Robert L. McNeil Jr., 94, a third-generation pharmacist who in the 1950s played a crucial role marketing the new drug Tylenol, which was manufactured at his family’s laboratory and has since become one of the world’s bestselling over-the-counter painkillers, died of a heart ailment May 20 at his home in Wyndmoor, Pa.
Mr. McNeil was a just out of pharmacy school in 1938 when he joined McNeil Laboratories, the Philadelphia-based company his grandfather had founded in 1879. Originally a neighborhood drugstore, it had morphed by then into a business marketing drugs directly to hospitals and doctors.
In 1955, Tylenol Elixir for Children hit the shelves. It was sold in a box shaped like a fire engine and marketed with the slogan “for little hotheads.”
The following year, Mr. McNeil rose to become board chairman of McNeil Laboratories. In 1959, he and his brother, Henry, sold the company to Johnson & Johnson, which produced bandages and other health products, for more than $30 million in stock.
Full story Robert L. McNeil Jr., 94, dies; third-generation pharmacist marketed Tylenol