By Emily J. Minor
In the days of scattered families — one kid in Boston, another in Seattle, the aging parents retired to Arizona — these people are downright odd.
“They all came back,” says the patriarch, Bill Strucker.
“I think they missed their mother.”
Perhaps.
But there is something else that has drawn all three of Strucker’s daughters home again, back to this place along the ocean with the ringing telephone and the familiar smell and the Fanny May candies stacked neatly in the front freezer. It’s the family business, Gulfstream Pharmacy Inc., where their dad has been the handsome, compassionate face behind the prescription counter since 1957.
So all-knowing is this guy that the customers have been known to call him Dr. Bill. He’s a pharmacist, of course, learning the profession back in the 1950s when pharmacists did things like grind and mix and measure. Bill Strucker’s daughter, Erin Craig, is the main pharmacist at the store now. But it’s Strucker himself who has the worn-out journal stuffed with old prescriptions for things like tooth powder and eye drops and Dr. Abbey’s Scalp Lotion.
He could probably mix you up some, in a real pinch.
Strucker, who’s 79 and still works every Saturday, came south from Erie, Pa., in the mid-1950s. He was a new, licensed pharmacist, determined to “come to Florida and strike out alone.”
But strike out he did not.
This stretch of A1A in Briny Breezes was a farm back then, with one building sticking out quite noticeably. Strucker said it was a small gift shop — the only thing between Palm Beach and Deerfield Beach except for two restaurants.
He leased the building in 1957, started a pharmacy and eventually hired his parents — they escaped the cold and retired to Florida. His dad was the delivery boy; his mother was the clerk.
These were the days of Sealtest ice cream and Whitman’s Chocolates and a whole section devoted to the latest line of Kodak cameras. Strucker and his wife, Virginia, raised their three girls here. Besides Craig, another daughter, Alison Goodridge, 33, eventually left to study elsewhere, but is back. She works part-time in the store. A third daughter, Elizabeth, is also local again. How has the store changed since the girls were young?
“It hasn’t, really,” says Craig.
“The smell is still the same,” says Goodridge.
And therein lies the beauty of Gulfstream Pharmacy.
It’s bigger now. Years ago, Strucker added on, changing the configuration of the store so the pharmacy counter is off the left. The old typewriter that Strucker used to type out his prescriptions is long gone. Instead, there are four computers and three DSL lines. And getting reimbursed for a prescription purchase is a complicated tangle of bureaucratic formulas that never seems to benefit the little guy. Strucker said it was really about 10 years ago that the big chains started squeezing out shops like his.
But, still, there’s something oh-so special about coming in here, sick as a dog, and having Erin or Tom or Alison or Mr. Strucker himself behind the counter, asking about your family, knowing what you want before you even have to ask.
“This business has survived because of his personality and service,” says Tom Craig, Erin’s husband, who learned to run the pharmacy under his father-in-law’s tutelage.
“Everybody loves him.”
A family business is a special commitment, and it makes for some pretty good reminiscing: Strucker used to mix the compounds for the polo horses when the grounds were closer to the ocean. He’s been summoned for almost every kind of emergency, including an attempted suicide. And one time a customer’s artificial eyeball kept, well, falling out.
“He told the eyeball story at the dinner table,” Alison says. And while all that is well and good, it’s the customers who have kept this special place so special. Customers like Natalie Latimer, who has been coming here for 20 years.
“Oh, my goodness,” she said one recent morning, a greeting card fluttering in her hand. “You can get anything here. Even jewelry.”
And perhaps some scalp lotion, if it’s a Saturday and a certain Mr. Strucker is in the mood.
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