All of Percy Malone’s accomplishments are prefaced by an early life steeped in poverty. His father, born in 1893, couldn’t read or write because he never attended school. His mother made it as far as the eighth grade. However, Malone’s parents taught him to have a strong work ethic in order to rise out of poverty.
As a young boy, Malone had multiple jobs — including one in a pharmacy. He may have started as a soda jerk, but eventually, he would become a pharmacist and a state legislator, working with one of the state’s famed former governors, Bill Clinton.
Malone was raised in Rosedale, Mississippi, in the river’s Delta along the Arkansas border. He was always working — just like his parents — from a young age. He served up sodas and milkshakes before he had even reached junior high school, and pharmacy work caught his interest.
“I grew up with a good family, was poor but didn’t know it, worked hard as a youngster, had multiple jobs,” Malone said. “Started working in a drugstore in sixth grade as a soda jerk — back when drugstores had soda fountains. Worked my way through several jobs in high school, but most all the time,
I was working in the drugstore. I decided I wanted to go to pharmacy school, and I didn’t know what pharmacy meant.”
Malone went to nearby Delta State University for his bachelor’s degree and got a sense of what went on in a pharmacy beyond his soda counter. He then went to the University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy. Upon finishing college, Malone took a job in Beaumont, Texas.
“I was looking for a place to have a start. Obviously, I didn’t have any money, and I wanted to get a start working for somebody. I saw pretty quick that in the Beaumont-Port Arthur area, that wasn’t going to happen. So I had a friend that had graduated from Ole Miss and was working in Fordyce.
[Another] one was working in Warren. I ended up in Camden for a short period of time. I heard of an opportunity in Arkadelphia with a guy named I.B. Fuller.
“I came up to see him on a Sunday afternoon while he was in the hospital. He said he was looking for someone who wanted to stay and have ownership, and I told him I was looking for a place to get permanent and start my own business. So it worked out for both of us. He was a great mentor.”
Malone, Fuller and another pharmacist named Buford Newman started the Medicaid Pharmacies, one in Hope and one in Hot Springs. After two or three years, the pharmacies were not performing well, so the men decided that Malone should take over control of those pharmacies and let Newman take the downtown Arkadelphia store called Fuller Drug Store.
“So I started on my own in those two stores,” Malone said. “Had to hire some help. If anyone asks if you’re self-made or not, tell ’em the truth. I’m like that turtle sittin’ on the post with a sign that reads, ‘I didn’t get here by myself.’”
Malone wanted to buy all three stores and run them himself, but he couldn’t get loans large enough to do so. He said a chance meeting with a man named Al Alexander, who was sitting in his car downtown, changed that. Malone sat down with Alexander and told him that if he co-signed a note for Malone to buy the pharmacies, he would pay Alexander back with the first money he made.
“For some reason, he said yes,” Malone said. “He recently passed away, but he was a big help to me.”
Malone was one of the first to have a computerized pharmacy system and one of the first to offer discounts on prescriptions and promote generic drugs. Malone takes his role as a leader in the community seriously and has used his business, and later his roles as a state representative and senator, to give back to the community.
He recently gave $50,000 to Ouachita High School in Donaldson to renovate the school’s gym, and when the 1997 EF4 tornado leveled much of Main Street in Arkadelphia, Malone called President Clinton to organize the rebuilding efforts.
“I was downtown at that time in a building,” Malone said. “I called President Clinton Saturday afternoon and told him, ‘We need you here to help us.’ He got here on Tuesday. We were worried about how we were gonna get open on Monday and Tuesday. He told us that we needed to ‘focus on what you want your town to look like 25 years from now.’”
A street in Arkadelphia is named W.P. Malone Drive in honor of Malone’s dedication to improving the community.
“Arkansas has been good to me,” Malone said. “God’s been good to me, and I’ve been very blessed.”
After all of the things Malone had to do to get to where he is, he has never forgotten the impoverished sixth-grader serving soda in the local drugstore in the Mississippi Delta. He takes credit for his hard work, but also for the help he received along the way.
Staff writer Morgan Acuff can be reached at (501) 244-4314 or macuff@arkansasonline.com.