traditional subject for wisecracks—grew out of the pharmacist's grim struggle for livelihood in our competitive system. When the chain stores opened up many years ago, cut prices and “loss-leaders” below cost forced prices down to a level where the margin of profit became infinitesimal. The druggist was obliged to put in all kinds of lines outside his field in order to supplement his depleted income. That is how books, toys, every sort of beauty aid, fancy stationery, and luncheonettes complete with tables, found their way into the staid pharmaceutical shop.
A long and bitter battle was fought to eliminate the chain drugstore on the legal grounds of restraint of trade, but to no avail. Many a trip to Albany and Washington was made by my father and his comrades to lobby for fair trade in their profession. But it was a losing battle, and finally the small independent retail druggist had to accept the ruggedly competitive pattern of today's jack-of-all-trades drugstore.
But don't let the appearance of the modern drugstore fool you. Your druggist knows as much, perhaps more, than the old timers. In that small compartment hidden away behind the perfumes and the depilatories, he has practically everything you could possibly need for what ails you. Although his service may not be as broad or as assured as my father's (the age of specialization has made him too self-conscious to give such complete consultative service, and he is much less bold about poaching on the doctor's preserve), he probably knows more—did father know about sulfa or penicillin? And there are druggists nowadays who, if you come to them with your troubles, are capable of saying, “Madam, what you are really suffering from is an anxiety neurosis. Why don't you consult a psychiatrist?” Could my father have said that?
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My Father has been dead a good many years. Before he died, he gave up his retail store for the wholesale drug business. He made quite a bit of money, but he was never happy about it, and finally retired—and stayed retired for an entire year. And then he had a dream. It was a dream of a super-colossal drug store. A three-decker. The upper level would be in the lobby of the Lincoln Hotel, the middle level would open on the street on Eighth Avenue, and the lower level would be in the subway station of the newly built Eighth Avenue subway. It was a beautiful dream, and it cost him his entire fortune before it landed him, broke, in a small retail store at Broadway and 72nd Street. That was where he died, a small neighborhood druggist again, catering to the needs of customers who were also his friends. He was happiest at that. The three-decker dream was gilded, but he was restless and uneasy in it. I don't think he could get the feel of a drugstore whose customers were transients and who passed out of one's life with their purchases. I think he was glad to give it up.
His days of glory were on Lenox Avenue, It's thirty years since we had the store there, Our old neighbors have spread themselves all over the country now, and my mother is not a young woman any more. But today, wherever she goes, people stop her and say to her, “Aren't you Mrs. D. whose husband had the drugstore on Lenox Avenue?” They remember us more often than we remember them.
Several years before he died, my father was asked to give a course in practical pharmacy at the Fordham University College of Pharmacy. I don't know how much he told them about merchandising. But I know he told them a great deal about human relations. To him a pharmacy was an institution—not for making a living, but for the welfare and benefit of its patrons.
We've been gone from Lenox Avenue a long time. But if you ever pass there, look at the southwest corner of 114th Street. There'll be a drugstore there. There'll also be a sign over the front windows. Just as it did thirty years ago, it still says: “Diamond's Pharmacy.”
