South West Illinois News

For the love of Walgreens

John and Pat Fisher met on their first day of Walgreens new employee orientation, fell in love, got married and had a family. Now, nearly 39 years later, they’re retiring together, too.

John Fisher recalls the day—more specifically the moment—he first saw Pat Hogan. It was June 18, 1984, and she was a few steps ahead of him on their way to human resources to fill out W2 forms on their first day of orientation as Walgreens new hires.

“She was wearing a blue suit. I still remember that,” he says, smitten with Pat as much today as he was four decades ago.

As new additions to the Walgreens IT staff, John and Pat would get to know each other through eight intense weeks of training among a small, close-knit group, and develop a mutual friendship. But the foundation that would eventually lead to marriage and a family took longer to build. In fact, if not for John’s persistence, the relationship may have never taken root.

“I asked her out six different times, and she said no every time,” he recalled with a laugh. “But the seventh time she finally said yes, so I’m glad I kept at it.”

“It just took a bit of time,” Pat recalls. “He was outgoing, smart and a really nice guy, and at one point I realized he was growing on me, so after weeks of saying no I finally said yes. But I’m very happy that I did.”

After four years of dating while advancing their careers, John and Pat were married in 1988, and two children followed. In the years between, they helped grow a company. On Feb. 3, 2023, they retired, walking out the same doors they’d first walked through nearly 39 years ago, ending their careers at Walgreens the way they started them: together.

Brought together by fate

That their 14,109 days of working together, 34 years of marriage and two children happened at all is owed to a rather amazing twist of fate.

In the spring of 1984, fresh out of Illinois State University where she majored in computer science, Pat had already secured a Walgreens job offer in IT, but John, who had graduated from nearby Northern Illinois University, also with a computer science degree, was told while interviewing that the last entry level IT job had been filled. It wasn’t until several weeks later when one of the other people who had accepted an offer changed their mind and backed out that John got a call offering him the suddenly open position, which he quickly accepted.

And who was the person who turned down the offer that unwittingly opened the door for the two to meet? Pat’s college roommate.

“It was a few months after we started dating that we put the pieces of that story together,” says Pat. “And once we did, we’ve never stopped thinking about how incredible it was that if my roommate had decided to keep her original commitment to Walgreens, John and I never would have met, we never would have gotten married, never would have had our children, never would have had our careers or our friends or our life together. She didn’t know it at the time, but her decision ended up changing a lot of lives,” Pat says with a warm smile.

Building careers, a company, and a family

The couple joined Walgreens at the leading edge of a period of transformation and explosive growth, and had a direct hand in the company’s success, working on major software implementations that became the backbone of its retail and pharmacy operations.

It was a smaller company at a simpler time—before the Internet, email and cell phones—but both understood their work was contributing to something bigger.

“When we started, Walgreens had just opened its 1,000th store,” Pat recalls. “The company was still small enough that we were able to get regular exposure to senior leaders, and we absorbed everything we could from them. It was a great environment for a young person to be in to learn and grow a career.”

Walgreens became part of their family’s DNA. Their kids, Erin and Kyle, who were born in 1993 and 1995, respectively, attended the on-campus daycare center at the company’s headquarters in Deerfield, Illinois, occasionally came to the office with John and Pat, attended company holiday parties, and even appeared in several of the company’s marketing campaigns as young children.

Original source can be found here