Montpelier
I used to love to go down into the cellar of my grandfather’s building when he was making soap. It was dirt-floored, with a concrete pad for the furnace and coal bin, and planks for footing that kept your shoes above the mud during wet seasons. He boiled the soap in a large black iron pot atop a gas burner. Any building inspector or OSHA official worth his salt would have screamed and run outside to fill out his cease-and-desist order. But Granddad, resembling more than anything else a troglodyte New England sugarmaker, toiled away at it until he finally could let it cool enough to mold into bars. “Bars” is hardly the word, though. Hand grenades would better describe them — translucent yellowish blobs that he sold from a bin in the waiting room of his pharmacy as Lange’s Facial Soap. I was bathed with it as a child, and I’m fairly sure it did some permanent damage, by weekly removing most of my epidermis.
Mother was home recently for a couple of weeks, with home care morning and afternoon. I was the designated transporter, cook and pill pusher. Looking at the dazzling array of the various pharmaceuticals prescribed for her was pretty daunting. I used to wonder at the time it took the nurses at the rehab center to make up each patient’s drug cocktail. No more; it’s a job. Anyway, as I hunted each morning and evening for the drugs on the list, I couldn’t help but reflect on those days, over 75 years ago now, that I haunted the back room of Granddad’s apothecary shop.
The front room featured a large candy case behind glass; an open potpourri display of band-aids, cough drops, cocoa butter and patent medicines; and a tasteful display of bed pans, trusses and orthopedic devices. Behind the counter — Granddad was into tradition — were displayed ground-glass jars of stuff with old-fashioned names like nux vomica (strychnine), morphine and ipecac. Patients brought in doctors’ prescriptions detailing exactly how much of each ingredient to mix into each attempt to heal. He had a glass-enclosed set of scales so delicate they would weigh a two-inch piece of human hair. I can still see him bending over the balance, with the proper weights on one pan, ever so gently tapping bits of powder from a jar into the other till they balanced.
He’d wanted to be a doctor, a surgeon, but his father had died quite young, and there was no money for medical school. He went instead to pharmacy college, and thereafter slowly worked his way up from hospital pharmacy, to pharmacist in someone else’s place, to starting his own. He owned the building, a four-story brick Victorian on a busy corner not far from the Capitol in Albany. My father, mother, sister and I lived on the fourth floor; the other two flats were rented out to various generally stable folks of German extraction. It never occurred to me then that 55 steps was a pretty good climb to our flat; it does occur to me now. And I remember that my great-grandmother scrubbed all 55 of them, along with the two connecting halls, once a week.
I loved the regularity of the store. The Seth Thomas high on the wall got wound once a week and checked against Granddad’s gold pocket watch. Doctor friends stopped in to eat their bag lunches, drink coffee brewed over the Bunsen burner, and shoot the breeze. Every day during the winter months I got dosed with a tablespoonful of cod liver oil; during the war, halibut liver oil. It tasted pretty bad, but the axiom of those days was that the worse something tasted, the better it was for you. No tobacco in the store, which was unusual then; but Granddad’s sideline was evangelism, and he considered tobacco an assault on the temples of our bodies.
Grandma sat at a desk in the back corner of the store, beside the safe, keeping the books and paying bills, and putting up boxes of carefully folded papers containing Seidlitz powder. Regularity, if I read aright the commercials on current television, is still important; but it was much more important then — almost the Holy Grail of good health. To combat more persistent cases of constipation, Granddad cooked up a witches’ brew called citrate of magnesia, the nuclear device of peristaltic stimulators. As it was poured into the bottle, I was allowed to drop the carbonation pill into it before the old man put it under the bottle capper and Grandma pasted on the label.
Boils were much more common then, probably due to a lower frequency of bathing. Nowadays physicians usually won’t touch them, treating them instead with antibiotics. Then, the wisdom was that they had to be lanced and drained. Easier said than done; so Granddad mixed up an ointment called Lange’s Drawing Boil Salve. It was dark brown and smelled heavily of tar; but it worked like a charm. I’ve never seen its like since. A couple of years ago I tried a similar salve allegedly much stronger, meant for horses. It didn’t hold a candle to Granddad’s.
He sold both patent cough medicines and one of his own concoctions that contained enough opium to cure any cough, or at least convince you that you weren’t bothered by it any longer. He made Lange’s Mosquito Lotion, purported to stop the itching of bites. In my experience, it was worthless. In those days before penicillin, he dosed me with sulfa, probably the worst-tasting medicine in the world, for my strep throat. I was in pretty tough shape, they tell me; but I remember a deep red-colored pill ground up in a teaspoonful of Hershey’s chocolate syrup being passed in to me through the bars of my crib.
Years later, after we’d moved away, my job in prep school was scrubbing the showers at the gym, and I got a case of ringworm on my legs. He sent me a bottle of carbolic acid and another of olive oil. Put the first on till the bubbling stops, he advised, and the other to neutralize it. It worked perfectly, but I couldn’t wear shorts for years afterward. Now and then I almost wish the scars were still visible, just to remind me of those really good old days and a wonderful grandfather.
Willem Lange can be reached at willem.lange@comcast.net.
