The legacy of Putvin Drug Store began in 1941, when Francis “Fran” Putvin purchased the City Drug Store and put his name on the door. His pharmacy is still a pillar of the Munising community, now owned and operated by two of his grandchildren.
By Joshua Grove
Beacon Correspondent
In the winter of 1941, a young pharmacist named Francis “Fran” Putvin took over the old City Drug Store on the corner of Superior Street and Elm Avenue in Munising, put his name on the door and set to work building a legacy.
Now in its third generation as a family-owned and operated pharmacy, Putvin Drug Store is celebrating 85 years of service to the community.
“He grew up in this area and worked at a pharmacy when he was in high school,” said Connie DeFrancesco, Francis’ daughter and a former co-owner of the pharmacy. “He worked at the Rexall drugstore, and I think that’s how he decided to go to pharmacy school. At that time it was only a two-year program. He went to Ferris, which at that time was Ferris Institute.”
After graduating from Ferris in Big Rapids, Francis moved briefly to the Copper Country, marrying his wife, Agnes, and working at pharmacies in Lake Linden and L’Anse before returning home to Munising. It was around that time that he put in an offer on City Drug, which he purchased in November 1940.
“He didn’t take possession until Jan. 1 of 1941,” said Francis’ granddaughter Debbie DeFrancesco Nedeau, who now co-owns the pharmacy with her brother Jeff. “That’s why we celebrate 1941.”
At first, the newly christened Putvin Drug Store boasted a soda fountain, candy, gifts, shoes and other goods in addition to a full-service pharmacy. Many medications were compounded in store, mixed and rolled into solid pill form and dispensed in glass vials.
In the early days, “We used to hand-stamp the prescriptions and [record them] on ledgers,” Connie recalled. “And then we’d make the labels on a regular typewriter.”
The Putvin kids — Roberta, Connie, Francis Jr. (“Sonny”), Sue and Mary — were always involved in the family business, either raiding the candy section, chatting with patients or manning the counter once they were old enough to help. As they grew into the pharmacy, Francis made sure that their work ethic met his high standards.
“My dad was pretty particular,” Sue Putvin Radloff said. “He was pretty ‘customer always comes first.’ You always look them in the eye, always count your change back. Those were rules to live by when we were working. Well, even at home. But I mean, customer care was very, very important.”
Fran was both an effective businessman and an accomplished practitioner. By the early 1960s, he was a member of the Michigan Board of Pharmacy, the official regulatory board responsible for vetting new pharmacists and setting industry standards statewide. He was also head of the Upper Peninsula Division of the Michigan State Pharmaceutical Association (now the Michigan Pharmacists Association), a regional chapter of a trade group representing pharmacists across the state. In Munising, he quietly purchased the Rexall where he first served patients, running both his store and its main competitor simultaneously.
Fran’s leadership within the profession and his high expectations at home weighed heavily on his children as they considered their own futures.
Following in her father’s footsteps, Connie decided to enroll in the school of pharmacy at his alma mater, Ferris Institute, where she entered a five-year program in 1960.
While attending Ferris, Connie fell for a fellow student named Joe DeFrancesco, whom she married in November 1965 soon after graduation. They then moved to Royal Oak, where they both worked for the Cunningham’s pharmacy chain around metro Detroit.
Less than a year later, Connie said, “my dad was saying that, if we knew of anybody who was interested in coming up and working in Munising, he was looking for somebody who would work for him and eventually buy the business. At that time, Joe figured, wow, it’d be nice to have our own store. And so he thought, well, he was from the city, but he would give it a try.”
Once in Munising, Joe quickly fell in love with the community and its up-north way of life, settling in as a pharmacist at the drugstore and an active member of the area’s civic groups. Connie worked alongside him, helping to raise their young family and gradually take over the reins from Francis.
Joe and Connie purchased the store from Fran in 1971. The handover ended one generation’s 30-year run at the helm and began another that would last for 37 years.
Over the ensuing decades, the couple would take the store’s old footprint and expand it into two neighboring buildings — the Corktown Bar and Napoli’s Pizza — moving the pharmacy over and dramatically increasing the retail space. When Rexall (by then sold to pharmacist Mike Hayes) closed in 1996, they acquired its prescriptions and an even larger customer base. Then, in 1998, they became the area’s first RadioShack dealer, installing a small electronics section in the room where the pharmacy counter once stood.
While the pharmacy hummed along, Connie and Joe continued to raise their four children. As in earlier years, the kids were often conscripted to work in the store.
“If we were in the pharmacy,” their son Jeff DeFrancesco said, “if we were working for my dad or even grandpa, our jobs would basically be fronting shelves, dusting shelves, getting familiarized with the pharmacy and interacting with patients. As I grew up, I didn’t care for pharmacy. It was one of those things where I liked medicine. I just didn’t want to seem like my dad, my grandpa, who were always trapped here. I wanted to go into medicine. … When I started getting into high school, my dad would let me come back here and help him in the pharmacy. It wasn’t a lot of hours, but it was something that kind of developed that [thought of] ‘Hey, this is something that I might be interested in.’”
Like his parents and grandfather before him, Jeff went off to Ferris to pursue a degree in pharmacy. He graduated in 1992, returning home to work alongside Connie and Joe. His sister Jennifer also became a pharmacist, though she opted to remain out of state post-graduation and work for Walgreens. Their sister Debbie took a different route into the family business altogether.
“I was the oldest of the kids in our family,” she said. “I always wanted to go to work with my dad. … I felt like I had to be more responsible than the other kids. And then all the way through high school, as soon as I could see over the cash register, I started working there. And then every summer, all my friends worked at the Dairy Queen or the Hasty Tasty or someplace fun. And there’s me. I knew I wanted to go to work with my dad. And I’d work from 9 in the morning till 6 at night.”
When she graduated, Debbie decided not to go to Ferris. Instead, she left for Wisconsin, then Florida, and eventually returned home with a young daughter and a degree in accounting.
“I ended up moving back in 1996 and wasn’t sure where I wanted to go,” Debbie said. “I worked for Ron Browe when he had his accounting agency in our building. And I also worked for my dad at the store. And within the first year that I had moved back, he had a heart attack. My mom and I didn’t realize … we were down around the Petoskey area. We were driving there and my dad kept saying he didn’t feel good. And so we ended up taking him to the hospital and sure enough … . And then he just kept saying, ‘Well, now you have to stay here because I need somebody to run the store.’”
Jeff took on more responsibilities as the store’s pharmacist, while Debbie worked in customer-facing roles and helped manage operations. For roughly the next 12 years, the duo became the faces of the business, working alongside a team of seasoned staff to continue adapting operations to new technologies, expansions and the increasing traffic that followed Munising’s growth into a full-fledged tourism hotspot.
By 2008, Joe worked only occasional weekends because of his deteriorating health, and the kids handled most of the practicalities of the business. He decided to sell the pharmacy that year, with Jeff and Debbie each taking a 50% stake in its ownership.
On May 2, 2009, only a year after passing the torch to a third generation, Joe was gone, marking the end of an era both for the business and the community that knew him.
Since then, the siblings have continued the legacy he, Connie and Fran built over decades of dedicated work. They’ve continued to expand, filling an estimated 500 prescriptions a day with the help of about a dozen staff members, including their sister Diane, and two licensed technicians who have been with the business since the 1990s.
This year marks 85 years since the Putvin name first hung on the pharmacy door. In an era when independently owned pharmacies are becoming a rarity, the DeFrancescos have found a way for the business to survive and thrive without sacrificing the fundamentals it was built on.
Debbie DeFrancesco Nedeau and Jeff DeFrancesco own and operate Putvin Drug Store, the pharmacy their
grandfather opened in 1941.
“My grandpa started it, and my dad followed and my mom,” Jeff said. “And [patients] trust us. It’s been generational where you get to know who their grandparents were, and then their parents and then, you know, their children. So it’s kind of like you grew up with them. We appreciate the community for as much support as they give us. And we wouldn’t be where we are without the community. It’s an honor to serve them.”
For information on weekly drawings and other deals held as part of the pharmacy’s 85th anniversary celebration, stop in or visit them on Facebook at facebook.com/putvindrugstore.