INSIDE:
Pharmacist Of
The Century
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At 100, Birmingham Drug's founder still
kibitzes with customers seven days a week.
DEBBIE WALLIS LANDAU
Special to the Jewish News
I t takes more than a Hallmark
holiday to close Birmingham
Drugs for an afternoon.
But store founder John
Krasnick's 100th birthday was an
occasion to halt even a thriving busi-
ness.
.
Some 300 guests — with invitations
depicting Krasnick as "Time
Magazine's Person of the Century" —
attended the party his family threw
him on June 30. Appropriately, it was
held in the parking lot behind the
pharmacy he founded 67 years ago.
Krasnick, who turns 100 on July 10,
still arrives at the store at 10 every
morning, dressed in suit and tie,
despite being officially retired. He's
often found sitting behind the count-
er, greeting customers he's known for
decades.
"Sitting down on the job, Doc, are
you?" asks Dennis Grooms of Royal
Oak. Dennis' mother, Opal Grooms,
now 90, was one of Krasnick's first
customers.
The two men banter a bit, then
pose for a photo that Grooms says will
thrill his mother.
Krasnick, who lives by himself in a
Southfield apartment, retorts,
"Retirement is for the birds!"
Mondays through Saturdays, he's
taken by cab to breakfast at Giorgio's
in Oak Park. Sundays, he goes to Alia's
in Southfield. Then it's on to the
drugstore.
And although Birmingham Drugs,
still on Woodward Avenue north of 14
Mile, is no longer the 1,200-square-
7/ 5
2002
40
foot business Krasnick created in
1935, his presence bridges the
decades. The store has quadrupled its
original selling space through annexa-
tion of adjacent space.
In an age when RiteAid, CVS and
Walgreen stores mark many major
intersections, Birmingham Drugs
remains a flourishing, independent
enterprise under the leadership of son
Bill Krasnick, its 65-year-old owner.
Bill, who lives with wife Margie in
Huntington Woods, says, "My Dad
always lived for and adored his [seven]
grandchildren. Now, he's enraptured
by his 13 great-grandchildren."
Work Ethic
John Krasnick's quintessential work
ethic, which he conveyed by example
to his children and grandchildren,
developed early and endured always.
"The one thing you must know
about my father, besides the fact that
he was always a kind and most gener-
ous man, was that his word meant
honesty," says daughter Dulcie
Rosenfeld, who resides in Detroit with
husband Norman. •
In the early 1900s, John's parents,
Jacob and Hilda Krasnick, brought
their infant son from a tiny town in
western Russia to settle in Holly,
Mich. With only three Jewish families
in the Holly area, John was sent to
Sheboygan, Wis., to live and study
Torah with Hilda's father, Rabbi Leib
Kaplan. It was in Sheboygan that John
first met his childhood sweetheart,
Adeline Hirschberg.
"I used to walk her across the rail-
road tracks to kindergarten every day,"
John Krasnick,
behind the
counter at
Birmingham
Drugs.
he still remembers.
Although Adeline's family moved to
Chicago, and John returned to Holly
after his bar mitzvah, they correspond-
ed and reunited each year at their
grandparents' homes in Wisconsin.
"I never looked at another girl," says
John Krasnick.
At 19, after taking Ferris State
University's six-month pharmacy pro-
gram in Big Rapids, John passed his
boards and moved to Ann Arbor. He
apprenticed at Quarry - Drugs and got
his license when he was 21.
"We had a big mail-order business.
In those days, we had as many as 100
different pharmaceutical powders. We
mixed them into compounds to fill
prescriptions. There was no such thing
as Aleve or Motrin."
He also recalls riding the train to
Detroit for 15 cents, picking up cigars
at Joe Muer's, and then selling them in
the drugstore.
Krasnick owned and operated
Manor Drugs, on Plymouth at Manor
in Detroit, until 1934.
He fondly remembers building his
soda fountain at his new Birmingham
Drugs. "We sold nickel ice cream
cones and Cokes."
"There were only three Jewish fami-
lies enrolled in the Birmingham
Schools when we lived on Henrietta
and Frank," says daughter Dulcie.
"When I was in 10th grade and Bill
was in elementary school, we moved
to a home on Warrington in Detroit,
to be in a Jewish neighborhood."
Other than missing his wife, who
died 11 years ago, John Krasnick is
happy with his life.
"I am blessed. I wake up each day. I
have a wonderful family. I have a place
to come to."
Asked the secret to living such a
long, productive life, Krasnick's blue
eyes twinkle and he says:
"The first 100 years are the hardest!"
❑