Eddie Glover

RIVER VALLEY and OZARK AREA — Conway pharmacist Eddie Glover answered the phone the Friday after Thanksgiving and was appreciative that a reporter wanted to interview him, but not then, because he was watching the Razorback game.

“I’m a big sports fan,” he said Monday, sitting in a US Compounding building on College Avenue, next door to the pharmacy. “I’m a big UCA Bears fan and a big Razorback fan. It’s kind of an obsession with me.”

He has season tickets to both those universities’ football games, and he keeps up with baseball and basketball.

It takes a scorecard to keep up with his business interests, too.

His latest accomplishment is being named - and it’s a mouthful - the2011 Willard B. Simmons Independent Pharmacist of the Year by the National Community Pharmacists Association at an October meeting in Nashville, Tenn.

“I was shocked; very honored, to say the least,” he said of the award.

Getting the award was even sweeter because he was accompanied by his daughter, Kristen Riddle of Greenbrier, who is a pharmacist with him, and his son, Sam Glover of Conway, who works on the sales side of the business.

“It’s been such a joy being with both my children in the business,” he said.

Eddie Glover, 61, grew up in the Needs Creek community near Greenbrier, where his 91-year-old mother, Jessie Lee Glover, still lives.

“She’s very active,” he said.

Glover said he still enjoys going to the family farm and taking care of the cattle, but he didn’t want to become a farmer like his late father, Wabern Glover.

Eddie Glover had a couple of friends who were pharmacists, and he said he’d always been interested in the medical field.

By his fourth year at the University of Central Arkansas, Glover said he’d decided to go to pharmacy school, and he attended the University of Oklahoma College of Pharmacy.

He got his pharmaceutical license in 1976 - 35 years ago - and his first job was at a drug store in Fort Smith.

It was a “great job” with good people, he said, “but I always wanted to be in Faulkner County.”

He got that chance when he went to work for longtime pharmacist Dwayne Goode at Village Drugs, which became American Drugs. Glover also worked at Perry County Food and Drug during that time.

Glover worked for 11 years with Goode.

“He was a great person to work for - I learned a lot working there,” Glover said. “That’s where I got a lot of my business and pharmacy skills.”

The people skills came naturally to him. Glover said he’s always liked to work with people, which is the “name of the game” in his profession.

He also worked for four years at Walmart and was working as a pharmacist at Fred’s in 1994 when a pharmacy came up for sale in Clinton.

“I thought, ‘You know, I think I’ll try this on my own,’” he said.

Glover bought that business, Thriftway Pharmacy, which he still owns with partner Larry Sparks of Conway.

From there, Glover’s career was full steam ahead. He and Sparks bought Marshall Medic in 1995 that they still own in Marshall.

Sparks said Glover i s “well-deserving” of the Independent Pharmacist of the Year award.

“His heart and soul is the whole thing,” Sparks said. “We’re not just interested in making money but making pharmacy continue for young pharmacists.

“He’s a great ambassador. He does a tremendous job, and I’m proud to be a partner with him.”

Glover and four partners, including Sparks, parlayed their business interests into 12 pharmacies, as well as maintaining their individual businesses.

“I haven’t had an exciting life; I’ve had a chopped-up life,” Glover said, jokingly.

It might not be the path he would have chosen, he said, but “God always has us in the right place.

“I really just think I found my niche in life when I went into business and pharmacy compounding 20 years ago,” he said.

Glover was one of the partners in Rod’s Pharmacy, and the pharmacist and co-owner at College Pharmacy, a traditional pharmacy with a “small part” devoted to compounding.

Compounding is creating personalized medications for patients, mixing them inexact strengths and dosage forms.

The compounding part took off, and they bought the building next door to College Pharmacy about seven years ago and created US Compounding.

The partners in the conglomerate of pharmacies decided to scale back, and they sold most of the stores. He and Sparks bought College Pharmacy, with Glover’s daughter coming in as a partner.

A few years later, College Pharmacy was combined with Corner Drug Store (another pharmacy in which he was a partner) and moved to a strip of offices that Glover built on College Avenue.

Glover sat at a table in a building used for storage and his office, adjacent to US Compounding.

“Every year we have grown, grown, grown. We’ve run out of room over here,” he said, pointing to the pharmacy next door.

He and his partners are renovating a 17,000-square foot former cheerleading gymnasium immediately south of Bob Courtway Middle School in Conway and will move the pharmacy there. He said it should be completed in May.

“We’re very, very excited,” he said.

“Compounding has been around forever,” he said. “I guess Adam and Eve compounded.”

Even with pre-made medication, “there always has been a need for special-dosage forms,” he said.

When someone needs a unique dosage, or a topical form of medication, Glover’s employees can make it.

The veterinary market is a big one for US Compounding, he said.

His pharmacy compounds medications for animals “all the way from your kitty cat to a race horse at Churchill Downs and everything in between,” he said.

US Compounding treats many of the animals at the Little Rock Zoo, Glover said.

But, back to people.

One of the pharmacy’s niches is sterile compounding, such as injectables, intravenous medications and eye drops that must be sterile.

There’s also the pharmacy’s own skin-care line, RX Skin Therapy, that his daughter primarily oversees.

Licensed in 49 states, the pharmacy does business across the country.

OK - and get the scorecard out - Glover also has ownership in a pharmacy in Harrisburg and owns American Home Pharmacy in Little Rock with several partners, including his son-in-law, Jeremy Riddle. American Home Pharmacy caters to senior citizens and delivers medication to their homes and helps them manage it.

Glover and Sparks’ son in-law, Keith Williams, own The Fieldhouse in Conway, an athletic training facility, especially for baseball.

Glover, his son-in-law and other partners have Arkansas Home Medical, a durable-medical company with locations in Hot Springs, Marshall, Little Rock and Conway.

“I enjoy having a lot going on - being involved, being in business and being an entrepreneur. I wouldn’t say I’m good at it, but I enjoy that,” Glover said.

The pharmacy profession has seen a lot of changes since he started in 1976 - from the volume, which is “much, much greater” - to insurance covering prescriptions.

Competition has increased with the big-box stores, “but there’s enough business for all of us,” he said.

He said independent community pharmacists like him can be competitive and offer personal services, such as delivery, that others don’t.

Glover said he’s had many rewarding interactions with customers, including two recent ones.

In one case, he said, he helped a mother with medication for her autistic child.

“They were going to have to give injections, and the child was afraid to do so, and I said, ‘Hey, how about letting your mom give me an injection?’”

He let the child watch her mother give him a B12 shot to show the child it was OK.

Another customer, an older woman, had suffered from shingles for weeks and hadn’t been able to sleep. Glover said his pharmacy prepared a topical medication for her,and she thanked him, saying, “I slept for the first time in two weeks,” he recalled.

“I love what I’m doing now, operating the pharmacy itself,” he said. “I like people, and I enjoyed getting involved with people, not just filling prescriptions - getting to know them, trying to help them, being a friend.”

If you ask Glover, that’s a winning scorecard.

Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.

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Eddie Glover

My family includes: My daughter, Kristen Riddle of Greenbrier, her husband, Jeremy, and their three kids, Payton, 10; Preston, 7; and Sydney, 5; my son, Sam, his wife, Lacey, and their daughter, Kate, almost 2; and my mother, Jessie Lee Glover, 91 If I weren’t a pharmacist, I’d be: A salesman My favorite movie is: The King’s Speech My favorite book is: The Breakthrough Company by Keith McFarland My hobbies are: I enjoy playing golf, and I enjoy going out and working on the family farm with the cattle.

River Valley Ozark, Pages 137 on 12/04/2011

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