After 140 Years, Sad Farewells

Phyllis E. Madanian stands behind a glass case filled with fudge.

There’s green peppermint fudge, cappuccino fudge that’s foamy white with cinnamon brown sprinkled on top, fudge with giant malted milk balls popping out of the top. There’s a brand new flavor, a creamy brown Milky Way fudge.

Madanian spends her days making and selling fudge. She goes through 150 pounds a week at Billings & Stover Apothecary, the gritty, old-fashioned Brattle Street soda fountain she owns and operates.

For the past 140 years, Billings & Stover has been a drug store that filled prescriptions at the back counter and sold cosmetics, exotic perfumes and ice cream in the front.

Until recently. When business slowed two years ago, Madanian stopped selling drugs and turned the prescription counter into a kitchen. She added a bakery, expanded the cosmetics counter and kept going.

But now the woman who struggled to keep Billings & Stover alive in recent years has announced the store will close its doors forever Feb. 28.

Madanian’s father, a Boston pharmacist, bought the store in 1975 and it’s been a part of her life ever since. Indeed, she practically grew up in pharmacies—her earliest memory is of spinning on the fountain stools in her father’s Boston shop. But after a life in the business, she decided last month she couldn’t afford to keep going on her own.

“Maybe it’s old school of me, but [my father] raised me believing that if you put enough elbow grease into it, you’re going to stay afloat,” she says. “This is a true independent. I’m the sole proprietor. I couldn’t have somebody telling me what to do, after being independent for so long.”

“I don’t even take home a pay check anymore,” she adds. “At one point, I just realized I can’t afford to work here anymore. Isn’t that ridiculous? Not being able to afford to work?”

Billings & Stover isn’t a typical drug store.

In the middle of the store sits a cardboard box filled with oversize, bug-eyed sunglasses, straight from the ’70s. On shelves lining the walls are arrayed Marilyn Monroe lunchboxes and statuettes of Elvis Presley standing next to a Harley Davidson motorbike. Behind the counter, a shelf holds fancy hairbrushes, combs and perfumes that can usually be found only in Europe.

“I do all the ordering,” Madanian says. “I like to order things that are practical but will also bring a smile to people’s faces.”

According to Madanian, these are the kinds of unusual products people come to Billings & Stover just to buy.

“We don’t sell anything here you could buy at CVS,” she says. “We don’t sell Ivory soap. We could be giving it away, nobody would take it here.”

Billings & Stover has a devoted following among locals, Madanian says. And lately client after client has come in offering her their sympathy over the store’s closing.

“It’s been like a funeral in here,” she says.

Like many of the customers, Bob Landers has made Billings & Stover part of his lifelong routine. For the last 60 years, Landers has come into the store almost every morning at 6:15 a.m. to open up. He used to work as a pharmacist, but ever since Billings & Stover stopped selling drugs, he “mostly putters around,” as he puts it. Every morning he cooks up chocolate chip cookies, makes the coffee and helps Madanian set up the fudge and baked goods.

The store opens at eight o’clock on time for its “coffee and newspaper regulars,” Madanian says.

“Not many people come in for the soda fountain in the morning,” Landers says.

But Madanian says, not so fast.

“There’s that woman who always gets her diet soda and walnut float,” she says.

“So many of our clients—they don’t even have to say the order,” she adds. “I could have it ready before they even get in the door.”

But today Madanian receives an unusual offer. Right after opening, a man walks claiming to deal in old pharmacy equipment. He asks if there is anything he might buy but, when he looks up with interest at the tall ledger books lining the top of the narrow shop’s wall, Madanian stops him cold.

“I really want those somewhere where they can be appreciated,” she says. “Those accounts go all the way back to July 14, 1854. I’m talking to the Smithsonian right now.”

After the man leaves, Madanian explains that many objects in the store tell a story.

“Some of the things in the shop,” she says, “I won’t sell.”

On the shelf behind the counter, she points out a large Gumby doll and lifts it up to show a “not for sale” sticker on the back side.

“Rosy wrote that,” she says. “She worked here 15 years, and passed away two years ago. She loved Gumby, and asked me not to sell the last one. And I never have. People have offered me a hundred dollars, but I have to tell them, he’s not for sale.”

All of a sudden, there are tears in Madanian’s eyes.

She pulls down a plaque from the wall. A large group of customers got together to give it to the store after the long-time employee’s death.

“That’s the type of customers we’ve had,” Madanian says, still fighting back emotion. “We know them so well. When we leave, it’s going to be devastating to the community.”

It is not surprising, considering that she has at times put in 80 hour weeks, that Madanian’s clients have sometimes become her best friends as well. She admits the end of Billings & Stover frightens her a good deal.

“It’s going to be so hard,” she says. “Ninety percent of my friends come from here. I don’t know how they’ll reach me now that I’m gone. Everyone calls me here.”

Madanian says she does not know what she will be doing next, but assures customers that her hand-made fudge will still be available.

“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” jokes an elderly woman buying a piece.

Cardullo’s, a family-owned food shop in the Square, will be selling her fudge from now on.

“As each small business goes out of business,” Madanian says, “the ones that stay get closer and closer. The friendships go beyond competition.”

Around lunch hour, the store fills with customers coming for their daily fudge fix. In the back kitchen, Madanian is hard at work on a Valentine’s Day treat: heart-shaped brownies with chocolate fudge frosting. Landers and two other store employees pass by, nibbling on the scraps.

Madanian dabs a bit of fudge on a cardboard base and places a white doily on top. She glues on a thick brownie with another dab, smears it generously with chocolate fudge, and pastes another brownie on top. It’s like a sandwich.

“Just winging it,” she says, “like I do with all my baking.”

Her best-seller at the bakery counter, Madanian says, has been a traditional Armenian pastry she learned to make from her mother, a sweet bread called choreg.

This kind of homemade touch is part of the Billings & Stover formula—part nostalgia, part bizarre. At the cosmetics counter, for example, Madanian maintains a supply of old-school perfumes.

“Everyone always says our perfumes remind them of their grandmothers,” Madanian says. “It’s true. We’re the only people who still carry those scents.”

But the store has always mixed the traditional with the out-of-the-way. In 1854, when it started out at the present-day location of Au Bon Pain, its circular advertised “foreign leeches of recent importation always on hand.”

At 7 o’clock sharp, the doors close. Madanian stays to chat with a friend and later that night, her sisters come up to help her pack up some of the store’s things. The store has been in the family for most of their lives.

At one time Madanian had hoped to keep Billings & Stover in the family for another generation. In fact, last summer her 12-year-old nephew put in time at the store as an apprentice.

“I had him working his way from the bottom up, like my dad made me,” she says.

But this winter she told him the days of Billings & Stover would have to end.

“He was so broken up,” she says.

—Staff writer Eugenia B. Schraa can be reached at schraa@fas.harvard.edu.