Medicine was the LaBranche family business for three generations.
Emile J. LaBranche Sr. opened LaBranche’s Drug Store in 1907 at 716 N. Claiborne Ave. According to the Amistad Research Center, the store helped other Black pharmacists and medical doctors start their careers
A graduate of Straight College and Meharry Medical College’s pharmacy school, LaBranche Sr. served on Dillard University and Flint-Goodridge Hospital boards of trustees in the early 1930s, helping to raise funds for a new hospital.
Emile J. LaBranche Jr., born in 1919, remembered living above the drug store. “I was born on N. Claiborne Avenue,” he told a Treme Oral History Project interviewer in 1993. “My father bought a new building at Orleans and Claiborne in 1922-23, so I [also] lived above that pharmacy. I was actively involved in the business even as a child.”
A 1939 graduate of Xavier University’s School of Pharmacy, LaBranche Jr. earned a MBA from Atlanta University in 1941. According to a Times-Picayune obituary, he earned a Bronze Star while stationed in the Southwest Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1971 with the rank of lieutenant colonel.
After the war, Labranche Jr. became assistant manager at the drugstore, working there 23 years. In 1946, he joined Xavier’s pharmacy faculty. He taught during the day and worked in the drugstore at night. He retired from Xavier in 1985. He died in 2009.
Following in the footsteps of his uncle Hernandez LaBranche, Emile J. LaBranche III became a medical doctor. He graduated from St. Augustine High School and Xavier before earning his medical degree from Louisiana State University School of Medicine in 1984. Specializing in family medicine, LaBranche III practiced in New Orleans East for more than 28 years, his obituary states. He died in 2017 at 70.
It all started with LaBranche’s Drug Store. As the Times-Picayune’s obituary states: “The pharmacy, which had Christmas and Easter window displays and a soda fountain where youngsters with good report cards were rewarded with free ice cream cones, was an integral part of the community that thrived along that thoroughfare until Interstate 10 was built in the late 1960s.”
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