Bernard Tracy, who is still a working pharmacist in Utica, turned 90 years old yesterday, and as a special gift he received the promise of immortality.
Family, friends, and fellow Rotarians gathered for a special birthday party yesterday afternoon at Harts Hill Inn to honor the druggist, and to announce the creation of 'The Bernard E. Tracy Award,' a $50 scholarship to be awarded annually through the Utica Rotary Club to a high school student excelling in science.
The announcement of the award was meant to be a surprise, and that's how it struck Tracy: some tears after all the laughter generated by grandchildren, other relatives and "friends as they recounted anecdotes about him.
Tracy thanked them all reminiscing, about the days when his grandmother first came to Utica from Albany on a canal boat, when Charles Lindbergh addressed a gathering from the rear platform of a train at Union Station, and "ending it all with his high school yell from Ilion High Class of 1909.
Two-years later, he was an apprentice pharmacist at Carney's Drug Store, where he met his future bride, Gertrude Carney, also a pharmacist. Together, they operated Tracy's Drug Store on Genesee Street from 1930 to 1958, when his wife decided it was better to stay home and Tracy went to work for others.
His wife died in 1970, and he's still working at Emma's Pharmacy on Oneida Street.
IN AN INTERVIEW, Tracy said he earned his degree from the University Buffalo School of Pharmacy in 1915 but since then the profession has changed radically, and "you probably don't have to know as much as before."
"Back in the old days," he said, "we used to make up prescriptions from scratch using herbs and chemicals, but now everything is specialty stuff prepackaged from the big pharmaceutical companies, and all you do is hand them out."
Over the years, he said, he has probably dispensed a quarter million prescriptions, and his eye glasses have grown thick trying to decipher doctor's handwriting. "Half of them should be sent back to school to learn penmanship," he said.
But aside.from that and a slight hearing loss, he says he feels fit and only once or twice in his life has he had to fill a prescription for himself. "A few years ago," he said, "I had a touch of pneumonia and needed an antibiotic. But that's about the only time I can remember."
OF COURSE, he said, people today use a lot more drugs than when he started out. Back then, a little sulpher and molasses in the spring and fall was enough to keep most people feeling fine.
You could make that at home, but a lot of over the counter tonics were popular, too, such as Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compoumd, castor oil, and Swamp Root,-which was supposed to "be good for the kidneys."
Narcotics were barely heard of, he said, or understood "Opium and cocaine used to go into a lot of prescriptions until a law was passed in 1913 regulating their use. "Tracy's Prescription Is Work" - Utica Observer Dispatch - May 3, 1981 - fultonhistory.com
