Charles Rudolph Walgreen Jr., son of the founder and former chairman and president of the drugstore chain that bears his name, was remembered Sunday as a visionary who transformed the company into the retailing powerhouse it is today.
Mr. Walgreen, 100, who stepped down from active management of the company in 1976, died Saturday, Feb. 10, in his sleep at his home in Northfield, three weeks before his 101st birthday.
Born in Chicago, Mr. Walgreen received a pharmacy degree from the University of Michigan.
As a child, Mr. Walgreen worked in his family’s drugstore, starting as a stock boy and eventually becoming a pharmacist.
By age 10, he frequently could be found driving his father between stores in Chicago because his father was fearful of the relatively new contraptions known as automobiles. The boy tied blocks of wood to his feet to reach the pedals, said his grandson Les Walgreen.
“He loved to tell such wonderful stories of those first Walgreens stores, with the gas lighting instead of electricity and the old soda fountains,” Les Walgreen said. “It was such a huge and important part of his life.”
He took over the drugstore chain in 1939 after his father died and led the company for nearly four decades through one of its most dramatic periods of change.
The first Walgreen store opened in 1901 on the city’s South Side. Twenty years later, there were more than 500 Walgreens stores across the nation and the company was quickly becoming most prominent drugstore business in the U.S.
Walgreen Board Chairman David Bernauer said Mr. Walgreen “was coming into the office well into his 90s on a regular basis.”
Company officers often wouldn’t know he was in the building until lunch because his office was in a different section of the company’s Deerfield headquarters.
“We would know he was there because he would show up at the lunch table every day,” Bernauer said.
“He had an incredible memory about past events,” said Bernauer, who noted that in the early 1990s Walgreens opened a store in Indianapolis in the same spot it had previously closed a store decades earlier.
“When he came to the lunch table, he was holding the press release and said we had had a store at that same corner before,” Bernauer said, recalling that it took the company several days to officially confirm it had operated a store at the corner in the 1930s.
After World War II, Mr. Walgreen led the company’s change to a new concept that was sweeping the nation, called self-service retailing, where customers could choose products from shelves by themselves. Previously, most retail goods were kept behind the counters and store employees would gather products for customers.
“With the new wave of stores, you needed twice as much space because you had to make room for the aisles,” Les Walgreen said. “They had to close two stores each time they opened one of the new self-service stores.”
During his reign as head of the company, Mr. Walgreen was credited with gradually reducing pharmacist hours from the industry norm of about 66 hours per week in 1939 to 40 hours per week.
At the request of the medical profession, he made changes in customer service that resulted in Walgreens becoming the first pharmacy chain allowed to advertise in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Mr. Walgreen also pushed his chain into new retailing concepts. For example, in 1952 he was one of the driving forces behind Evergreen Park’s Evergreen Plaza, one of the first large shopping centers built east of the Mississippi River.
During World War II, the company raised millions of dollars through war bonds sold at its stores and as part of its nationally broadcast radio shows featuring Bob Hope and other top Hollywood stars.
In 1943 Walgreens opened a not-for-profit pharmacy in the newly constructed Pentagon in Washington, with all profits going to the Pentagon.
Two years later, Secretary of War Henry Stinson thanked Mr. Walgreen for the sacrifices made by the company “in contributing so materially to the comfort and convenience of the many thousands of Pentagon workers during the trying war days”
The company credits him with adopting a 24-word moral test developed by Rotary International that remains the ethical base of the pharmaceutical company: “Is it the truth? Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build goodwill and better friendship? Will it be beneficial to all concerned?”
Les Walgreen said his grandfather led an active and vibrant life until he had a stroke five years ago.
In 1968 when he was 62, Mr. Walgreen visited the South Pole and wanted to make the trip again when he was 91. He exercised every day in preparation, flew to Chile and made two small commutes to get closer to the pole. But on the final leg of the voyage, the pilot refused to fly Mr. Walgreen, citing his age, his grandson said.
“He never let his age stand in the way of what he wanted to accomplish, and he was devastated that he could not make the trip,” Les Walgreen said.
Confined to a wheelchair for the past five years, he kept his mind active. He worked with a yacht company to design and build his 127-foot handicapped-accessible yacht, the Sis W.
Mr. Walgreen was a past president of the National Association of Chain Drug Stores and the American Foundation for Pharmaceutical Education and honorary president of the American Pharmaceutical Association.
He is survived by his wife, Jean; two sons, Charles R. III and James; one daughter, Leslie Ann Pratt; 23 grandchildren; and 33 great-grandchildren.
Services are pending.
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