Editor’s note: In November 2022, I had the privilege to interview Leah Gavin about Freeman Drug’s 150^th anniversary. Gavin died Tuesday, April 22, 2025, at Regions Hospital in St. Paul surrounded by family as a result of injuries sustained after a fall at home. In her memory, we are reprinting the article that tells so much about what kind of person Leah was and her lasting impact on River Falls.

For columnist Dave Wood's tribute to Leah, click here. 

Not many businesses these days can say that they’ve been around for more than a century, let alone 150 years. In November, Freeman Drug will celebrate 150 years in business with a week-long celebration. Customers are invited to stop in for cake, prize drawings, giveaways and commemorative pottery created by Ben Gavin.

The pharmacy has a rich history in the community (see timeline) and is the oldest continuous business in River Falls, said pharmacist and owner Leah Gavin. She herself began working for the drug store in 1965 when she was just a kid. She and her family moved to River Falls into a home on Hillcrest Street in 1962, built by Glen Cox.

“Jerry Belisle was a partner (in Freeman Drug) and died in 1962,” Gavin said. “That’s when Dad (Seth Speerstra) bought in.”

Speerstra grew up on a farm in Whitehall, while Gavin’s mother’s father was a pastor in western Minnesota and eastern South Dakota. Her mother went to work in Whitehall as a lab tech at the hospital, where her dad was working the drug store. He went to school in Madison, and he worked all over, including Mondovi, Superior, Stillwater, St. Paul, and Hudson for Mickelson’s. They finally settled in River Falls. 

As a young woman, Gavin served as a clerk, swept the floor and cleaned at Freeman Drug. Soon the tedious task of typing medication labels was given to her.

“They saved the nursing home labels until I got home from school,” Gavin recalled. “Roger Hammer made sure I knew how to type. In my senior year, I graduated early (in 1970) and went down to the pharmacy to do the bookwork.”

River Falls kids in the 1960s and 1970s often flocked to the pharmacy to get their baseball cards. People also flocked to the soda fountain, gathering together to hear the town news and visit with friends.

Gavin decided to attend pharmacy school at the University of Minnesota and committed to a five-year plan, commuting from River Falls. About 20% of her class was women. She didn’t notice any kind of gender discrimination in her field until she began working.

“When I got out to work, people would say ‘I want to talk to the man,’” she said. “They didn’t want to talk to me. They wanted a man pharmacist. Of course, that’s all changed now. It’s mostly women pharmacists now.”

While in school, she worked at Hillren’s nursing home (the Lutheran Home building). Freeman Drug and another pharmacist in town, Wayne Nelson, had a pharmacy at the nursing home where they dispensed unit dose medications each day.

“At one point, there were three pharmacies in town,” Gavin said. “I kind of grew up in the business and I liked the people. You learn so much on the job.”

Her younger sister is a pharmacist as well, but lives in California with her husband.

Upon graduation, Gavin began her official career at an independent pharmacy in Baldwin called Rasmussen’s followed by working at the hospital pharmacy in River Falls. In 1982, her dad and Ivan Iverson ended their partnership and he needed help.

“Dad was working the store alone and it was just too much for him,” Gavin said. “So I quit the hospital and went down to the store.”

She became a full partner in the business in 1988.

The secret to longevity

People like going into Freeman’s because of the hometown, caring atmosphere, Gavin said.

“I’ve always had a very good crew, very good people working for me,” Gavin said. “We do a lot of things that nobody else does.”

Those things include home health, durable medical, rentals, wound care, compression stockings and wraps, compounding lab (making a finished product from the raw ingredients), and more. They make individual dosage forms for people for whom nothing else will work and they work with infants and animals. They carry topicals that can’t be found anywhere else, including hormone therapy topicals.

“The board is always full and my compounders are always busy,” Gavin said.

Freeman’s employs almost 20 people who take pride in providing custom care to their customers. Gavin separates herself from the chains by focusing on what she does best.

“We don’t do junk, we don’t do cosmetics, toys,” Gavin said. “The only excess things we have are cards and local books, because we like to promote local artisans and writers. We don’t make any money off the local offerings. I don’t feel like that is right. We provide individual service. I go out there and measure people for stockings, wrist braces, knee braces, help them pick out over the counter meds.”

Customers will frequently find Gavin on the floor, discussing people’s medications, symptoms and medical history. She shows people how to use walkers and how to put on their compression stockings.

Customer Inez Arman was extremely grateful when Gavin came out to her car to give her husband a COVID-19 shot. Another man, who was 100, would come down every couple of weeks to get his Vitamin B12. He’d park out back, beep the horn and staff would go out to attend to him.

“It’s a huge thing to get in and out of the car for some people,” Gavin acknowledged.

Her Main Street location works, but some people have taken business elsewhere because Freeman doesn’t have a drive-up. But that’s not necessary.

“We do deliveries,” Gavin said. “People can beep their horn or call us at the back door and we’ll run it out. I don’t feel not having a drive up has handicapped us, because we go right out to the cars and explain things if it’s something new for the patient.”

One item Gavin would love to have is a wider counter, but she’d rather spend money on paying her employees.

“It’s more important for me to pay my help than to remodel,” she said about the store. “We don’t need that. We keep it clean and we’ve got good service and good people. That’s the important thing.”

Changes

Working at Freeman’s since 1965 (minus her early jobs in Baldwin and at the hospital), Gavin has seen many changes in the pharmacy business. One of the biggest has been the use of computers.

“Now we don’t have to type labels,” she laughed. “Insurance is filed right off the computer instead of writing out forms and sending them in, which is very tedious.”

Regulations have gotten tougher and more complex, with more information wanted by insurance companies.

“We have to report so many things,” Gavin said. “They pull all of the narcotic information every day off of our computers. When we do COVID shots, we have to send those to the state every day. Paxlovid, an anti-viral for Covid, we have to send in verification of doses (the government pays for it). All of this within the last 10 years. We can look up anybody’s narcotic usage and see their history on a government site. The government has a lot more rules and regulations. It’s burdensome but justified.”

Small businesses face many challenges and Freeman is no exception, even with exceptional customer service. The insurance companies pay the pharmacy little, which definitely affects the store’s bottom line.

“It’s very hard to stay in business because of how little the insurance companies pay,” Gavin admitted. “We are going to put out a list of insurance companies that we won’t accept next year, because we’re losing money on scrips.”

Even though Freeman’s hasn’t made her wealthy, that’s never what it’s been about for her and husband Ron, who worked at UW-River Falls. 

“Neither one of cared that we didn’t make the big bucks,” Gavin said. “Life was more about staying in town and making sure we were available for the children (they have two sons, Ben and Tim). We could have made more money working in the Cities, but we would have spent more time on the road. It was more important to be local and involved.”

Gavin has served as a Sunday school teacher, a Scout leader, a volunteer pharmacist at the Pierce/St. Croix County Free Clinic, and has volunteered for school committees and church committees at Ezekiel Lutheran Church.

Another challenge, this one more frightening, that Gavin has faced is being robbed.

“I can tell when someone walks in the door if they’re a drug seeker or not,” Gavin said. “We’ve had three break-ins/armed robberies over the years.”

One man came into the store dressed entirely in black with a black mask. He carried a pop bottle containing gasoline which he poured all over the floor. He held the clerk and a lighter and demanded narcotics or he’d torch the building. It was terrifying, she said.

The same man came back a couple of weeks later. The business was in the process of installing cameras, after the last incident, but they weren’t functioning yet. After the robbery, Gavin sprang into action.

“I chased the guy,” she said. “I thought to myself ‘He’s not going to do this to me twice.’”

In a scene that sounds like it’s from a movie, Gavin chased the man into the parking lot behind the police station, where she grabbed him by the pants. He was wiggling out of them when someone opened a truck door and the guy ran into it. He was arrested.

Another time, someone broke in the back door but left DNA everywhere; the security cameras identified him. Freeman Drug now has more security measures in place to guarantee employees’ and product safety.

“You have to be prepared but it can’t frighten you. Life goes on,” Gavin said.

Volunteering

When she’s not chasing criminals down the street, Gavin can often be found performing volunteer work.

In 2007, Dr. Bob and Mary Johnson founded the Free Clinic of Pierce & St. Croix Counties to provide free, primary health care to low-income, uninsured residents. Bob Johnson was a physician at River Falls Medical Clinic and Mary Conroy-Johnson was a registered nurse at RF Area Hospital and chair of the Kinnickinnic Health Foundation.

Bob Johnson approached Gavin for her help as a volunteer pharmacist when one of her partners was leaving, so at first, she wasn’t sure she could commit to a new cause.

“But when he said what he was doing, I couldn’t say no,” she said. “I said I’d be glad to do the pharmacy, but I asked that he let me do it my way, which I needed a computer so I could have records for all the patients. We opened in 2008.”

At first the response was tremendous, Gavin said.

“We had to cut it off at 25 patients per night,” she said. “Right now, it’s much less. We have social workers on staff to help people fill out Obamacare forms online. Many don’t have computers or know how to fill it out.”

The clinic, which is open starting at 4:15 p.m. on Tuesdays at 1629 E. Division St., operates on a walk-in basis. The clinic also provides assistance for people who need drugs that are too expensive.

“Working at the free clinic, working with the doctors that are there, they’re not just a name on a piece of paper, we work together,” Gavin said. “We’ve built a bond. Same with the nurses and the staff. Everyone there is a volunteer from some medical facility. You build a bond that way.”

Gavin has also been at the forefront of providing COVID-19 vaccines to people during the pandemic. She and pharmacist Lisa Heier worked closely with Pierce County Public Health Director AZ Snyder to offer vaccine clinics at Freeman Drug, UW-River Falls and the library. It was a team effort with volunteers coming out of the woodwork, Gavin said.

“The community was so helpful, but that’s just the way this community is,” Gavin said. “When there’s a need, they’re there. All you have to do is whisper a word and it’s out. That’s why we live in this town, and that’s why our kids stayed in this town.”

The future

As for what the future holds, long-time pharmacist Rita Cudd will retire in the near future. Gavin is also planning to retire, but not until after Cudd’s and her replacements are trained in.

“We’ve had so many students come through and they say they’ll come back, but they move on to something more exotic,” Gavin said.

Gavin loves her job, but is looking forward to spending more time with her three grandchildren.

The store will keep providing services the community needs, when they need them.
“That’s why we stay open in the evening because people are driving home from work, in order to accommodate people,” Gavin said. “We’ve always done that. Our service is tailored to the customers.”