JOSE: My father came with no money whatsoever. He was lucky enough to have an insurance policy that was worth $4,000. And with that, he went into business. I work in that store in the daytime.

HATTIE: Right.

JOSE: My father work at the store during the whole day. When I finished, I went home, ate--you know, my wife cooked. And then my wife and I would go to the store and we'd stay there until the store closes.

HATTIE: So we have an 18-hour day.

JOSE: Yeah, it was from opening until closing to opening that store and closing this one. And that was going on seven days a week. I remember in those years, our entertainment Sunday was to get in the car and do our deliveries that we had during Saturday and Sunday. And we had to deliver to the customers.

HATTIE: But you'd get out in the fresh air.

JOSE: So the whole family got in the car and started doing deliveries. I hear--and I keep hearing stories that people went to him and said, you know, `I cannot pay you for this.' And, you know, that's very emotional.

HATTIE: Right. But he would give them their medication because they needed it...

JOSE: Right. Right.

HATTIE: ...and he would let them pay him later. And maybe he never got paid. JOSE: I always had a dream to have a drugstore chain. That was a dream.

HATTIE: It wasn't a drugstore. It was a drugstore chain.

JOSE: Chain. And to expand and to grow. I always wanted that. I always knew that. I had no doubt in my mind that that's what I wanted.

HATTIE: OK.

JOSE: So we started. We started in that little store. We moved that store three times making it bigger. I went to school and got my pharmacy license.

HATTIE: Your pharmacy license.

JOSE: My brother also went to school and got his pharmacy license. We started working and, you know, we were putting in long hours, long days. It was what we liked. It never really seemed that hard to work. I mean, we worked there from opening till whatever, and it seemed so normal. And then, we decided to open the second store. That was hard, that transition from the first to the second. There was a lot of sleepless nights.