Cleveland Jewish community.com -- Community

A world of technology separates Harris and Friedman in the way they conduct business. One still uses a typewriter or writes out information by hand; the other executes everything on computer. In the process, they learn from each other.

I catch up with Harris, a spry, petite and totally "with-it" 96-year-old, and her granddaughter Hallie at Emjay Labs on Chagrin Boulevard, where the two work together in a modest, one-room office. On this bitterly cold February morning, I find Harris intently bent over her work writing out checks in a huge ledger, her head covered in a creamy ivory cloche that matches her sweater set.

The Beachwood resident enjoys recounting the story of Pinxav's origins. In the 1920s, when her yet-to-be husband and several of his fraternity brothers were still in pharmacy school at Adelbert College, they pooled their money to buy a small company from a person who had "a salve of some sort." As part of a school project, Milford Harris and a few of his classmates re-engineered the salve's ingredients (originally peach in color) to develop what would later be named Pinxav. Its formula, containing zinc oxide, aloe vera, wintergreen, clove oils and Vitamin E, was patented in 1927, and it has remained the same ever since.

The budding pharmacists gave their salve to friends and other pharmacists to try. After graduation, Milford and seven or eight other pharmacists formed a purchasing cooperative. Pinxav was one of the products they carried.

Later, Milford bought out his partners in the cooperative to form Harris Wholesale Drug, which ultimately would become one of the nation's largest drug wholesalers. Meanwhile, Lillian, who married Milford in 1931, graduated with a degree from the Western Reserve School of Applied Social Sciences (now the Mandel School) in 1933.

Unlike other women of her era, she deferred childbearing for nine years, explaining that as the first in her family to earn a college degree, she was determined to use her college education. She worked at Travelers' Aid and the Jewish Social Services Bureau (forerunner of JFSA). After her two sons, Seth and Matt, were born (1940 and 1942), she began helping her husband in the wholesale business, learning bookkeeping and other clerical skills on the job.

On Sunday nights, she recalls, "I'd call the pharmacy owners for what they needed, and at 7:30 Monday morning, I'd run down to the office to fill those orders." The company had a warehouse on 65th and Euclid, and if the one truck they had broke down, "my husband would load up his car and make the deliveries himself."

In addition to making calls, Lillian Harris was the bookkeeper until they got a regular bookkeeper, and kept the individual accounts until they hired an accountant. And so it went with one clerical task after another.

For the first 25 years of their marriage, the Harrises lived on the West Side. They were "instrumental," Harris says, in getting The West Temple started. Later, they became members of Park Synagogue, carpooling the boys to religious school with two other families. Harris was also active in National Council of Jewish Women.

But first and foremost, Lillian Harris was a working woman. Other women her age looked at her as if she were "nuts," or thought she was stuck-up because she didn't get much pleasure, she admits, from shmoozing with them.

"My mother-in-law once bought me a beautiful mah jongg set in an alligator case, hoping I would use it," she chuckles. (No chance this feisty mother of two, grandmother of six, and great-grandmother of six, would foist a similar gift on any of her female offspring.)

After the Harrises' older son Seth graduated from college, he joined the business, since his father was already suffering from Parkinson's Disease. Following his father's death in 1972, Seth took over, with Lillian still working at his side. After Seth sold the company in 1989, the remaining family holding was Pinxav, which Lillian ran virtually single-handedly n and by hand n from 1986 to 2000.

She did all the books and billing, kept the same accounts going, and ordered Pinxav from Connecticut, where it is manufactured. She kept a Rolodex of customers and files crammed with letters from satisfied customers. Some who had slathered Pinxav on their children were now doing likewise for their grandchildren.

"I used it for bedsores and wounds," a doctor wrote. "I used it on my dog," commented someone else.

It was time, however, to put aside the Rolodex, promote the product, and computerize transactions. Enter the third generation.

"Grandma sensed I was interested in the business, and in 2000, when my two daughters were a little older, Grandma asked me if I would help her," says Hallie Friedman, daughter of Seth.

"I knew nothing about invoicing, accounts receivable, and other things, so Gram taught me everything she knew," says Friedman affectionately. "She keeps great records and has sharp math skills. She corrects me."

What Friedman and her brother-in-law Greg Steiner, a California resident, bring to the Pinxav changing table is 21st-century marketing and PR techniques.

"Grandma was receptive and willing to make changes," says Friedman. "We worked together on them." In fact, says the slim young woman whose own daughter Isabel was with her that morning, "One of the most rewarding things is to work with Gram."

One innovation was changing Pinxav packaging from stodgy black-and-gold to a retro-looking pink box and tube decorated with cherubim and marked with antique pink lettering and scrolling. Most business transactions are now computerized, and the product, sold at Drug Mart, Medic and Marc's, is also available for purchase online (www.Pinxav.com).

In reluctant acknowledgement of her advancing years (she will be 97 in July), Lillian Harris gave up driving a few months ago, and now uses a walker to get around. Her declining eyesight also robbed her of her favorite hobby, reading. But for five or six hours each week, she can be found at her desk, ever alert, checking sales figures and numbers.

Harris takes comfort in the fact that, for the foreseeable future, and perhaps into her great-granddaughter's generation, Pinxav will remain as it has always been n a proud family business.