July 21, 2005

Town Drug pharmacist Tim Rogers talked with a customer, Conrad Balliet, earlier this week. Rogers takes the time to talk to his customers to get to know them better.

By Diane Chiddister

Spend an afternoon with Town Drug pharmacist Tim Rogers and you’ll see that, as well as dispensing medicine, he offers his customers countless valuables that can’t be packaged into small orange bottles.

On a recent afternoon, for example, he offered birthday greetings to an elderly man, consolation to a mother whose little boy was sick and warm welcomes to everyone who came through the door. He addressed most people by name and inquired about their lives. And to his customers’ constant stream of questions, he offered clear and patient answers.

If Rogers knows one thing clearly, it’s that being a good pharmacist means caring for his customers.

“A good pharmacist goes home every night and prays to God that he hasn’t harmed anyone during the day,” Rogers said in a recent interview.

Rogers does care, and every day, he said, he feels gratified to be of service to the people who bring their business to him. That gratification has kept him in the pharmacy business for 40 years, the last six in Yellow Springs.

His customers need many things, Rogers said, and most of all, they need information about the prescriptions and ailments they bring his way, details about dosages, guidelines or possible side effects. They need answers to the questions they often feel uncomfortable asking their doctors, who may seem aloof, disinterested or in a hurry, Rogers said.

While Rogers is undeniably busy, he is not in a hurry, and he answers each question as carefully as he can. On a recent day he explained to one customer how best to apply Vitamin E to a scar, and to another the best brand of calcium tablets. He measured a man’s knee to determine the right size brace, and told another to call him at home if her new pills gave her problems.

But if Rogers doesn’t know the answer to a question, he said, he is the first one to say so.

“An important characteristic of a pharmacist is that you have to be honest,” he said. “You can’t lie to people or try to cover up a mistake.”

Accuracy is a pharmacist’s first concern, Rogers said, and he has in place a system to catch any errors that might occur in filling prescriptions. His technician, Connie Bedner, who has 15 years of experience, fills the prescriptions, which Rogers initially puts into the computer to produce labels. The label is then checked against the prescription, and the identification number on the bottle of medication is checked against the number on the label. After that, Rogers checks again.

Over all, Rogers said, his approach to ensuring accuracy is “to keep checking and checking and checking.”

While many of his customers need information, some patrons just need to talk, Rogers said, and he does his best to listen, even if he sometimes hears more than he wants to.

“You put on a white coat and people will tell you things you don’t want to know,” said Rogers, who said that he considers his bad memory to be one of his greatest assets. “It’s safe to tell me almost anything because I’ll soon forget it,” he said.

Rogers positions himself in the store in a way that emphasizes his accessibility. While many pharmacists tower over their customers from a raised platform in the back, Rogers sits on a stool at floor-level, eye to eye with his customers. From there, he can see the goings on in the store, and is reminded, he said, of why he considers Yellow Springs the best place he’s ever worked.

“People here care about each other,” he said. “The most enjoyable thing to see is who is going out of their way for someone else. I see that all the time.”

He also enjoys watching the interactions between villagers that occur in his store, the small daily conversations that help to build community. And he feels that people appreciate his work here, he said, partly because they understand it on an intellectual level and partly because, for a while in the 1990s, the village had no pharmacy.

Long the site of Erbaugh and Johnson’s, the building at the corner of Glen Street and Xenia Avenue stood empty after pharmacist Carl Johnson retired in 1996. The Odd Fellows Lodge, which owns the building, sought a pharmacy for the space and after it was unoccupied more than a year leased it to Fred Messina, the owner of Town Drug in Jamestown. Messina continues to own the store, which Rogers has managed since 1999.

Before coming to Yellow Springs, Rogers worked for 17 years at Howard’s Pharmacy in Vandalia, and for one year, which was “as long as I could stand it,” he said, at CVS after the national chain purchased Howard’s. Previously, he worked as a pharmacist at a variety of Columbus and Dayton-area stores.

Rogers said he never intended to become a pharmacist when he was growing up in Stow, a suburb of Akron. He enjoyed drafting and had an aptitude for it, while working part-time as a stock boy, then a soda jerk, in the town drug store. But he discovered that he didn’t like the deadlines associated with drafting and, after being promoted to the pharmacist’s assistant at the drug store, was surprised at how much he enjoyed his interactions with people there.

So Rogers attended the first five-year pharmacy program at Kent State University, and became a registered pharmacist in 1965.

The most significant change in the business he’s seen in the last 40 years is the growing influence of insurance companies, a change that troubles him, Rogers said. Insurance companies increasingly question doctors’ prescriptions, a situation that Rogers considers their “practicing medicine without a license.” The conflicts between doctors and insurance companies require Rogers to spend altogether too much time on the phone to the insurance companies, he said.

“If I leave the profession, this will be why,” he said.

Rogers also sometimes feels overwhelmed by the responsibility of the store, and could use more breaks. But it’s hard for him to take a vacation — his last was in February 2004 — because few pharmacists can operate the store’s unusual computer system, he said. And when he had prostate surgery last November, he took off only three weeks when he should have taken more, he said.

But Rogers has no plans to leave his job, which, he said, gives him as much personal satisfaction as it did when he began 40 years ago. He has a good staff, which includes Bedner, Marge Miller, Mary Ann Grote, Mike Triplett, Megan Lentz and Julia Swisher. And he’s getting the store the way he wants it, responding to villagers’ requests for an expanded vitamin section and a new one that offers school supplies. Rogers said he hopes also to add homeopathic remedies, about which he receives many requests, but first he has to find the time to acquaint himself with homeopathy so that he can answer his customers’ questions.

Rogers just turned 63, but he sees himself continuing as long as he can, until he’s 70 or even 80. He identifies with aging Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, he said with a laugh, and may have to be carried out of Town Drug on a stretcher. Until then, he will sit on his stool eye to eye with the people of Yellow Springs and do his best to serve them.