When my family and I moved to Chicago’s Sauganash neighborhood 26 years ago, we lucked out. It’s not only a beautiful community, but it also had something we hadn’t seen in years — a family pharmacy. My grandfather E. Clifton Daniel was a small-town pharmacist. And he had something my other grandfather, Harry S. Truman, didn’t — a popcorn machine and a soda fountain.
Sadly, corporations and insurers have made it harder and harder for family pharmacies to keep their doors open. Our pharmacy, Tarpey’s, closed this week after more than 50 years in business.
Tarpey’s started life as Peterson Drugs. Bob Tarpey was their pharmacist. He and his wife, Carole, bought the business in 1973.
Tarpey died young, having spent years fighting cancer. His son, Pat, was just out of pharmacy school. Pat and his mother took over running the business with Pat’s older brother, Michael, also a pharmacist. That ended when Mike went to work for his father-in-law.
Afterward, Pat rarely took a break, working up to 14 hours a day, seven days a week. My wife, Polly Bennett-Daniel, worked at Tarpey’s for 20 years but never saw him eat. “He doesn’t have time,” his daughter Jamie said.
Early on, he sometimes tried a week’s vacation, hiring a supply pharmacist to fill in. But when he returned Monday morning, he wound up doing two weeks’ worth of work in two days. Customers didn’t know the supply pharmacist, so they put off getting their medications until Pat returned.
Pat knows every one of his customers, which medications they take and where those medications might interact. He’s even been known to correct a doctor or two.
“Everybody’s sort of devastated he’s leaving,” lifelong resident Pam Rosenthal said. “He was someone you could trust.”
Jim Mullen, founder of Mullen’s Applesauce, grew up in the neighborhood and has known Pat and his family since childhood. In 1996, Mullen, then a Chicago police officer, was shot in the line of duty and paralyzed from the neck down. The family moved to Edgebrook and chose Pat to manage the myriad medications that Mullen must take daily.
“It was wonderful that Pat could manage the chaos of a workman’s comp case,” said Mullen’s wife, Athena. “His mom used to deliver them to us. I really relied on her, you know.”
Through it all, Pat and his wife, Missy, created a happy, balanced home. They raised two children — Jamie, who worked at Tarpey’s, and her older brother, Ryan, who is a pharmacist like his father and grandfather. The kids became accustomed to their father’s schedule; Missy joked that their former babysitters have became lifelong friends. That said, both Ryan and Jamie — and their cousins Katie and Eddie Tarpey — loved going to work on Sundays with their father and grandmother. Before COVID-19, the store was open seven days a week, from Oct. 1 through Mother’s Day.
There were magazines, Pokémon cards, Beanie Babies, payment in lottery tickets, the ability to “test” the candy and the possibility of an ice cream sandwich for lunch. Early on, Tarpey’s also featured a soda fountain and a wooden phone booth, the latter often serving as the site for a game of “see how many kids we can cram into it.”
Many of those kids became paid employees. Knock on any door in Sauganash, and you’re likely to find a 50-something who used to work at Tarpey’s. My oldest worked there for several years. Pat Gallivan, manager of L. Woods Tap & Pine Lodge in Lincolnwood, worked for Bob Tarpey while studying at Northeastern University. He was a customer long before that.
Bob Tarpey once caught him filching baseball cards but didn’t turn him in to his parents. Later, when Pat, a college student at the time, arrived for work hungover, Tarpey gave him $20 to get something to eat and clear the cobwebs.
“Everybody loved Pat’s dad,” Gallivan said. “He was one of my all-time favorites.”
Bob Tarpey, Pat, Mike and their mother provided not only a service but a sense of community as well. Drugstore chains provide the service, many of them admirably, but they can’t compete with the fact that almost every time you walked into Tarpey’s, you would see someone you know.
“You run in there for five minutes, and it turns into a half an hour,” Gallivan said.
Pat Tarpey plans to play golf, lots of golf, and enjoy the family cottage in Lake Geneva, something he could previously do for only part of each Sunday during the summers.
We will miss him, but each and every one of us knows he deserves the time off, if not much, much more.
“He hasn’t maybe been saving the world,” Gallivan said. “But he’s certainly been taking care of business in his little corner of it.”
Clifton Truman Daniel is honorary chairman of the Truman Library Institute and secretary of the Truman Scholarship Foundation.
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