Disneyland and the Upjohn Co. are not two entities you might expect to be mentioned in a sentence together, but they are — many times — in a new book exploring the relationship between the former pharmaceutical giant and “The Happiest Place on Earth.”
As residents of Southwest Michigan, many of us have probably spent a day or two strolling the grounds of the Gilmore Car Museum in Hickory Corners and may recall The Gnome-Mobile display from the 1967 Disney film of the same name as well as other Disney memorabilia there.
Courtesy of the Coit Museum
What most of us probably don’t remember is that the Upjohn Co. had a prominent presence in the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California. What was called the Upjohn Pharmacy graced Disneyland’s Main Street from the park’s opening day in 1955 until the pharmacy’s closure in 1970. And what virtually nobody knows is that the pharmacy’s more than 1,000-piece collection of antique apothecary artifacts now resides in a museum in Tucson, Arizona.
But Stephen Hall has managed to weave these histories together in his book, A Spoonful of Sugar: The Story of the Upjohn Pharmacy in Disneyland, published by The Old Mill Press in January. The 136-page book documents not only the physical journey of what Hall calls the Upjohn Pharmacy’s “terrific, world-class” collection but also personal and professional tales of Walt Disney and Donald S. Gilmore, who joined the Upjohn Co. in 1929 and served as chairman and CEO from 1953 to 1961.
“I never set out to write a book,” says Hall, former director of the Coit Museum of Pharmacy & Health Services at the University of Arizona. “This was a passion project. This book has not only a lot about Disney, but also about Upjohn, Don Gilmore and the history of pharmacy — all threaded together.”
Mostly forgotten history
In 2012, Hall began working with the artifacts from the Upjohn Pharmacy as an unpaid graduate student at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he was studying library science and volunteering at what was then the school’s History of Pharmacy Museum (now Coit Museum of Pharmacy & Health Sciences).
Piece by piece, Hall delicately unboxed dozens of crates’ worth of artifacts that had comprised the former Upjohn display at Disneyland. Although he had no background in pharmacy, he became enchanted by the beautiful handmade and hand-painted items. Most of the collection’s pieces date from the 1860s to 1910 and were “genuine apothecary antiques, not fabricated for Disneyland,” says Hall. Even when the park opened in 1955, these items were considered antiques.
“I was the first person to have laid eyes on this world-class collection in 40 years,” Hall says.
After securing a paid position as curator and caretaker of this antique collection, Hall spent the next 10 years researching the collection and ascertaining many facts about it and how it came to be.
Turns out that Walt Disney and Donald Gilmore, then-chairman of the Upjohn Co., were personal friends. They were neighbors and lawn-bowling partners in the winter months in California and often corresponded. In fact, The Gnome Mobile movie set and car on display at the Gilmore Car Museum were personal gifts from Disney to the museum. However, Hall’s research uncovered that the Upjohn Pharmacy’s inclusion in Disneyland was actually the result of an independent idea from Upjohn’s then-marketing director Jack Gauntlett, who had heard about the theme park and worked to have the Upjohn Co. become a corporate sponsor.
Disneyland’s Upjohn Pharmacy, located at the corner of Main and Center streets, on the way to Sleeping Beauty Castle, involved two parts. The first was “a display of a turn-of-the-century apothecary,” says Hall. The second part showcased the Upjohn Co. of the 1950s, with photos of its buildings in Portage, including Building 41, the manufacturing facility made famous again worldwide in 2020–21 for its production of a Covid-19 vaccine by Pfizer Inc., a company that succeeded Upjohn.
The Disneyland pharmacy also displayed Upjohn’s mid-century offerings, including Unicap vitamins. Although it was not an operational pharmacy, Hall says, “two licensed pharmacists worked at the Upjohn Pharmacy, and they had to have the most fun pharmacy job in the world, being at Disneyland every day.”
According to Hall’s research, Disneyland visitors during that time best remember receiving souvenir bottles of Unicap vitamins and seeing a jar of live leeches on the pharmacy’s counter that was a symbolic nod to medical practices of the 19th century.
The Upjohn Pharmacy remained at Disneyland until 1970, when it was dismantled and donated to the National Science Museum of Southern California, now known as the California Science Center.
“As far as I can tell, the museum in California never displayed it,” says Hall. The items remained there for four decades, until Hall’s predecessor, Richard Wiedhopf, then-curator of the History of Pharmacy Museum, requested the items in 2008. Wiedhopf remembered the Disneyland display from his childhood and wished to have the items back on public view.
While the former Upjohn Pharmacy building at Disneyland now operates as a gift shop, it still whispers of its past — in the building’s corner is a “non-descript window that has four names, including E.G. Upjohn (a physician who established the medical division of the Upjohn Co. in 1937 and served as president of the company from 1953 to 1962 and as chairman of the board from 1962 to 1969) and Don Gilmore,” says Hall. “It’s a bit of an Easter egg to find that!”
And it was only one of hundreds of such discoveries by Hall during his research, which by 2018 had grown exponentially.
“This book is an example of scope creep,” says Hall. “My initial research was so that I could do my job, but I just became really interested and wrote a 15-page paper for an academic journal. During a couple rounds of peer review, with others asking questions, I got to 60 pages of content and wasn’t even close to actually telling the full story. Then I realized this is actually much bigger than I thought it was.”
So, he decided to write his book, thinking, “I have all this information, and there is nobody in a better position than I am to be able to tell this story. Nothing has ever been written about this, and Disney is so huge.”
Back on display
Thanks to a large endowment from the Coit family to create the Coit Museum in 2022, the Upjohn Pharmacy once again has a permanent display.
“When we first displayed the Upjohn Pharmacy pieces in 2014, it was just a display case, but, thanks to this generous gift, we were able to build a single, central home for the Upjohn display at the museum,” says Hall.
The current display is remarkably similar to the original but with a slightly larger floor plan. It has become “the crown jewel at the Coit Museum,” Hall says. “It is the hook that makes everyday people want to visit a pharmacy museum.”
A full-circle moment for Hall was meeting a man who was in Tucson for a reunion on the 50th anniversary of his graduation from the University of Arizona and who was also an Upjohn and then Pfizer Inc. employee. Having retired, the man still met monthly for breakfast with his former coworkers.
Hall says the man approached him and said, “We solved the mystery. For decades, all of us retirees had wondered what had happened to the pharmacy at Disneyland. I can’t wait to tell everyone at the next breakfast that all of our Upjohn display is now in Arizona!”
“It almost brought me to tears,” says Hall. “Many other people remember seeing this as kids visiting Disneyland, and it is very cool for them to see it again.”
Although Hall left the museum in 2022, his heart was still set on publishing the story of the Upjohn Pharmacy.
“I was surprised to keep discovering how big of a story this was,” says Hall. “The more I dug into this, the more I realized this was a much bigger narrative, with so many unexpected directions and rabbit holes. I hope that the reader will enjoy being surprised too.”
