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For the first time in 78 years, there is no pharmacist named McDonough counting pills in St. Elmo.
It's a shame. The McDonough family tree has deep roots in the neighborhood located at the foot of Lookout Mountain.
For generations, the folks of St. Elmo rushed to the McDonough family's Incline Drugs to get relief from strep and shingles.
Before mobile phones, Lookout Mountain doctors would stop at Incline Drugs on their way home to check phone messages or touch base with their spouses for milk and bread orders.
Steve McDonough, 66, whose family owned Incline Drugs for most of the 20th century, was a third-generation pharmacist. He retired from the CVS store in St. Elmo last week. On his last day, there was a cake and a hot dog cart in front of the pharmacy to mark his departure.
Longtime customers stopped by to wish him well. The old-timers remembered both his father and grandfather.
Steve McDonough's retirement closed the books on a legacy that traces to his grandfather Martin Fleming McDonough, who opened Incline Drugs in 1939. The business took its
name from the world-famous Incline Railway, located just across the street.
"It was terribly hard to leave," said Steve McDonough, who lives in Hixson now. "My family has been in that neighborhood since the early 1900s."
For a short time in the 1970s, Steve, his father "Buddy" and his grandfather Marti, worked together at Incline Drugs, now the site of the 1885 Grill.
Steve, for his part, says he served some St. Elmo families through five generations. He has watched the neighborhood go from a middle-class mecca in the 1950s and 1960s, to a transitional community in the 1970s and 1980s, to a gentrified den of diversity in the 21st century.
"That's part of the joy of being in one place for so long," he said. "You remember things. Things like what kind of car such-and-such's grandmother drove."
Martin Fleming McDonough, the family's modern patriarch, was born in 1901, the son of a court bailiff. He was named after a childless local judge, Martin Fleming, who promised to look after the boy if his father died before the child reached the age of maturity. As it happens, Martin McDonough's father did die, and the judge kept his word by buying young Martin yearly Christmas gifts, clothes and school supplies.
As a young man, Martin McDonough became an apprentice pharmacist and eventually worked at several downtown Chattanooga drug stores before opening Incline Drugs with a few hundred dollars in seed money. So eager was young Martin to get his business going that he pushed aside his superstitious tendencies and opened the drug store on Friday, March 13, 1939.
"The business started well and grew quickly," said Steve McDonough.
Martin's son, Martin McDonough Jr. - known to most as "Buddy" - became a pharmacist after World War II and came to work in his family's drug store alongside his dad.
Steve McDonough spent much of his 1950s childhood in St. Elmo, working at the drug store along with his cousins. Sometimes, Steve delivered prescriptions on his bicycle.
Eventually, he was the only one of eight grandchildren in the family to successfully pursue pharmacy as a career. He got his doctorate in pharmacy at the University of Tennessee Center for Health Sciences in Memphis in 1974, and later settled into work alongside his father and grandfather at the family business.
The McDonoughs sold Incline Drugs to Revco pharmacy in 1996. It was purchased by CVS two years later.
But even in recent years the McDonough influence has been strong. Because of the loyal customer base, it was sort of like a family pharmacy wrapped inside a chain store.
Even though he is retired now and plans to travel with his wife, Flowerree, McDonough - a former president of the Tennessee Pharmacists Association - said he will always be a pharmacist at heart.
"You take families from getting their kids through childhood, to helping them get their parents through the end-of-life" period, he said. "It cements bonds."
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.