The Audacity, Tenacity and Vivacity of Connie Thompson ’47

Few colleges of pharmacy can celebrate Women’s History Month with a woman who has lived through as many changes in women’s history as Connie Thompson ’47. Her father, also a graduate of the MUSC College of Pharmacy, was born in the 19th century while Connie, a spry and active nonagenarian, is in the 21st. 

She’s done many remarkable things in her 90-plus years. But before she could uncover corruption in the mental hospital in Nashville, before she could be part of an International Women’s Group in Saudi Arabia, before she could shock 1950s customers as a female “druggist” at Walgreens, before any of that… she had to talk her way into pharmacy school. The first obstacle was her father. 

“Daddy said ‘Women don’t go to pharmacy school,’ ” said Thompson, whose father Charles D. Miller owned Park Pharmacy at the corner of Rutledge and Fishburne. “But I just went to the school and filled out an application. I knew I could talk Daddy into anything.”

The oddest part of being a woman in pharmacy school turned out to be going to the Citadel, where she had to take some classes due to a shortage of professors. She and Beryl Myers Stone ’47 created a stir among a cadets corps that wouldn’t see Citadel gender groundbreaker Shannon Faulkner for nearly 50 years.

Having survived the memorable MUSC pharmacognosist Dr. Hampton Hoch, who made her learn every imaginable plant, she was ready to enter the work force. The scarcities of World War II, as reflected in her entering class of five people, had softened some barriers for women. She found a position at the Walgreens on King and Wentworth. 

“Daddy said he couldn’t afford me and the only reason I got a job was that the men were all gone,” she said. “People would come up to me and ask to speak to the druggist, not believing that the druggist was me. It was a different time.”

She and husband Charlie Thompson moved to Nashville in 1963, where she was one of three pharmacists at a mental hospital housing 350-400 beds. 

“There had been no pharmacists and the drugs were just flowing, including going out the back door,” she said. They had to go with guards to each floor to find out what each patient was on and start taking inventory. “I remember one who thought she was Cleopatra. We had this one doctor - the poor man had been wounded at Iwo Jima - he took her under sedation and came out and said ‘I think she may BE Cleopatra.’ ”

They would move several more times, including stints in Charlotte, Atlanta, Kansas City and Saudi Arabia, where they lived from 1981-86.

“I thoroughly enjoyed it,” she said. “I got a chance to do things I ordinarily wouldn’t have done. Everyone should live overseas and travel to Egypt and places like that.”