New Pharmacist: “This Is Home”

DAYTON - The last time Holly Warner left the Touchet Valley, she cried for days.

She was barely 11 and liv­ing with her mom in Dixie, which she says was a tom­boy's paradise. There was a creek close to her house on a 20-acre farm. The property had an orchard, three vegetable gardens and a treehouse. Warner was an avid horseback rider. In the winter, she'd hit the slopes at Bluewood. She liked walk­ing to school, which had just 40 kids kindergarten through 5th grade. "I loved it here. It was the best place to grow up," she says. "It felt safe." They had moved there four years earlier to be with her mom's new husband, a commercial airline pilot who flewin and out of Walla Walla.

But that year, the couple was getting a divorce and Warner's mom decided to move back to her hometown of San Antonio, Texas.

It should come as no sur­prise that Warner, 34, who has just taken a position as the third pharmacist at Elk Drug in Dayton, has no plans to budge now that she's back.

Warner replaces Pam Melton, whose personal circumstances forced her to move back to Spokane. Warner joins Sean Thurston, who has plans to take over the business from Paul Hen­drickson. Hendrickson, who has been the valley's pharma­cist for more than 34 years, plans to gradually retire.

"We're extremely fortu­nate to have someone from the area who has a passion for small-town pharmacy and intends to make this commu­nity her home," Hendrickson said. Before she returned to Dayton's doorstep, Warner lived and worked in some interesting places.

Take Swedish Hospital in Seattle, where she had her first job out of pharmacy school prescribing drugs for patients of the pediatrics wing - sometimes even pre­mature infants.

Or the more recent posi­tion she had as pharmacist for a small chain of drug stores in the Virgin Islands, where she said no outsider - no matter how long they lived there - was ever really accepted as a "local."

She calls those experi­ences "intense" and "chal­lenging." But none of them were as inspiring to her as her new position at Elk Drug. "I'm excited to go to work every day, and I've never felt that way before," War­ner explains. "I've always fantasized about living in a town where I can get to know most people and know their stories."

Warner's own story as a pharmacist began when she started to attend Pharmacy School at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2004. She had received a Bachelor's of Science in Biology from the UW two years earlier.

After she graduated in 2008, she took the shifts at Swedish. The position as pe­diatric pharmacist was chal­lenging because prescribing dosages for children is much more sensitive than preparing drugs for adults. She had to do a lot of research to come up with the right answers for almost every prescription.

In the spring of last year, Warner and her partner Will Anderson, who was the ex­ecutive chef at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse in Seattle, de­cided to pursue their fantasy of living on a sunny island and moved to St. Thomas, where Warner worked as a pharmacist.

But island living soon began to feel claustrophobic to the couple who found its lifestyle of constant tempera­tures, circular island roads and $8 gallons of mainland milk "limiting." Anderson was actually the first to find a job in the Walla Walla area. He got a job as a full-time chef at the Backstage Bistro in March. Warner found out about the opening at Elk, which had al­ready been filled by Melton, so she went to work part time at the Medicine Shoppe in Walla Walla until she learned her predecessor would be leaving.

The couple hopes to get married and move to the Touchet Valley to embrace a country lifestyle with a small farm house on the Touchet where they can have horses, chickens and a vegetable garden. "My mission is to settle down, dig into some place and create the life I want to live during the next 20 years," Warner says. "This is home now."