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It's a sad goodbye for Rose Drugs

By SUE CARLTON
Published March 14, 2007

Rose Ferlita is looking out at the parking lot that faces Nebraska Avenue and almost wishing she wasn't here.

Because here comes another customer, another friend, another person looking utterly stricken by what's about to happen.

"Rosie," the woman says, and then Ferlita, the tough-as-nails-commissioner, is crying, too. Again.

It's been like this since she made the decision to close Rose Drugs, the neighborhood pharmacy she opened 23 years ago on a gritty Tampa thoroughfare of car repair shops and faded motels.

You're thinking, this is a big deal? In a town where Walgreens and CVS stores sit on every other corner?

Only if you ever knew a place like this.

Rose Drugs is a neat square of beige concrete block behind burglar bars. Just inside, a fat cocker spaniel named Murray is running across the terrazzo, chasing a ball thrown by a customer's little boy. Bo Upton, the security guard who has been here forever, holds the door for a woman he just told a joke. (He always tells her a joke.)

"Hey baby, you just missed your mom," Ferlita says to a woman walking in. Pretty much everyone is "baby," including the guy who just finished cutting the grass.

The shelves hold cold remedies and medicated soaps, shampoos and ointments. An older man shuffles by in search of Vaseline hair tonic. "Been using it for years, and all of a sudden they quit making it," he says.

Murray jumps up to sit beside whatever customer is waiting on the padded black bench for a prescription. "They don't care if I'm here as long as they can sit on that bench with Murray," says Ferlita, a pushover for dogs-in-need. (There's also Cookie, and before that Samantha-the-Rottweiler-Nobody-Wanted, and Bud, and Weiser.)

Back when AIDS was new, Ferlita worked with the health department and the Tampa AIDS Network; she had a reputation for sometimes providing drugs for free. In the early days of stigma and ignorance, some patients worried about confidentiality and shied away from chain stores.

The prostitutes that make Nebraska Avenue infamous didn't come in here. The store has never been robbed, though there have been close calls.

But they have mixed medicine here for a chicken and an ailing pet lizard.

Ferlita's roots go deep, back to when her grandfather opened an Ybor City bakery in the late 1800s. When the pharmacist became a politician, the office half of her building was her campaign headquarters; the customers, her grass roots support. They helped get her elected by a whisker to the City Council in 1999. They were there for her again when she won the County Commission seat in November.

She is closing because of the demands of that new job. Ferlita, 61, calls it the toughest decision she's ever made.

So again and again in these last days, she has sat on the bench with her customers. "If there's anything I can intercede with," she has said, and "You have all my numbers" and "Honey, I feel as bad as you."

And you can believe it. Rose Drugs closes today, the business to be taken over by a brightly lit CVS nearby.

[Last modified March 14, 2007, 10:36:38]