CHICAGO – Charles Rudolph Walgreen Jr., son of the founder and former chairman and president of the drugstore chain that bears his name, was remembered Sunday as a visionary who transformed the company into the retailing powerhouse it is today.

Walgreen, who stepped down from active management in the company in 1976, died Saturday in his sleep at his home in Northfield, Ill.

He was 100 years old, just three weeks short of his 101st birthday.

Born in Chicago in 1906, Walgreen attended college at the University of Michigan, where he graduated with a pharmacy degree.

From the time he was a little boy, Walgreen worked in his family’s drugstore, starting his career as a stock boy and eventually becoming a pharmacist.

By the age of 10, he frequently could be found driving his father between stores in Chicago because his father was fearful of the then new machine known as the automobile.

He had to tie blocks of wood to his feet to reach the pedals, said his grandson Les Walgreen.

“He loved to tell such wonderful stories of those first Walgreens stores, with the gas lighting instead of electricity and the old soda fountains,” Les Walgreen said. “It was such a huge and important part of his life.”

He took over the drugstore chain in 1939 after his father passed away and led the company for nearly three decades through one of its most dramatic periods of change.

The first Walgreen store opened on the city’s South Side in 1901. Twenty years later, there were more than 500 Walgreens stores across the nation and the company was quickly becoming the nation’s most prominent drug store.

Walgreen board chairman David Bernauer said Walgreen “was coming into the office well into his 90s on a regular basis.”

Most times, company officers would not know he was in the building until lunch because his office was located in a different section of the company’s Deerfield, Ill., headquarters.

“We would know he was there because he would show up at the lunch table every day,” Bernauer said.


“He had an incredible memory about past events,” said Bernauer, who noted that in the early 1990s Walgreens opened a store in Indianapolis in the same spot from which it had exited a number of years before.

“When he came to the lunch table, he was holding the press release and said we had had a store at that same corner before,” Bernauer said, recalling that it took the company several days to officially confirm that it had operated a store at the corner in the 1930s.


Following World War II, Walgreen led the company’s change to a new concept in retailing that was sweeping the nation, called self-service retailing, where customers could pick off products from shelves by themselves. Previously, most retail goods were kept behind the counter and store employees would gather items for customers.

“With the new wave of stores, you needed twice as much space because you had to make room for the aisles,” Les Walgreen said. “They had to close two stores each time they opened one of the new self-service stores.”

During his reign as head of the chain, Walgreen is credited with gradually reducing pharmacist hours at his stores from the industry norm of about 66 hours per week in 1939 to 40 hours per week.

At the request of the medical profession, he made changes in customer service that resulted in Walgreens becoming the first pharmacy chain allowed to advertise in the Journal of the American Medical Association.


Walgreen also pushed his chain into new retailing concepts. For example, in 1952 he was one of the moving forces behind Evergreen Park’s Evergreen Plaza, one of the first large shopping centers built east of the Mississippi River.

During World War II, the company raised millions of dollars through war bonds sold at its stores and as part of its nationally broadcast radio shows, which featured Bob Hope and other top Hollywood stars. In 1943, Walgreens opened a not-for-profit pharmacy in the newly constructed Pentagon in Washington, D.C., with all profits directed back to the Pentagon.

The company credits him with adopting a 24-word moral test developed by Rotary International that remains the ethical base of the pharmaceutical company: “Is it the truth? Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build good will and better friendship? Will it be beneficial to all concerned?”


Les Walgreen said his grandfather led an active and vibrant life until five years ago, when he suffered a stroke.

In 1968, when he was 67 years old, Charles Walgreen visited the South Pole. When he was 91, he decided he wanted to make the trip again. He exercised every day in preparation for the trip, flew to Chile and made two small commutes to get closer to the South Pole. But on the final leg of the voyage, the pilot refused to fly Walgreen, citing his age, said his grandson.

“He never let his age stand in the way of what he wanted to accomplish, and he was devastated that he could not make the trip,” Les Walgreen said.

Even though confined to a wheelchair for the past five years, he kept his mind active. He worked with a yacht company to design and build his own 127-foot handicap-accessible yacht, the Sis W.

Walgreen was a past president of the National Association of Drug Stores, the American Foundation for Pharmaceutical Education and honorary president of the American Pharmaceutical Association.

He is survived by his wife, Jean Walgreen; two sons, Charles R. Walgreen III and James Walgreen; one daughter, Leslie Ann Pratt; 23 grandchildren; and 33 great grandchildren.

Services are pending.