By John Gilpin
What was my dad like when he was a child? He would have told you he was an angel, but everyone else would have told you differently. He had red hair, and he was quite a little terror. He would sneak out of the drugstore and run across the road to the elementary school and pester everybody. He’d run up and down the hallways and peek his head into everybody’s classroom. They brought him over to school early just to get him out of my grandmother Roma’s hair. Uncle Homer [Gilpin] was on the school board and was influential in getting him accepted into the first grade when he was only five years old.
Uncle Burt tells a story about when he and Dad raised chickens as a school project. They had a little chicken coop built out back along the creek, and Uncle Burt sold eggs to the A&P store for ten cents a dozen. Carroll Krautter recalls having to move the chicks out of the coop and into the kitchen overnight when the creek got too high. Apparently, it was not uncommon to see baby chicks in the back of the drugstore in the mid-1940s.
Dad was sixteen when he graduated from Greene-Dreher-Sterling, and then he went to Bridgeton Academy up in Maine because he still needed to mature a little bit. When he finished school there, he went on to Philadelphia School of Pharmacy. He graduated in 1953 at the age of 23 and came back home to work at the drugstore as a pharmacist. My father would have liked to be a lawyer, but Uncle Burt would tell you that he felt a responsibility to become a pharmacist. He and Bill Rubrecht used to sit in the back booth and discuss politics, and even if my father agreed with him a hundred percent, he would pick the other side. Then at the end he’d say, “Well, you’re right Bill,” and Rubrecht would say, “What do you mean I’m right? How am I right?” It was quite comical to listen to the two of them go back and forth.
In March of 1957 he married my mom, Jane Howe, from Lake Ariel. They met while she was a student at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia. They would carpool together when they were coming home on weekends, and I guess that’s how the magic started.
I remember Mom helping at the drugstore on Sunday mornings when the newspapers were delivered. We’d gather down at the drugstore at six o’clock to put the Sunday papers together—the Scranton papers, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Pocono Record. My mother would write the names on the papers and stack them in alphabetical order on the chairs—we’d have 300 of them reserved, at least. Then we’d go upstairs and my grandmother would make a great big breakfast. When we opened at nine o’clock it was a hustle and bustle place. It was unbelievable!
Sunday was the only day we closed early. Every other day my father opened at seven o’clock in the morning and didn’t close until eleven o’clock at night. He would go upstairs to his mom’s during the day and take a little catnap, and he’d come home for dinner and then go back down to work. My sister and I saw how hard our father worked and how many hours he put in. I can’t tell you how many times he’d come home for dinner and one of the ladies would call and say so-and-so is here for a prescription, and he would go back down. He would get calls at two o’clock in the morning and someone would say, “I need my heart medicine,” and he’d go back down and fill the prescription and deliver it. It was like any other pharmacy in a small town, he was dedicated and people trusted him.
For as long as I can remember, my grandmother Roma had white hair. She couldn’t always get around that well, but you could never sneak one past her. She loved kids, and she made the best chocolate chip cookies in the world. The cookie jar on the kitchen counter in her apartment upstairs always had chocolate chip cookies in it. Always.
Note: This is an excerpt from an article that first appeared in The Greene Hills of Home, Vol. 28, No. 4.