Fontanelle Drug to close Aug. 15

A lot of blood, sweat and tears have gone into what Kaye Bax has done for 39 years at Fontanelle Drug.

Bax has cared well for her patients. Against many odds, she’s kept an independent pharmacy going strong in a town of less than 700 residents for a very long time.

Adair has Fay Pharmacy, but overall, Bax said there are fewer and fewer independent pharmacies on Iowa’s main streets each year.

With swelling challenges over the last several months that are out of her control, as well as a chance she has to spend more time with family, Bax made the announcement that Fontanelle Drug will close. The last day it will be open is Aug. 15.

Customers will have prescriptions transfered to NuCara Pharmacy in Greenfield, unless they notify Fontanelle Drug they’re choosing to go somewhere else.

”I can tell you I wouldn’t have worked as hard as I did for all these years for someone else,” Bax said. She purchased the store in 1985 from the previous owner, who originally asked her if she’d run it for him. “It takes a lot to make a store go in a small town and when it’s not yours, I don’t think most people are as willing to go the extra miles that it takes to do that.”

Bax is excited that Rachel Hall, who is pharmacist at NuCara Pharmacy, will be able to take on many of her patients when she retires. A part of the transition is that Bax will work temporarily at NuCara to aid the transition.

Hall is one of several now-pharmacists who came to Bax to learn about the pharmacy profession before choosing to become a pharmacist.

Bax first worked at Fontanelle Drug while she was still in school at Drake University. Once she graduated, she worked at a variety of pharmacies as a roving pharmacist. The experience helped her learn the ways of other pharmacists and she was able to pick up on their tricks to the trade before beginning her own pharmacy.

She began her chapter of Fontanelle Drug by taking no salary for the first couple of years. She saw it as a good way to make sure the store got started on the right footing financially.

To Bax, being a good pharmacist in the context of a small town meant being “in tune with” her patients. They became her friends, she said.

”I’ve taken care of five generations of some families because I had the grandparents, the parents, they had kids and then they had kids, now they’re starting to have kids,” Bax said. “I put a lot of hours in here. The first year I probably put in 90-100 hours per week. There’s a lot of paperwork in the background, and at that time, we didn’t have computers.”

Just as the onset of computers changed some things for the better and others for the worse, Fontanelle Drug changed physically through the last 39 years. What was once a fraction of the current building has now grown into a facility that not only serves as a pharmacy, but one where Bax sells gifts and other products as well.

Bax said she has had the “best, most loyal” customers. That’s one of the toughest parts of closing the store.

Her employees throughout the years have also been a main stay and a key piece in the success of Fontanelle Drug.

Bax said she hopes she is remembered as a pharmacist who tried her best to serve the needs of her patients.

”I probably didn’t make as much money here, but I had benefits that I couldn’t have bought,” Bax said. “My kids came in here, and when they were babies, my customers would hold them. My kids would go with me on deliveries and they’d become close to (my patients), and they got a lot of good out of that. It taught them to respect people. They also had to work here and learned responsbilities. Those kind of things, you can’t buy those things.”