Fighter pilot, pharmacist could deliver the goods

There were no ceilings in Curtis "Doc" Robinson's basement pharmacy on Capitol Hill.

When he returned from flying 33 combat missions over Italy in World War II, Mr. Robinson quickly learned that even for a fighter pilot in the Army Air Forces, there were strict limits on how high a black American could rise.

In 1947, when Mr. Robinson and his wife, both college-educated, moved to the District, he headed over to National Airport to seek a spot as a pilot at Eastern Airlines. Robinson was informed that Eastern did not give job applications to black pilots.

Like so many other black Washingtonians, Mr. Robinson turned to the federal government, finding work at a National Security Agency predecessor, where he transcribed recordings of intercepted signals from Soviet agents. But black workers faced a low ceiling at the NSA as well, and Mr. Robinson quickly grew restless.

At home, his baby daughter, Linda, was suffering from a heart condition that required a stream of medications. Mr. Robinson saw both hope and a business opportunity in the drugs that helped his child, and soon he was parlaying his college degree in chemistry into a degree in pharmacy from Howard University and then, in 1952, his own shop, on Alabama Avenue SE.

By 1965, Mr. Robinson owned six pharmacies in the District as well as a surgical supply company on Brentwood Road NE. In 1968, when rioters burned and looted many shops along the city's business strips after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Robinson's pharmacy in Southeast was spared damage -- neighbors had come out to protect the only black-owned shop on that hard-hit block.

Mr. Robinson, who died Oct. 12 at 90 of kidney failure and congestive heart failure, was still bringing medicines to customers' homes just months before he closed his last shop, Robinson Apothecary, on East Capitol Street NE last year. Six nights a week, he would lock up his store and deliver a few prescriptions as he wended his way home.

"We sit and talk," he said in an interview in 2002. "I might stay half an hour and visit." He never charged for delivery. "No, I couldn't charge. Because I deliver at my convenience."

Grandson of a slave who became a postmaster and a Methodist minister, Curtis Christopher Robinson grew up in South Carolina, graduated from the historically black Claflin College in his home town of Orangeburg and worked as a teacher until the opportunity came along to apply to the Army Air Forces' pilot training program for black cadets at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

In 1943, Mr. Robinson and the 99th Fighter Squadron moved to Italy, where he flew missions against German Messerschmitts in the equivalent of hand-me-down aircraft that could be dangerous to fly. Mr. Robinson told The Washington Post that a pilot could not hear an approaching enemy fighter plane because of the growl of his own engine.

"We couldn't warn each other, either," he said. "We were flying the old beat-up Flying Tigers that had already been in action in Burma. We flew those old rags, and the radios did not even work."

He added that great skill was required to maneuver the planes, especially when the enemy could sneak up fast and get an Allied pilot in his gun sight.

"The rate of closure was so fast," Mr. Robinson said. "You were flying 350 miles an hour. One moment he's a dot, and the next moment he's very large."

In mid-1944, Mr. Robinson fell ill with pneumonia and returned to Tuskegee to become a flight instructor.

When he and his wife, Florie Frederick Robinson, who had been his college sweetheart, moved to Washington, they rented in Columbia Heights before buying a house closer to Mr. Robinson's Southeast pharmacy. In 1962, near the peak of white flight from the District, they moved to Hillcrest, where they became the first black family on the block and one of the first in the neighborhood of stately houses.

His wife died in 2000. Their daughter, Linda, died as a child. Survivors include a son, Curtis C. Robinson Jr. of Washington, and two grandchildren.

In his later years, Mr. Robinson watched as chain stores pushed independent pharmacies out of business, often opening competing shops within a block of their target and then offering to buy the mom and pop shop's prescription files. But he took pride in the fact that even as the industry changed around him, he continued to call customers to remind them that their prescriptions were due for a refill and continued his house calls.

"At one time, I was doing a hundred prescriptions a day," Mr. Robinson said in 2002, when he was 83 and still working solo at his Capitol Street shop. "Now I look at television, fill 15 or 20 prescriptions and look at some more television, which suits me fine. This is my life."