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Bel Air drug store closing after 127 years of business

Posted at 6:15 PM, Sep 30, 2019
and last updated 2019-09-30 18:15:25-04

BEL AIR, Md. — As just about everything has changed along Main Street in downtown Bel Air, there's been one constant -- Boyd and Fulford Drugs.

Gene Streett has seen some things -- seven decades of them.

"We took the soda fountain out in 1972 and I kind of miss that because everybody came in for lunch. And everybody that came in for lunch had a story to tell," he said.

And the chapters date back to when Gene stepped into the shop in 1944 as a high school freshman. He never left.

The people of Bel Air went to him for not only their medicine, but their news.

"If you don't have it, you don't miss it, but the ones of us who've had it will miss it. Gene was like a member of your family. He everybody by name, he knew waht prescriptions. He was trusted," Judy Jessee, a loyal customer, said.

After more than a century, the store is closing up shop.

But it's about more than the bandages, cards, and pills --- bu the memories that line the store's shelves.

"We used to walk up from the high school, and this was our first stop to get a coke and they had the long, marble counter and then we'd wander down Main Street to the next drug store where we all stood on the corner, " Jessee said.

A sweeter time, those who called the pharmacy home, say.

As the man who had it part of his life for 75 years waits to dispense his last prescription and then hang up his lab coat.

"It's jut nice to know that when that alarm goes off at 6 a.m., I don't really have to get up. I can lay there another 15, 20 minutes and then struggle out of bed," Streett said.