DRUGS: Quiz Kid

Small, dark Lewis Judah Ruskin was a drugstore stockboy in Chicago when his father gave him a cryptic warning: “You’ll never be successful; ambitious men never are.” Lewis shrugged, and set out to become the “General Motors of the drug and cosmetic industries.”

Last week, 25 years later and $10 million richer, Lewis Ruskin was well on his way. He wound up a deal that made him one of the top powder-&-perfume men in the U.S. The deal: a 30-year contract with the Evelyn Westall Co. of New York (White Shoulders, Menace and Gay Diversion perfumes). For the “world sales rights” (virtual ownership), Ruskin will pay Westall $600,000, promises to buy $30 million worth of goods from the company during the next 30 years. From his new eminence, he curled a lip at the big names in perfumery, said: “Who is Chanel? They sell less than $1,000,000 worth of perfume a year.”

The Small Town King. Young (42) Mr. Ruskin, no violet for modesty, attributes his success to his sharp, morning-glory wits. He likes to remember that he graduated from eighth grade at the age of ten years and nine months, from high school at 14 (“I would have been a quiz kid”). He became an apprentice at Chicago’s high-class, high-priced Sargent’s drugstore (today he owns half of it). He quit to take a crack at almost everything else, even spent 18 months in Italy studying to be an opera tenor, eventually decided that he was a druggist after all.

With $5,000 he had saved, he formed the North American Pharmacal Co. (drug products) in Chicago. Three years later he prospected a new field: the small-town drugstore. He dazzled the outlanders of Sterling, Ill. with a garish, big-city drugstore, complete with huge drug and cosmetic departments, a well-stocked food section. It was such a hit that he moved into five other towns, now has a chain of 54 stores in five states (Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa and Minnesota).

Growing Pains. As king of the small-town drugstore, he found that the most lucrative end of the drug business was selling cosmetics. He decided it might be even more profitable to make his own. So he bought Chen Yu, big-selling “class” nail lacquers, for $2 million. When Chen Yu grossed $10.7 million in 1944, Ruskin bought or formed nine other cosmetic companies, including three in England. Now he is dickering for eight French companies.

This year his drug and cosmetic business should gross $24 million. Next year he expects to see it hit $36 million. But he yawns like an idle lily at the idea that his record is a rags-to-riches one. Says he: “The Alger story is a bore.”