Among the many casualties of the rapid growth during recent decades of bigger stores, almost always retail chains, is the old-fashioned drugstore. In the town where I grew up in the 1940s, with a population of slightly less than 5,000 people, we had four drugstores downtown, all within a block of each other. Only one had any connection to a chain. It was a Rexall Drug, but it was owned by the druggist, as were the other three. They were all family-owned businesses. By the 1940s, drugstores were already selling more than prescriptions and patent medicine. Toiletry items, make-up, magazines, …