THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, October 5, 1996 TAG: 9610050404
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MIKE KNEPLER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 145 lines
Eddie Diggs keeps a photo of himself standing behind the soda fountain at the Fairmount Pharmacy 50 years ago.
That's when there were still ``soda jerks,'' the guys who mixed soft drinks from syrup and carbonated water, right at the counter.
At the Fairmount Pharmacy, the counter and the booths all closed in 1976, victims of the spread of fast-food drive-ins and the demise nationwide of old-fashioned ice-cream parlors.
Today, the entire store shuts down, giving way to the chain pharmacies being built nearby and the changes in health insurance that have created more red tape for small businessmen like Eddie Diggs.
George Edward ``Eddie'' Diggs Sr., 67, is among the last of a breed in the pharmacy business, a man who worked his way up from soda jerk to pharmacist and owner.
``It will be sad, but it will be a relief, really,'' Diggs said the other day while still dispensing prescriptions from his store at 2301 Lafayette Blvd.
``I'm going to miss my customers and my friends - I guess you could call them customers and friends,'' he said. ``But these last couple of years have really been sort of hectic with this HMO stuff. You spend a lot more time on the phone talking to insurance people than filling prescriptions.
``And you know how it goes, you dial their phone number and `punch one,' you `punch two,' and you wait.''
Diggs knew the day was coming. Yet, the Fairmount Pharmacy continued on, serving surrounding neighborhoods such as Fairmount Park and Lafayette-Winona. Delivery service continued right up to the end, as well.
That was something Diggs and his employees always prided themselves on.
``We delivered everything,'' not just prescriptions, he said. ``If somebody called up for a loaf of bread, they got it . . . anything in the store. We never had a minimum (purchase price), and we never charged.''
In 1946, when Diggs, then 17, began working the soda fountain, younger teen-agers had jobs as delivery boys - riding bicycles.
``Most of them were neighborhood boys. This was probably their first job,'' Diggs said. ``That's how it went for years. . . . We even had one fellow later on, I think, who rode a motorcycle. Then we started getting cars for them. We went through many cars.''
Delivery boys came and went. Diggs stayed - except for four years in the Air Force and another four in the pharmacy school of the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond.
Even then, Diggs worked weekends and holidays at the pharmacy - never working anywhere else, save one day when he filled in for a sick pharmacist at another drug store.
``When I was in the service and I'd come home on leave, I'd come in and work,'' said Diggs, who spent much of his Air Force years in Lubbock, Texas. The distance from the pharmacy didn't faze him.
``Once in a while, I could catch a flight. Then if I was on leave or something I could come home on the bus. Normally, I'd be on leave for a week or two,'' he said. ``When you're a kid you don't need to rest. And this was like a second home to me.''
Diggs grew up in Fairmount Park, a neighborhood of mostly aging bungalows near the center of the city. He wasn't just attached to the community, he also was close to William Ungar, then co-owner of the store.
``William had a big influence on my decision to go to pharmacy school. My father died in '47, and actually he sort of became a father figure for me,'' Diggs said.
Ungar was the store's pharmacist, and his late brother, Max Ungar, worked the front of the store.
The Ungar brothers opened the pharmacy in May of 1946 and hired the teen-aged Diggs a few weeks later.
``He was a very bright kid, very straightforward and honest, all the good things,'' said William Ungar, who still owns the building. ``He was a good worker, always prompt, always friendly with the customers.''
Diggs, who said he was just glad to work in his neighborhood, recalled, ``I didn't even look at it as a job then.''
``I was just one of the kids, and I was having fun at the time. . . . I fixed limeades and Coca-Colas and Pepsi colas in the old soda fountain way, where you had the syrup and mixed it with carbonated water.
``We had a whole bunch of women who used to come in here, just routinely. I used to call it `the baby carriage brigade.' They would come in here with their baby carriages and sit in the booths and pass the time of day.''
In his old photograph, Diggs stands near a cash register showing a 30-cent sale. ``That was expensive at 30 cents,'' he noted. ``It might have been a banana split or a nut sundae.''
Diggs worked his way up to drug clerk, taking the prescription orders from customers.
In 1957, he graduated pharmacy school and returned to the store full time. ``I always knew I was coming back to work here,'' he said.
In 1975, Diggs bought Max Ungar's share, and in 1982, he bought William Ungar's. That same year, his son, Eddie Jr., came to work the business side of the store.
Eddie Diggs Jr., by the way, can boast of seeing the Fairmount Pharmacy even before he saw the house he grew up in. At least his mother, Mary Diggs, boasts for him.
Three days after Eddie Jr. was born, Mary Diggs said, she brought him home from the hospital but stopped first at the pharmacy to show him off.
``Max and Willie were just like family to us,'' she said.
The pharmacy business, though, was fast changing.
Diggs mixed fewer medicines by hand, even over-the-counter potions such as the laxative castor oil in carbonated water.
``You used to come in for castor oil, and you'd get some root beer syrup and put it in a cup and pour while you were fizzing it with the carbonation,'' Diggs said. ``If you drank it right away you wouldn't get that aftertaste from the castor oil.''
Perhaps the biggest changes were outside the store, including competition from the chains.
This year, Revco and Rite Aid pharmacies began building stores on nearby Tidewater Drive, a few blocks from two other independent pharmacies.
``I didn't think we needed five drug stores in a two-mile radius,'' Diggs said, citing one reason for closing. The Revco at Tidewater Drive and Lafayette Boulevard is buying his stock and prescription-customer files.
Diggs will work at the Revco for a while before going into full retirement. His son also will go to Revco.
Meanwhile, Diggs isn't certain he understands the direction of the health-care industry, with its health maintenance organizations, managed-care plans and mail-order prescriptions.
Many of his longtime customers also say they don't understand. In recent days, they came to say goodbye and thank the Diggses and their employees.
Ron Morton of nearby Shoop Avenue, a retired Ford plant assembly line worker, was among the friends. He had worked at the pharmacy as one of the delivery boys on bicycle, and his brother, Charles Morton, was the motorcycle-riding carrier.
He beckoned Diggs outside to show off his latest set of wheels, a restored 1965 Ford Mustang.
The Fairmount's last delivery man, Henry C. Moorer, 76, and a former employee of the store, A.C. Shields, 65, conversed by the corner.
They wondered how delivery customers, especially elderly shut-ins, will get their prescriptions now.
``For some of the customers,'' Shields said, ``we were the only ones they'd see all day long.''
Friends also said they'll miss the store because it supported the neighborhood's anti-crime citizen-watch programs.
Back inside the store, Eddie Diggs was philosophical.
``In business you have to either grow or you got to shrink. We could have probably shrunk and stayed in business,'' he said. ``But I guess it was just time for us to close.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by MIKE HEFFNER/The Virginian-Pilot
At 2301 Lafayette Boulevard, generations of customers bought sundaes
and socialized.
MIKE HEFFNER/The Virginian-Pilot
In 1946, just after the Fairmount Pharmacy opened, Eddie Diggs,
then 16, above, stands in front of fellow soda jerk Alvin Wheeler.
Now, Diggs, 67, left, owns the store. He is selling to Revco, where
he'll work a while. by CNB