t hitMarcia Malone Slaven was born in Grafton, West Virginia on July 17, 1932. In 1950, she enrolled at West Virginia University after graduating from Grafton High School. She was a student at WVU’s School of Pharmacy. In 1950, pharmacy was not a usual major for women. She became a member of the Iota Chapter of Alpha Xi Delta. According to her obituary, she “made lifelong friendships with her sorority sisters.”
In a way, she was following in the footsteps of her older sister Emily Malone Glaser, also an Alpha Xi at WVU and the 2000th registered pharmacist in West Virginia. The fact that their father, Paul E. Malone, was also a pharmacist, might have entered their choice of career.
After graduation, she returned to Grafton to work at Malone’s Drug and Chemical Company, which was started by her father. When her father died on June 23, 1953, at the age of 55, she assumed many of his responsibilities.
On November 29, 1958, at the Shrine of the Blessed Sacrament in Washington, DC, she married Maynard D. Slaven. He was a member of Alpha Sigma Phi and a 1958 graduate of WVU’s School of Pharmacy. They had two sons.
Malone’s Drug Store was a fixture in Grafton and it served the community. It hit the one millionth prescription filled mark in the 1960s. The Slaven’s kept the store open for as long as they could and although it survived for more than 50 years, it closed in the early 1980s. The Slavens also owned Medical Arts Pharmacy in Morgantown.
According to her obituary:
Following the store’s closure, Marcia was the longest-serving pharmacist in charge at Grafton City Hospital, a multiple-decades long record that is unlikely to be equaled. She wrote, along with Maynard, the drug formulary for the institution, a massive undertaking that gave instructions for drugs approved for patients. During her decades of service to the hospital, she also served as a clinical instructor for the WVU College of Pharmacy and guided many future professionals through the processes of checking for medication errors, preparing hyperalimentation (artificial nutrition) treatments, and handling toxic chemotherapy preparations. She was, by all accounts, a consummate teacher and a detail-oriented but sympathetic instructor.
Marcia Slaven was an active member of the Grafton community and served many civic, business and professional organizations. She died on Dec. 19, 2022 at the age of 90.
