By JOSEPH B. NADEAU

WOONSOCKET — After taking a year off, the Greater Woonsocket Hall of Fame Committee is back at work and ready to add three well-known figures to the group of noted area residents honored in the foyer of Woonsocket High School.

The late Viola Berard, a well-known community activist who gave more than five decades of service to the area, will be named as the 2007 selection to the hall, and Stanley Goldstein and his late brother, Sidney, founders of CVS, will be inducted as the 2008 hall selections.
The plaques and biographies honoring the inductees will be unveiled during a ceremony at Woonsocket High School on Thursday, beginning at 7 p.m., Romeo Berthiaume, retired chair of the Social Studies Department and Hall of Fame Committee, noted this week.
The plaques are meant to provide students at Woonsocket High School with examples of area residents achieving great success in life, noted for heroic acts, or who served their community in an exemplary and noted way.
“Obviously, Viola, as a community activist certainly deserves the honor,” Berthiaume said of Berard, who died in 2006 at the age of 90.
Not only did Berard help establish the Northern Rhode Island Community Mental Health Center in Woonsocket — a role honored with the naming of its headquarters on Cumberland Street as the Viola M. Berard Center — but she also worked tirelessly for local youth under many other hats. She was involved in groups such as Connecting for Children and Families, the Rhode Island Crusade for Children, the Rhode Island Council of Community Centers, the Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, CYO, and Volunteers in Action, a statewide program matching volunteers to needed tasks. She served on the Woonsocket School Committee from 1957 to 1965, serving as chairwoman of the panel for four years. In later life, she was a strong advocate for seniors and lobbied their causes frequently at the State House.
 In 1996 she won public recognition of her long years of service with her selection for ABC Channel 6 “Freedom Torch Award,” and was the 1995 Woonsocket Senior Center’s Senior Citizen of the Year. The Senior Citizen award was presented to her by Mayor Francis L. Lanctot and Charles B. Ryan, executive director of the Retired Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP).
 Berard was a native of San Antonio, Texas, and became a young widow during World War II when her first husband, Raymond F. Tucker, died in a plane crash. She met her second husband, the late Dr. J. Charles Berard, while he worked as a dentist at Langley Field and she worked at the base hospital assisting in the discharge of returning servicemen. The couple relocated to Woonsocket in 1945 where Berard raised her four children, Dan, Kennis, Norman and Charlene, and became active in Holy Family Church and her many other civic endeavors.
Berard was named Woonsocket Kiwanis Club Citizen of the year in 1976 and was also named the Woonsocket Business and Professional Women’s Club Woman of the Year and Quota Club Member of the Year.
She was selected as Grand Marshal of the Autumnfest Parade for the 1995 edition of the city’s annual Columbus weekend festival.
 Stanley and Sidney Goldstein were also obvious choices for the Hall of Fame, according to Berthiaume, given their success in taking a family-owned health and beauty products distributing business and building it into a nationwide drugstore chain that continues expand as the nation’s largest pharmacy chain today.
“The Goldsteins’ success in business speaks for itself. They founded CVS, a worldwide corporation with its headquarters right here in Woonsocket,” he said.
The Goldsteins grew up on Dulude Avenue with their brothers, Larry and Jason, while their parents, Israel and Etta, owned the infant Mark Steven distribution company to which CVS can trace its current success.
The Goldsteins would move to the city’s North End in the mid-1950s, sending Stanley off to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania following his graduation from Dean Academy in Franklin.
 Sidney also graduated from Dean Academy, now Dean College, and remained active in local civic affairs for much his life. He was a trustee of Woonsocket Hospital for many years, a board member for the former Rhode Island Hospital Trust National Bank, and a member of the Woonsocket Redevelopment Agency that was created to rebuild the Social Flatlands area after devastating floods in the 1950s. 
Sidney and Stanley co-founded Consumer Value Stores in 1963 to transition away from their business’ original role of supplying racks of health and beauty aids to the small family-owned corner convenience stores then being replaced by larger supermarkets and chain drugstores.
The pharmacy chain’s success prompted the Melville Corp. to acquire the company and add it to holdings such as Marshalls clothing stores, Kaybee Toys, Wilson Leathers, Bob’s Stores, Thom McAn and other specialty retailers. The Goldsteins remained involved in the CVS and Mark Steven operations, Sidney as President and Treasurer of Mark Steven and executive vice president of CVS, before his retirement in 1987. Stanley became president of the CVS division and then CEO before heading off to duty as president of Melville Corp. 1985. He handed off his CVS roles to Thomas Ryan in 1999 and left Melville’s board of directors in 2006.
The company’s growth also benefited Woonsocket. The Goldsteins constructed a new 150,000-square-foot Mark Steven warehouse building in 1969 as the first occupant of the city’s Founder’s Drive Industrial Park off Cumberland Hill Road, and in the 1980s built their new CVS headquarters as the anchor of the city’s new Highland Industrial Park at the Woonsocket-Cumberland line.
CVS continues to grow with its stores now numbering over 6,100 outlets, Berthiaume noted.
Stanley, 72, now resides in Providence and is currently devoting his energies to The Big Picture Co., a non-profit education reform organization that developed the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center. Big Picture began opening schools outside Rhode Island in 2002 and has a goal of creating 50 schools around the country, Berthiaume said.
The new inductees will join the likes of Edward Harris, an 1850s city industrialist and friend of Abraham Lincoln, Mayor and city reformer Kevin K. Coleman, baseball Hall of Fame members Napolean Lajoie and Charles L. “Gabby” Hartnett, World War II flying ace John Godfrey, opera singer Eileen Farrell and former Call owner and publisher Andrew Palmer, the 2006 inductee.
Admission to the unveilings is free and open to the general public, Berthiaume noted, and refreshments will be served during a reception to follow.
The Greater Hall of Fame Committee includes, Philippe Simonini, Social Studies Supervisor for Woonsocket Secondary Schools, Berthiaume, Phyllis Thomas, president of the Woonsocket Historical Society, Raymond Bacon, co-manager of the Museum of Work and Culture and a retired teacher, William Marrah and Chris Benetti, also retired teachers, Darin Cooper of the Central Office, and Dr. Lourenco Garcia, high school principal.
 Sponsors of the Hall of Fame include Woonsocket High School, Club Par-X and Club Lafayette.