K was for Kotex.

Doc Koffler made the process as genteel as possible. It was 1920s Toronto, and any woman entering his store need not ask the staff for this purchase, as she did for all other products. These packages were wrapped in handsome green paper and tied with rustic sea-island string, then stacked openly. A woman could serve herself and pay at the counter. No words need be said. Discretion was assured. It was the start of a revolution.

Leon Koffler was a Jewish baby born in Romania when it was a particularly bad time to be a Jewish baby born in Romania. It was the late fall of 1895. With discrimination mounting, thousands of Romanian Jews were leaving for the U.S.A. and Canada; when he was just shy of 20, Leon was one of their numbers.

His father was dead, so he was head of the household, arriving in Toronto with his mother and sisters. He first set up as a grocer, but soon moved on. By 1921, he had completed the one-year course at the Ontario College of Pharmacy, and opened Koffler’s Drug Store on College St. By then, he was also married, and soon would have his own son.

Murray Koffler was born above that store in the mid-1920s. Retail sales coursed through his veins from both sides. Not only was his father a natural entrepreneur and marketer, his mother’s father had been a buckskin- and moccasin-clad peddler in turn-of-the-century Saskatchewan before running his own furniture store. Both these guys could sell, and both had left Eastern Europe without looking back.

Leon was Mr. Koffler to his employees, Doc Koffler to his folksy local customers, but he was no doctor. He played cards with practicing physicians to drum up his prescription trade, but back then a pharmacist, or druggist, was really a shopkeeper who ran a kind of general store.

Filling prescriptions was just one part of the income stream. There was the sundries trade — chewing gum, soda pop and newspapers. There were health products — the aforementioned green packages, the Sheiks and Ramses kept safe for male customers in drawers behind the counter. There were perfumes and beauty aids and camera equipment all kept in handsome oak-and-glass cabinets. Almost everything was accessed only by the staff.

And of course there was the soda fountain; Leon’s was one of the best. Twelve brass stools and three booths were arrayed around mirrors and nickle- and chrome-plated taps and mixers. Patrons could get a sundae or malt shake, or join the early-morning bachelors for bacon and eggs.

In all, Doc Koffler’s place was a strange little shop selling seemingly unrelated things to a wide variety of locals. And not only did he and his staff fetch what shoppers wanted from behind the counter, he would deliver it as well. You could just give him a phone call; he had a fleet of bicycle boys ready to bring a 10-cent stamp, a 12-cent bottle of pop or a two-cent Toronto Star right to the door at no charge.

Measuring five-foot seven, with dark hair and brown eyes, Leon was an ambitious dynamo. By the mid-1930s, his hard work, great service and attention to detail had garnered him a second store up Bathurst St. just north of St. Clair Ave.

Nearby, he owned an apartment building at 2 Connaught Circle and a nice house at 315 Rosemary Rd. in Forest Hill. Always working, Leon found himself driving down to Buffalo on many Friday nights to double-check the latest American trends in drug-store window displays. He lived for his business.

Murray was 17, an only child not even out of high school, when Leon died. He was an Oakwood Collegiate guy, did Gilbert and Sullivan at summer camp, even kilted himself as a Scotsman playing drums in the 48th Highlanders Pipe and Drum Band. Now, as the sole support for his somewhat reclusive mother, he didn’t have to serve in the Second World War, but he was conscripted into other service. He became a pharmacist.

Murray loved serving people and helping them with their medical needs, but not much else about the business. He was young, smart, a college graduate and good at selling, yet half his time he was hawking chewing gum to kids, wasting 10 minutes taking a phone order for a block of ice cream or frying up someone’s breakfast.

He cast around for other ways of making money, building rental suites, installing perfume vending machines in washrooms, selling tape recorders, eventually investing in mining stocks. This last venture cost him his father’s original store when the stock tanked.

By then, Murray was married with children, and had learned his lesson. He would stick to the pharmacy, but would do it his own way.

In the 1950s, E. P. Taylor was the titan of the WASPY Canadian business scene. Like Koffler, he had inherited some key assets, but had increased those assets exponentially. Through a friend, the young Koffler wangled a 15-minute meeting with the legendary business leader and horse breeder early one Sunday morning in 1952

Taylor lived on 600 acres up on Bayview Ave. near York Mills Rd., with a house and stables on the rolling acreage that is now the Canadian Film Centre. He was a Protestant, Koffler was Jewish back in a time when such things mattered. But they didn’t matter to that pair.

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Koffler kept Taylor from his thoroughbreds for an hour and a half. The pharmacist desperately wanted to get into Taylor’s upcoming suburban shopping centre at York Mills and Bayview. Like Taylor, Koffler could see that the suburbs were the future, and that retail was heading to shopping centres. If you could be an anchor store, you could make a fortune.

But to get financing to build those shopping centres, most developers needed well-established chain stores as anchors. And Koffler just had one store — he was of no financial use to anybody. Luckily, Taylor had deep pockets, needed no banks and could judge prospective tenants based on other criteria. Taylor was about 52 years old, Koffler 29. The older man bought in to the younger man’s vision. Koffler got the lease.

It was lean up there on York Mills at first. The store was bright and modern, and like his father before him Koffler kept it immaculate. He had long since got rid of the soda fountain, free delivery service and fried eggs; York Mills took this focused spirit into a new age.

The staff was decked out in crisp white coats, looking medical and professional. While Koffler’s father had driven to Buffalo, Murray could keep up with the pharmacy business through magazines. The biggest trend: open, self-serve shopping.

Amongst his many holdings, Taylor owned the Dominion supermarket chain, which Koffler greatly admired. Dominion was pounding competitor Loblaws with its modern, self-serve stores — customers simply filled their carts from the shelves, then proceeded to the cashiers at the front of the store. It was old Doc Koffler’s stacked packages on a grand scale, and Koffler did up his York Mills location with an open-shelf design.

He was ready for the future, but the future was slow in coming. Taylor would come in each week and ask how Koffler was doing. Some days, the parking lot was empty, and all there was to look at were the cows across Bayview Ave. in Taylor’s field.

The future did arrive, though, and when it did it was big. People poured into the area. When Taylor built the Don Mills Shopping Centre and community a bit to the east of Bayview, Murray got a lease there as well, and it was at Don Mills where he first devised the system that would grow his empire. He offered an old pharmacy-school friend the chance to run the new store as an associate — Koffler would set up the store, do all the marketing and guarantee a base salary in exchange for a small up-front fee and 10 per cent of the profits. Against the advice of his father, lawyer and accountant, Koffler’s friend accepted the offer and never regretted doing so.

It wasn’t until 1962 that Koffler opened the first store actually called Shoppers Drug Mart, at the Shoppers World Plaza at Danforth and Victoria Park Aves. But that basic associate arrangement didn’t change. In the early 1960s, all of the old Kofflers Drug Stores would become Shoppers Drug Marts, and Shoppers made Koffler, his old school friend and many other Associated Pharmacists very wealthy.

Koffler and Taylor stayed in touch. When he had about 16 stores and was debating going public, obtaining partners or selling out, Koffler got the highest compliment from Taylor, who said he needed no partners, just capitol. Taylor told him to go public, and said he wanted to buy some shares himself.

It’s interesting given the role Taylor and his Dominion stores played in Koffler’s early life that the now-formidable Loblaws bought Shoppers Drug Mart. But now you can buy gum, newspapers, ice cream, perfume, cameras and pop at Shoppers. You can even find eggs and bacon, too, but you have to cook them at home. There’s Kotex, too, of course. It’s on the shelves. Help yourself.