A Dose of Sadness : Community Laments Looming Closure of Venerable Pharmacy

Naples Island is a throwback, a quiet bay-side enclave in Long Beach where time seems to have been standing still since, oh, about the 1950s, and residents like it that way just fine.

But time is catching up, and now it has claimed its latest victim, the nearly 50-year-old Naples Pharmacy, a venerable neighborhood institution where youngsters could buy candy, tourists could stop in for a straw hat on their way to the beach and local residents could catch up on neighborhood gossip.

The pharmacy, unable to survive the drug-pricing policies and contractual demands of large health insurance plans, is closing Sept. 1. The pharmacy’s two owners, Bob Dahlin and Don Wolter, are throwing in with the owner of an independent drugstore in Belmont Shore, the Egyptian Pharmacy, hoping that their combined strength will enable them to survive the turbulent changes that have claimed about 600 pharmacies in California over the last six years.

Many of the Naples Pharmacy’s customers learned Wednesday that it was closing when they received a two-page letter from Dahlin and Wolter. Typical of the way they ran the pharmacy, the letter was personal. It recited problems faced by small, neighborhood pharmacies and said that “after months of mental anguish, reality has finally come to Bob and Don on Naples Island.”

“We are just not able to continue under the current economics of the pharmacy business,” Dahlin said in an interview Thursday. “Something had to happen.”

Even though some of Dahlin’s customers said Thursday that they could see the closing coming, they greeted the news with tears and sadness.

“The letter made me cry,” said Lee Ostendorf, an oil company consultant who has been a regular customer at the pharmacy for the 30 years she has lived in Naples. She says she drops in several times a week just to chat or pick up a postcard. “It’s real hard for a lot of people to take,” she said. “They are like family.”

In a county of strangers, Naples, an island in Alamitos Bay with 1,600 residences, prides itself on being a place where everyone knows everyone else. And the two pharmacists and their staff, a number of them local teenagers, were among the most popular.

Even though Dahlin and Wolter are moving less than a mile down 2nd Street, a distance barely noticeable in most parts of Los Angeles County, to some residents of Naples it crosses a boundary into a busier, more commercial area that’s just not the same.

“Everybody is rather upset that the pharmacy is going,” said Stan Poe, who has written a history of the island, which is perhaps best known for the annual Christmas boat parade that winds through its canals.

“Naples has always been pretty much its own community.”

In recent years, several other small businesses run by well-known local proprietors have closed. Perhaps the most popular was Zietan’s, a small grocery store that went out of business about five years ago. The site of Zietan’s was cleared for the construction of luxury homes.

Like the pharmacy, the small grocery store extended credit to local residents, did business on a first-name basis and was a clearinghouse for community gossip.

“People here like to say you couldn’t go to the grocery store or pharmacy and get out in less than two hours,” Poe said.

Poe’s wife, Maureen, a special education teacher at a school in Palos Verdes Estates, said the pharmacy reminded her of her small hometown in Michigan.

“When I moved out here in 1978, I was overwhelmed by the size of the communities,” she said. “Here it’s like a small town. People recognize you, they talk to you, they really care about you, and that is what the pharmacy is all about. At some places around here, you think you could shop there for 20 years and you’d never be more than an empty face. Not at the pharmacy. You always had a feeling they were paying attention to every customer.”

On Thursday, the morning after the letter arrived notifying customers that the business would close its doors Sept. 1 and that Dahlin and Wolter would be moving to Belmont Shore, the regulars came by to express their condolences.

“It’s change,” said Bill Newmeyer, 74, a freelance cartoonist. “I don’t think change is always for the better.”