The Building That Shaped My Career Choice

Vahe H. Apelian

I came across the attached picture recently and I became reflective as it depicts the famed ABC store in downtown Beirut. Almost facing the store, on the other side of the street, was a building that shaped my career choice.  The ABC store was located at a junction.  A short distance from the store, at its back, situated atop of an elevation is the Grand Serail, the headquarters of the Prime Minister. It also is a few blocks from the Lebanese Parliament building. The Grand Serail is a historic building. Stairways from the street led to the Grand Serail grounds.

Next to the stairways that led to the Grand Serail was the Abu Jamil Street that stretched hardly a mile. The former ARF community center was located at its far end, on a hill whose balcony overlooked the street below.  The neighborhood was also known as Wadi al-Yahoud, meaning "Valley of the Jews" because it was the Jewish neighberhood. Alain Abadi, who became a popular pop singer and idol to  the youth lived in the neighborhood as well.

At this junction, on the hand side of the famed ABC Store, a little bit up, was the building I alluded earlier. It was a  three stories building. On its street level  was a pharmacy called, CHAGHLASSIAN. On the second floor there was a medical diagnostic laboratory named after its owner, PILIGIAN. The third floor was on top of the roof and it was a photographer’s studio where our family and relatives had family black and white pictures taken. We did not own a camera in those years. 

That building shaped my career aspirations.

During 1958 when civil war broke in Lebanon, we moved from our house and stayed in the inn, Hotel Lux, in downtown Beirut my father ran. It was a few blocks from the seaport and a short walking distance from the ABC store.  Downtown was not shut off altogether but there was curfew starting in the afternoon. During our few months stay there during summer I worked in the CHAGHLASSIAN PHARMACY doing errands by bringing medications from the distributors nearby, cleaning and even helping the pharmacist doing compounding that was still practiced to a degree. Naturally, people came in to fill their prescriptions or outright ask for some medications and seek the advice of the pharmacist who wore a white gown. In my impressionable age, not yet in my teens, I remained fascinated by the whole atmosphere in the pharmacy

Now and then I would walk up to the second floor to the  PILIGIAN LABORATORY and would remain fascinated by the bottles, tubes and the owner in his white coat doing the testing. Years later I found out that a medical doctor whose last name was Piligian had owned the laboratory at one time. But he had immigrated to the U.S. but the laboratory had retained its name. It is there that my father had his father, our grandfather, tested to find out that he had diabetes.

On the third and last floor, which was the roof, was an Armenian photographer’s studio. He had a few settings that were used as backgrounds for taking pictures. Many of our family members had their black and white pictures taken there against those settings. I have my famed Katch Vartan- Brave Vartan –picture taken there as well (attached). It is not a colored picture but was colored. Such pictures were called retouche’, that is to say re-touched.

When I graduated high school in 1965, I had already set up my mind to study pharmacy. Next to my picture in the yearbook, I have noted that I intend to study pharmacy. Years later I found out that the slogan in Armenian I had chosen, as it was expected from each graduate to note one, is attributed to Walter Withman. It reads: “Keep your face always toward the sun and the shadows will fall behind you.” Surely easier said than done.

I graduated from the American University of Beirut School of Pharmacy in 1971 and started doing graduate work and when the AUB Hospital started a three years long fellowship program to be trained in clinical laboratory to operate a clinical diagnostic laboratory, I knew that's what I would like to do. My mentor, Dr. Garabed Garabedian, who was the chairman of the Department where I did my graduate work, was kind enough to intervene on my behalf and have me accepted to that fiercely competitive program. I was on the verge of completing the program when the civil war broke in Lebanon and altered the country for good

I immigrated to the U.S. in 1976 and changed my career to the pharmaceutical industry and spent the next over three decades in that field working for a few multinational companies that do not exist anymore. Acquisitions and mergers changed the industry for good.