Author Tea Krulos Remembers the Brady Street Pharmacy

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The Brady Street Pharmacy was a place out of an early Tom Waits song. Picture him with cigarette dangling, hovering over a bottomless cup of coffee at the lunch counter with notebook and pen, casting his gaze across the loners and losers, the fully drawn characters who worked there, the neighborhood regulars arguing in Italian and the old-lady shoppers complaining because the shredded wheat was out of stock.

Tea Krulos worked at that East Side landmark for several years in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s and plays the Waits role in his new book, Brady Street Pharmacy: Stories and Sketches. Since leaving the pharmacy before it closed in 2010, Krulos authored several books on subcultural topics, including Heroes in the Night and American Madness, and local history, such as Wisconsin Legends & Lore. Brady Street Pharmacy fits well into his bibliography.

“All of the stories are inspired by real events as I remember them,” Krulos says. “There’s a couple stories where I speculated what was going on in someone else's mind, most notably the story ‘A Christmas Village of His Own,’” where Krulos imagined the thought proceess of BSP’s owner, Jim Searles.

Like the Oriental Pharmacy and many similar places of fond memory, BSP was squeezed in the tightening vise of pharmacy chains, whose control over the market hardened in the ‘90s and drove neighborhood drugstores to extinction. BSP ran into a particular set of problems when Searles carved out a portion of the shelving aisles and transformed the space into a theater, the Astor Street Performing Arts Center.

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“I think he was a little sick of running the business and he had this starry-eyed dream to be a patron and producer of the arts,” Krulos says. “He wanted to support local arts like film, theater, dance and music, which is a really noble thing but I think he underestimated how tough it can be to make money in the entertainment biz.” 

Pharmacies have grown into impersonal, robo-call driven outlets in the big-chain era—and in the death of corner drugstores we’ve lost something else as well. “Sadly, places like the BSP, Oriental Drugs and Goldmann’s are gone,” Krulos says, recalling the weird old Milwaukee that hung on through the end of the last century. “There's still some good greasy spoons and eclectic cafes you can hang out at, but many of those have disappeared, too. It’s really too bad because those places were microcosms and served the community as meeting spots. Box stores and restaurants just can't replace the unique character of those places.”

Krulos will discuss Brady Street Pharmacy: Stories and Sketches at 6 p.m., March 23 at the South Milwaukee Library.