Medicine cabinet memories
Each of the windows flanking the door displayed an enormous glass container filled with a colored liquid. Was this where the medicine came from … potions brewing in unnamed solutions absorbing their power from the sun?
This display could be found at Kelly’s Drug Store, located on the corner of 59th Street and Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn. We were frequent customers. With four small children, each a petri dish of whatever was going around, and two parents who had their own health issues, needing medicine was a common occurrence and Kelly’s, a good six blocks away from our house, was the place where our family procured its nostrums.
In fact, this is where all of the Smithwick family shopped for medications. Aunts, uncles and cousins preferred to shop there even when there were closer stores. My cousin Vincent would come in from New Jersey to shop there. Kelly’s had been across the street from Our Lady of Perpetual Help, where the various branches of the family worshiped and sent their children to school since 1908, the same year that the church was built. Maybe that was the connection. I do remember my Aunt Mina proudly telling us that our grandmother had made a $300 contribution to the church building fund. I wonder, did she know the original Mr. Kelly?
Inside Kelly’s? My memory fails to account for what was displayed on the shelves because of the theater at the back of the store. The pharmacist, who went by the appellation of “druggist” then, stood behind a raised platform three feet above the floor. He wore a white coat and was flanked by more of those gigantic fluid filled glass containers as well as impressive examples of medical paraphernalia. It was as if we approached the oracle of Delphi, supplicants begging assistance. This place meant business. I suspect the drama had its own placebo effect, even if no one knew or used that term.
I wonder what was in those pill bottles we purchased. Penicillin wasn’t available until after World War II, and then mostly as an injection. I do remember what was in the medicine cabinet and most of that was what the sisters at Our Lady of Perpetual Help school would have labelled as “patent medicines.”
There was always Vicks, the savior of mothers when all of their offspring were deeply congested. Mom had a well-used vaporizer into which she would add Vicks and the whole house would quickly smell of eucalyptus and menthol. Four kids, born a year apart, get sick a lot. Even today, those scents remind me of home.
There was Sayman’s Salve, with a picture of Mr. Sayman on the cover of its dusty yellow jar, echoing the color of the ointment itself. We used it for anything involving skin, from mosquito bites to sunburns. I Googled Sayman’s Salve and, wonder of wonders, it’s still around. Mr. Sayman’s photo is gone now and the jar is blue. Its ingredients are mostly a variation of Vaseline and zinc oxide.
And there was the eye cup, a mysterious and somewhat scary glass object with no specific use that I could discern and so I, as a child with a vivid imagination, thought it was where you put your eye when it was hurting. And I guess enough time has passed to acknowledge that on occasion I used it to give my doll a drink.
Speaking of eyes. We were a family whose members often fell prey to whatever causes a sty. We all knew of the little tube that fixed the sty, Yellow Oxide of Mercury. For years I thought that we had been poisoning ourselves with the mercury, but, no, it’s an old fashioned but effective medication.
Today, drug stores have become pharmacies, which have morphed into a kind of general store. They are big, flowing palaces of kitsch and cosmetics and coolers with foodstuffs and, tucked into the back, a place where you can get your medications.
Last week, I visited the Main Street Pharmacy in Marcellus to pick up a prescription and get my senior flu shot. This is not one of those big box places. It’s hometown modest. There are OTC meds and a great selection of greeting cards and gifts, but you are sure that you are in a pharmacy.
I am smiling a smile of remembrance … Jamie Cataldi, the pharmacist works from an elevated area about three feet above the customers and the staff that waits on them. There are no giant bottles of colored fluid or intimidating-looking medical equipment displays, but, for me, there is that something that adds to the credibility of the pharmacist’s knowledge and skill. Maybe it’s just fond memories of being at the place where I remember holding my Dad’s hand when he said we would get the medicine to make us feel better.
Feeling better? Today that is something.
