In 1958, Lexington pharmacist William K. “Buddy” Wheeler opened what he once said he thought would be “a small drugstore that I could operate for a few years, then move on to having a big store.”
Instead, Wheeler Pharmacy became a Romany Road landmark that remains in operation 66 years later. Wheeler, 89, died Thursday.
Wheeler sold the business to his daughter, pharmacist Claire Wheeler Lewis, in 2020, but he remained very active behind the scenes.
“He was back in his office crunching numbers,” Wheeler Lewis said in an interview. “He was there and telling all of us what to do.”
Indeed, Wheeler Lewis wrote in a Facebook post that her dad “told me 2 weeks ago to replace the carpet in the pharmacy department because he noticed it was worn. He even told me that my mother would pay for it.”
Wheeler was a 1956 graduate of the University of Kentucky College of Pharmacy.
He told former Herald-Leader columnist Don Edwards in 1988 that he started his business “on a shoestring,” with “$20,000 in borrowed money and a line of credit from a Cincinnati drug company,” Edwards wrote.