Wheeler Pharmacy At 4401 Dowling St.

[Libbie]

Does anyone remember the old Wheeler Pharmacy? It was at 4401 Dowling, southeast corner with Wheeler. My mother used to take me there in the early nineteen fifties, after nursery school, for a BLT sandwich at their lunch counter. 

 

For decades, post-nursery school, it sat there, unchanged. I never had any reason to venture back into it, till one day, maybe in 1997, I stopped in. It was exactly as I remembered it: the old-fashioned soda fountain/lunch counter taking up the north wall; shelves full of drugstore stuff such as you could still see until not so long ago at the Buffalo Pharmacy and at the Avalon Drug; a pleasant oldish woman at the ornate, ancient cash register; and a very old gentleman seated in a chair in the center, watching the passing scene.

 

I had my small daughters with me, and I bought them each a popsicle. As I paid, I remarked to the lady that I hadn't been inside since about 1954. She said that the drugstore had been new then; it had belonged to the elderly gentleman seated nearby, her uncle. I remarked on the picturesque  cash register (The link below is to a picture of a reasonable faccimile, if memory serves):

http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0192/4284/products/m2800-1_1024x1024.jpg?v=1391026517 . She said

that it had stood them in good stead during a recent blackout. 

 

Not long after, it closed, changed hands, and went through several incarnations, including a stints as Global Pharmacy, Alternative Medicine and Pharmacy, and other businesses, each one resembling the old drugstore less and less.

 

I'm glad I went in that day in the late 1990s and ate popsicles with my little girls, seated on stools at the no-longer-operational lunch counter, and in memory I smelled the makings of a BLT sandwich and saw my mother out of the corner of my eye, on the stool next to my four-year-old self.