Chuck Gin knew how to juggle.
With the help of the recent GI Bill, the World War II veteran was a student at the newly created University of Arizona College of Pharmacy, decades before it was renamed the R. Ken Coit College of Pharmacy. He balanced his job at a drugstore with helping his bride adjust to life in a new country. He worked shifts at his parents’ market, all while attending classes, completing homework and studying.
One spring morning in 1947, though, something had to give. Gin learned that his first child was born while he was in class. His professor sent him home from the lab, said his daughter, Katie Wong, the very one who provided the ultimate excused absence that day.
“I still don’t know how he accomplished all that he did,” she said of her father, who died in 2010 at the age of 86.
Chalk it up, perhaps, to being part of the Greatest Generation. Gin was a member of the first College of Pharmacy graduating class of 1950, most of whom had served their country and came back to attend school on the GI Bill. The college had just three faculty members and didn’t even have its own building. Classes were held in surplus army tents.
June 6, 2024, marked 80 years since the D-Day invasion on the beaches of France, when the Allies began liberating Europe during World War II. The success of D-Day and subsequent military operations increased the urgency and development of plans to reintegrate millions of veterans into civilian society.
New beginnings
On June 22, 1944, the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill, was signed by then President Franklin D. Roosevelt to provide returning veterans with money for education, loans, unemployment payments and job-finding assistance.
“Millions of men and women came out of uniform and went back into the workforce. The bill was a way to increase their employment and boost the economy, as well as give them their due because of their service,” said John Curatola, PhD, senior historian at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans and a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps.
The American soldiers returned home and integrated back into society. For many, that meant going to college, Curatola said. In 1947, World War II veterans accounted for nearly half of all college admissions. That was the same year the University of Arizona started its pharmacy program after a 23-year campaign led by a local pharmacist and the Arizona Pharmacy Association.
In that first pharmacy class of 25 students, 92% were WWII veterans, said Metta Lou Henderson, PhD, a Coit College of Pharmacy research professor and alumna.
Gin’s journey to pharmacy started in Canton, China, where he was born. Gin, the oldest of four, and his parents emigrated to the United States when he was 5. He enlisted in the Army after graduating from Tucson High School, where his typing skills kept him off the battlefield, Wong said. He was proud to serve his adopted country.
“He really loved America,” she said of her father. “He felt like it was his duty and an honor to join the military.”
After graduating from the U of A, Gin opened Emery Park United Drug Store, a fixture on Tucson’s southside for 35 years.
Growth of a college
Like Gin, Albert L. Picchioni, PhD, also served in WWII. After earning his Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy from the University of Montana in 1943, he served three years in the Army as a combat medic pharmacist. Picchioni – “Picc” to his buddies – rarely spoke about his wartime experiences, preferring to spare his family from stories like the time he peeked under a thick, green tarp blanketing the back of a cargo truck only to see endless stacks of soldiers’ bodies.
Picchioni became the first full-time professor of pharmacology at the U of A in 1952. In his 35-year career, Picchioni was an award-winning professor and served as interim dean and associate dean for academic affairs.
As a researcher, he studied neuropharmacology in epilepsy and toxicology. The Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center, which was the first of its kind in Arizona and among the first in the U.S., started with Picchioni at the helm. It provided help in poison emergencies – something that happened with alarming frequency in the 1950s when children got into household cleaning products that lacked chemical information. Along with other faculty volunteers, Picchioni would take turns answering a 24-hour hotline.
“He was like a superhero without a cape,” Joe Picchioni said of his father.
