Panasci's career at Fay's mirrors evolution of industry. (Henry Panasci, owner of Fay's Drug Company Inc.) (Editorial)

Thirty-five years have passed since Henry Panasci opened his first drug store in upstate New York, disappointing family, raising eyebrows, confident that he was ready to run a drug chain. In so doing, he left the drug chain his uncle Carl would ultimately build into one of the region's most successful.

During the period from then until now, Panasci has built one of America's most successful and, more important, most exciting drug chains. More significant still, the successes and failures, trials and tribulations, adventures and setbacks that have marked Panasci's career running Fay's, have mirrored - and at times anticipated - the history of chain drug retailing in America in the last half of the 20th century.

Panasci has known the stunning successes that marked chain drug retailing in the 1960s and 1970s, the equally remarkable reversals borne of overstoring, willy-nilly growth and imprudent diversification that marked the …