Just Drugs

Druggist Tells About Old Times

Dallas Morning News
Wednesday, 29 July 1953
Section 3, Pages 1 & 13

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Walter D. Adams, 80, the grand old man of Texas pharmacy who has operated Adams Drug Company in Forney, Kaufman County, for sixty years, Wednesday visited his fiftieth Texas Pharmaceutical Association convention in Dallas’ Baker Hotel.

Adams said he found the organization’s seventy-second convention as enjoyable as the other forty-nine he’s attended.

This time he could be in town just one day.

After the morning general session, Adams said the advice about modernizing is “valuable if they (other druggists) will use it.” He’s always kept his store up to date, he said.

Born in Kemp, another Kaufman County town, Adams was orphaned at three and lived with an aunt until he was twelve. Then he became a printer’s devil and served out his apprenticeship on the Kaufman Sun. At seventeen, he founded the Forney Tribune. After a year he decided to enroll in Texas A&M College.

But Adams missed the independence of running his own business while at College Station and returned to the Tribune after completing a year of school work.

Three years later he opened his drugstore.

It didn’t take Adams long to decide that pharmacy was his true love. He’s been in the same spot in Forney ever since. His printing and newspapering background paid off in the drug business, too – he edited the Texas Druggist for many years. His associates also showed their esteem for Adams by electing him TPA president in 1914. And a few years later, he headed the American Pharmaceutical Association.

When he started out, Adams recalled Monday, drugstores didn’t have many side lines and concentrated on the basic drugs. One of the few side lines was a face powder which was “ground up chalk sprinkled with perfume.”

Since then drugstores have added more side lines and even started buying most of their drugs already prepared, Adams said.

One of Adams’ fellow druggists – a few years younger than the grand old man – Monday complained to Adams that “pretty soon our stores won’t be drugstores.” However, Adams smiled back and said “most druggists need side lines.”

One side line he refuses to install, though. That’s a soda fountain. Adams has never put a fountain in.

“Makes mice in the store. I hate mice,” he explained.

Forney has had as many as four drugstores at a time during his sixty years, Adams said. But he has met competition by “emphasizing the professional side – filling prescriptions.