Friendship recalled
Editor’s note: In today’s article, the first of a three-part series first published in 1999, Glenn Tunney shares the story of Grant Brown and Bill Johnson, two Brownsville men whose dedication to their community and their common profession of pharmacy forged a unique bond between them. —
I recently spoke with retired pharmacist William F. Johnson and his wife, Margaret, who live on Pearl Street in Brownsville. I wanted to learn more about the late Grant E. Brown. Bill Johnson had a long professional relationship with Grant Brown, who was a well-known Brownsville pharmacist, local history buff and owner of the “Grant Brown collection” of historic photographs of old Brownsville.
As I talked with Bill and Margaret, I realized that the lives of Grant Brown and Bill Johnson are inseparably entwined. Much of the story of one is also the story of the other. It is a small-town parable of competitors who developed a lasting friendship and mutual respect for each other.
Brown Drug Store was located at 105 High St. in downtown Brownsville. It was in the Crawford building, which still stands on the corner of High and Bank streets. The building, currently housing the Antique Grill, is directly opposite the former National Deposit Bank, now National City bank.
In the 1940s, there were three commercial tenants on the ground floor of the building. On the left side was Greenfield’s Market; in the middle was a restaurant; on the right was Brown Drug Store. Beyond the Crawford building to the right was an alley, and to the right of the alley was the Bison Theater building. Yoho jewelers, whose sign can be seen in a picture postcard from the collection of Ray Christner, occupied the front-left corner of the Bison building.
Grant Brown, owner and pharmacist at Brown Drug Store, was a graduate of Washington and Jefferson College and the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy. He had a brother, Bill, who was a job printer, and a sister, Lois, who was a schoolteacher at Prospect Street School. Grant and his wife, the former Evelyn S. Sprouse, had three children; Grant Jr., Ned and Carol. The family lived at the top of High Street hill in a house presently occupied by the Dascenzo family. Grant often walked down the hill to work in the morning, had lunch in town and went home for dinner. His store, which for many years operated from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m., was open seven days a week.
Bill Johnson was born and raised at 250 Bank St. in Brownsville. In 1940, 14-year-old Bill went looking for a part-time job. His search took him to 105 High St., the Brown Drug Store. He was hired for “good money” (Bill’s words), twenty-five cents an hour to do whatever Grant told him to do.
For years, Grant was the store’s only pharmacist. With the store open seven days a week, there were few opportunities to relax. Bill Johnson recalls that on a holiday, they would occasionally head for the mountains.
“I remember one time,” Bill told me, “when Grant, his son, his dad, and I went up to Dulany’s Cave (now Laurel Caverns). Several times we went up there and spent whole days, going into the cave in the morning, then coming out, maybe going back in again.”
Bill worked at Brown Drug Store through high school and graduated from Brownsville High School (on High street) in 1943. He entered the School of Pharmacy at the University of Pittsburgh, but in the following year he was drafted. Returning to Brownsville in 1946 after a two-year stretch in the Navy, Bill went right back to work at Brown Drug Store.
He worked part-time while riding the train to college in Pittsburgh. Returning by afternoon train after a day of classes at Pitt, Bill would go straight to the drugstore and work until closing time, usually 11 p.m. Bill completed his degree in pharmacy at Pitt in 1949, and Grant welcomed him as a new full-time pharmacist. For the next seven years, the two men manned the prescription counter at Brown Drug Store.
“What did the inside of the store look like?” I asked Bill.
“There was a wooden phone booth at the back end of the store,” he recalled. “Behind the booth there were stairs that went to the cellar and stairs that went up to a balcony above the back part of the store.”
“So you could look down on the rest of the store,” I said.
“Yes. And the back part of the store, on that second floor, was where the prescription room was, where he did all his prescription orders.
“He had a soda fountain in there,” Bill continued. “On the right side forward of the telephone booth, there were about three booths, then the fountain, with about six or eight stools at the fountain. You could buy ice cream, Coca-Cola, sundaes, ice cream cones, things like that. Most of the drugstores then, even over on the other end of town at Bush and Marsh, had a soda fountain.”
I said, “I hadn’t thought about it before, but now I wonder what it was that put drugstores and ice cream counters together?”
“I think that then, it was an attraction just to help bring people into the store,” Bill said. “Gradually, a lot of those counters developed into places where you could get sandwiches and things like that. Grant had regular recipes and formulas that we used to make up the syrups for the fountain. At that time, we made all of them ourselves.”
Bill’s wife, Margaret, then produced a fancy framed certificate attesting that William Johnson was officially certified by the Borden company to serve Borden’s ice cream.
“You needed to be certified to serve Borden’s ice cream?” I laughed. I couldn’t believe it.
They both laughed too. “It was just a promotional thing for Borden’s,” Margaret said.
Brown Drug Store was prospering, and in the late 1940s, the store expanded.
“Someone decided to put a new restaurant in between Greenfield’s Market and the drug store,” Margaret explained. “Then Grant took that over. Grant and Bill moved shelving around, took out a section of wall and moved the soda fountain into the restaurant.”
“At that point,” said Bill, “we had a cook in the kitchen and girls, a lot of them high school girls, worked at the fountain and in the restaurant. We got some older women to work for breakfast waiting on booths and counters.”
“They opened around six o’clock in the morning,” Margaret said. “Mrs. Louise Mortland Goe was one of the first cooks that was hired down there.”
Louise succeeded other cooks such as Inez Johns, Hazel Pringle and a lady Margaret remembers as Mrs. Newell. Louise, still a Brownsville resident today, says she would arrive at work at 3 a.m. to get the pies baked before the restaurant opened at 6 a.m. Her husband Lyn helped her, as did her daughters Shirley Mortland Murray, Vivian Mortland Endsley and Bonnie Mortland, as well as Lynford Mortland and her sister Wanda Rosgony.
Keeping the customers satisfied were waitresses Rose Marie King Cross, Julia King Kovach, Grayce Johnson Stevenson, Marie Angelo Hudak, Louella Keplar, Christine Murphy Amos, Tess Durchlag and Mildred Stipkovich. Shortly after Louise left the restaurant in the early 1960s, it was sold to Gus and Pauline Francis and the wall between the restaurant and the drug store was closed again.
Serving food was not the only creative way to bring customers through the front door of the drugstore.
“When Bill was working for Grant, it was Bill that got Grant into cameras,” Margaret told me. “Grant never took a picture, but Bill was into photography. He developed a photography trade and people would go to Bill to fix cameras.”
“And the Russell Stover candy,” she added. “Bill talked Grant into taking that line on. Holiday season, Valentine season, that was a busy time.”
“Right after World War II,” Bill said, “we bought the Gene and Boots candy for many years, all the handmade things that they had, we really did a terrific business with that.”
“You have to remember,” he pointed out, “at that time, certain things that you bought were drug store items. You couldn’t buy them in a grocery store. Most of your cosmetics, you had to go to the drugstore for them. Grocery stores for the most part didn’t sell toothpaste, toothbrushes, combs, brushes, deodorants. Cameras were drugstore items too, for the most part.”
“It was the small, independent stores that made Kodak what it is today,” said Margaret.
Bill remembered something else about Grant Brown. “You know, you always had to have signs to put in the window and price tags and things like that. Grant made them himself. He had a set of drawing pens, and whether it was a big sign or a little sign, he would get his pens out and he would make his own signs.” Some of those signs are visible in a photograph Margaret showed me. Bill is shown standing next to the telephone booth in Brown’s store.
I looked at the photograph. “These signs look professionally done,” I declared.
“He was good,” Bill said.
“He had several different points for his pens,” Margaret added. “He had them in a candy box, and he’d get out that candy box with those stylus pens.”
The early 50s were successful years at Brown Drug Store. Bill worked for Grant as a registered pharmacist from 1949 until 1956. Then, in March 1956, Bill made a decision that appeared to end his longtime relationship with Grant Brown.
Bill, 30-years-old and still single, purchased Central Pharmacy from Charles D’Antonio. Central Pharmacy was on the curve at the intersection of High and Bank streets. It was practically across the street from Brown Drug Store. The relationship between Grant and Bill had now come almost full circle. Bill had started at the drugstore as Grant’s 14-year-old helper. He had become Grant Brown’s co-worker, sharing the pharmacist’s duties with him. Now, after 17 years together, they were owners of competing pharmacies.
And yet it was the friendliest competition you can imagine.
“In fact,” said Bill, “for a long time after I left Grant and bought the store across the street from him, in competition with him, I still had the keys to his store. He wouldn’t take them back for a long time afterwards. He said, ‘you may need something.’ That’s the kind of person he was.”
Though now competitors, the bond of mutual trust and respect endured. Next week, I will share with you how an unusual reversal placed these two Brownsville pharmacists back together once again.
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Comments about these articles may be sent to Editor Mark O’Keefe, 8-18 E. Church St., Uniontown, PA or e-mailed to mo’keefe@heraldstandard.com .