SHOW BUSINESS: An Evening with Louis Armstrong

In the late 1950s, Doc Pressman's Randolph Pharmacy, located at Fourteenth and Randolph Streets in Washington, D.C., was a meeting place for a number of musicians. There were the locals, Jack "Jive" Schaffer, Roger Calloway, and Buddy Garrison, and also some well-known jazz musicians who would occasionally drop in when they were in town. Doc Pressman was both proprietor and pharmacist in residence. He could be found behind a counter at the back of the store. There he was comfortable among shelves containing thousands of pharmaceutical potions, drugs, vitamin pills, retorts, and odd-shaped glass containers. Doc believed in the therapeutic efficacy of vitamin pills, especially of vitamin E, which he believed, when taken every day in huge quantities, would cure anything. Whether Doc made an independent study or whether the salesman for Hance Bros, vitamin company brought this knowledge to his attention is now unknown and beyond the reach of further research. He was always busy and cheerful. He moved pills very rapidly into small containers. He typed out labels. He actually prepared ointments from the original elements. Doc, although licensed only as a pharmacist, drifted into the casual practice of medicine by treating a constituency suspicious of orthodox diagnostic techniques. Doc relied heavily on the Merck Manual, drug company handouts, Hatha Yoga, and Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous. Doc's musician clientele required a pharmacopoeia to help them stay up all night and remain awake all day. (Winston Churchill's physician, Lord