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Stuart Wheeler, Buddy Wheeler and Claire Wheeler Love (left to right) are several of many Wheeler family members who have kept the family business running for six decades. Photo by Hattie Quick
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Dubbed the “unofficial mayor” of the “Village of Romany,” longtime regular Jim Mayberry still makes his way to his favorite breakfast spot around six days a week, despite being legally blind. Photo by Hattie Quick
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Lynne Eckmann (left), who directs Wheeler Pharmacy’s home delivery service, dubbed Home Connection, prepared prescription boxes for clients. Assisting is Nahed Qasem, a pharmacy technician. Photo by Reggie Beehner
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Haley Poston helped fill prescriptions at Wheeler Pharmacy. Poston, 24, from London, Kentucky, and a student at the University of Kentucky College of Pharmacy, was nearing the end of her six-week internship at the pharmacy. Photo by Reggie Beehner
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Chelcie Everman, a pharmacy technician, took call-in prescriptions. Photo by Reggie Beehner
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Stuart Wheeler, who has managed Wheeler Pharmacy for some 28 years, chats with customer Mike Warner, who said he’d been coming to Wheeler’s since 1963, when he first discovered the milkshakes. Photo by Reggie Beehner
At the 1950s-era Fountain at Wheeler Pharmacy on Romany Road, where a close-knit group of regulars convene most mornings for a cup of coffee and a hot breakfast, one topic reigns supreme.
“UK [University of Kentucky] sports is the No. 1 topic,” said Wheeler regular Joe Gentry, who figures he’s been doing his part to liven up conversation around the U-shaped Formica counter for the better part of 30 years.
“During football season, we’re talking about football. And during basketball season, we’re talking basketball,” Gentry continued. “When it’s off season, we’re talking about how we’ll be better next year.”
Thanks to its status as a favorite hangout of UK coaches – especially longtime regular Joe B. Hall – Wheeler’s is practically hallowed ground for Big Blue Nation. ESPN even filmed Coach John Calipari having breakfast there in 2012.
Lonny Demaree, an IBM retiree and Wheeler regular for nearly 20 years, is among those who have found the hidden gem to be a great insider source for UK sports info – in fact, he sometimes uses info and observations gleaned from conversations at Wheeler’s as a boon to his second career as a writer for Kentucky Sports Report, where he is known by many as “the mayor of Kentucky football.”
Demaree isn’t the only “mayor” around Wheeler’s counter, however – Jim Mayberry is known among his Wheeler Fountain buddies as “the unofficial mayor of the Village of Romany,” and they even presented him with a custom-made hat to prove it. Mayberry has lived on Romany Road for much of his life, recently moving to an apartment complex across the parking lot from Wheeler’s. Now legally blind, he still estimates that he makes his way to his favorite breakfast joint about six days a week.
“I can see well enough to get here,” he said with a chuckle.
Other common topics among the breakfast counter range from politics to pinpointing grammar mistakes in the daily newspaper. During heated political seasons, patrons sometimes lightheartedly abandon their regular seats to position Democrats on one side of the counter and Republicans on the other – but most days you’ll find the motley crew intermingled, despite their opposing views or other differences in their daily lives.
“Sometimes we disagree on stuff just for the sake of a good discussion,” said longtime regular Guy Adams.
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While the exact lineup tends to shift a bit from day to day, the cast of characters remains largely the same at the Wheeler Plarmacy Fountain breakfast counter, where regulars gather every morning to talk sports, politics and more. Photo by Reggie Beehner
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Ricky Camp (right), a cook at Wheeler’s for 14 years, shared a laugh with his longtime colleague Shakara Hardin, who’s worked at the store for nine years. Photo by Reggie Beehner
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Lee Tolliver, who has worked as a cook and waitress at Wheeler’s for more than 20 years, delivered a breakfast order to customers at the counter. Photo by Reggie Beehner
A Chevy Chase Landmark
The Fountain has been a vital part of the “everyone’s welcome here” vibe that has helped make Wheeler Pharmacy a Chevy Chase touchstone for six decades. William “Buddy” Wheeler opened the pharmacy in January 1958, as a 23-year-old with a newly minted UK College of Pharmacy degree in hand. His was one of the first businesses established on Romany Road – in fact, at the time he opened the business, he found himself fielding questions about why he decided to build a drug store “so far out of town.”
He laughs about that memory now. Six decades later, business is still going strong, and Wheeler, who just turned 84, still pops in to the pharmacy for a few hours almost daily.
“They call me the vice president of special tasks now,” Wheeler said recently, referring to his kids, who have taken over the business’s day-to-day operations. (Adams calls the Wheelers the “first family of Chevy Chase.”)
The business is family-run in the most literal sense, with Wheeler’s four children each having his or her own designated role to oversee: Oldest son, Kendall, who retired from IBM, now helps with project management and IT; son Stuart is the store and Fountain manager; daughter Margaret is a CPA who handles the accounting; and daughter Claire, herself a pharmacist, manages the pharmacy operation and also owns and runs her own business, Wheeler’s Custom Compounding, across the street. Kendall’s wife, Tammy, is the pharmacy’s bookkeeper, and all nine of Wheeler’s grandchildren have worked in the store.
The job specialization has been one key to the business’s success.
“Having defined roles is why it works,” said Stuart Wheeler.
Claire Wheeler Love agreed: “I wouldn’t say we’ve never stepped on each other’s toes – that’s going to happen from time to time,” Love said. “But at the end of the day we know that while this is business, we’re family first.”
And when Love talks about being family first, she’s talking not just about her blood relatives, but rather the larger Wheeler Pharmacy family. Many employees have been with the business for decades.
Wheeler regulars know they’ll most likely be greeted by Brenda Brown’s bright beaming smile behind the Wheeler storefront counter. They know when they take their seats at the Fountain, it’s Ricky Camp, Lee Tolliver or Sha’Kara “Shaq” Hardin who’ll greet them, oftentimes without even needing to ask their order, since they’ve got it memorized. They know that longtime pharmacist Wayne Bryant – who still works part-time, though he officially retired last year after 45 years with Wheeler’s – might be the one filling their prescription, while asking what their kids are up to.
“One of our customers said once that Wheeler’s is like Cheers without the beers,” Stuart Wheeler said. “Everybody knows everybody here.”
It’s that intimate connection with the people they serve that sets Wheeler’s apart from corner chain pharmacies, said Love.
“Our family and our staff tend to live in this area. They go to church nearby. Their kids go to school here and play ball at Ecton Park,” she said. “When customers come in, we know them not just from Wheeler’s but from all these other walks of life as well.”
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Claire Wheeler Love, daughter of Buddy Wheeler, who founded the iconic neighborhood pharmacy 60 years ago, owns and manages her own business across the street. Called Wheeler’s Custom Compounding, it makes customized medications. Love also helps oversee the pharmacy at Wheeler’s. Photo by Reggie Beehner
Serving the Community
Over the years, Wheeler’s business model has evolved and expanded to best meet the needs of its customers.
“I am just always thinking ahead, trying to see what’s coming down the road,” Buddy Wheeler said recently, reflecting on six decades of business ownership.
It was that mentality that led him to add a compounding service to the pharmacy in the late 1990s – which Love now owns and operates as a separate entity – and in the mid-2000s, to establish a medication management program called Wheeler’s Home Connection, which provides individualized medication counseling and prescription home delivery for enrollees, most of them homebound seniors. More recently, the pharmacy responded to the loss of the nearby Romany Road Kroger by adding a milk refrigerator and expanding its grocery inventory to help provide needed staples for area residents.
Wheeler’s Custom Compounding, owned by Love since 2012, is in the final stages of an expansion that has more than doubled its size, just across Romany Road from the original Wheeler Pharmacy. When the renovation is complete, the compounding pharmacy will include two dedicated labs, as well as a full line of products available to walk-in customers, including pharmaceutical-grade vitamins and supplements, hemp and CBD oil products, essential oils and skin care and veterinary products. Among these products are many small lines created locally – such as DappleUp, an all-natural dog/horse shampoo developed by Stuart’s daughter Katherine Wheeler, and Focal Force, a pre-workout supplement created by former resident pharmacist Alex Brewer. Plans to launch a series of educational health workshops for the public are in the works as well.
It’s the latest iteration in the family’s long-term goal of providing an array of services that help make life in Chevy Chase as ideal – and idyllic – as it can be.
“Dad found that as a solo entrepreneur all those years, no one was holding him back. There wasn’t corporate red tape to deal with,” Love said. “If he wanted to make a change, he just did it.”
Those personal touches have created a unique and authentic local ambiance that can be hard to attain – and one that has kept its regulars loyal and consistent for more than 60 years. Daily breakfast patron Pamela Wainscott pinpointed what keeps folks coming back.
“There’s no other place like it in town,” she said. “It’s nice people and good food. What more could you ask for?”