Community healing

Few 12-year olds in the projects dream about owning a pharmacy, but Sylester (Syl) Flowers recognized early on it would be his ticket out of poverty.

“I started working in the neighborhood pharmacy in grade school,” recalls Flowers, who was born in Pittsburgh. “The pharmacist didn’t have kids, and he treated me like a son. By the time I was in high school I was supervising the soda fountain and ordering supplies.”

Encouraged by his boss to go to pharmacy school, Flowers won a scholarship to Howard University. After graduating he served in the military and in 1961 settled in San Francisco, where he landed his first job in a hospital pharmacy. The pull of having his own business won out, and in 1964 he opened his first pharmacy in an African American neighborhood in Oakland, Calif.

“The pharmacist is the only health professional people don’t need an appointment to see,” he notes. Soon his pharmacy was the focal point of the community. A big man with a shaved head and an easygoing, affable manner, Flowers says he became “the go-to-man” in the neighborhood for a wide range of advice.

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“I was the pharmacist and also the neighborhood psychologist and social worker,” he says. “That store became my standard for how I conducted business.”

Within six years, Flowers owned a chain of pharmacies incorporated under the name Ramsell Corporation (the name of the San Francisco street where he lived). He credits his business success to the pharmacist who took him under his wing when he was a boy. “I learned how to run a pharmacy as a business,” Flowers explains.

Flowers’ credentials won him a contract with San Francisco’s Department of Mental Health. Besides providing methadone treatment at a community health center, he managed the paperwork required for the county, state and federal governments.

Building on that experience, Flowers secured a contract to manage outpatient prescription services for the city of San Francisco in 1982. At the time, his daughter, a student at UC-Berkeley, had just enrolled in a computer class. Flowers signed up for the class with her, getting a jump-start on his competition in information management control.

In 1992, the county of San Fran-cisco hired Ramsell to manage its AIDS Drugs Assistance Program (ADAP), a federal program providing free or low-cost HIV drugs to infected people with limited incomes. Flowers later won contracts to develop ADAP management systems for the states of California and Washington.

In March 2006, Flowers reorganized Ramsell as five businesses under the renamed parent company Ramsell Holding Corporation. It encompasses the Public Health Service Bureau, a pharmacy benefits administration organization serving AIDS patients in California and Washington; The Apothecary, which provides pharmacy services in Oakland; Purely Personal, a condom-distribution program; Ramsell IT, which monitors and administers health benefits programs; and Alta Tierra Properties, which invests in real estate.

Flowers’ son Eric, who joined the business in 1994, was named president of the Public Health Service Bureau. “I’ve got a bit of my father’s problem-solving bug and his same dogged determination,” says Eric. Father and son have the ambitious goal of centralizing the management of HIV benefits administration for the whole U.S.

“I have a personal stake in this epidemic,” says Syl, “because 40% of infected people are African American and Latino. The under-served always need additional help, and I’m a pharmacist who understands HIV. God planned me to be where I am now, and I love what I do.”

Deanne Stone is a business writer based in Berkeley, Calif.

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