Wichita pharmacist remembered for dispensing kindness and medicine in equal measures

Longtime Ken-Mar Family Drugs owner Darrel Steinshouer was someone who was known for, as one person put it, dispensing kindness and medicine in equal measure.

“He wasn’t like the pharmacist in the neighborhood,” said Annette Faust, who worked for Steinshouer for almost 20 years. “He was like their friend.”

Steinshouer died Feb. 6 at age 81.

In 2011, he was forced to close his store at 13th and Oliver to make room for what turned out to be a short-lived Walmart Neighborhood Market.

Steinshouer bought Ken-Mar Family Drugs in 1970s. His pharmacist wife, Sylvia, worked there as well, as did his three children at various points.

Though the Steinshouers lived in College Hill, their lives revolved around the 13th and Oliver neighborhood.

“Over time, the community changed, but it did not matter to Darrel,” said Carla Eckels, director of organizational culture at KMUW. “He was so connected to us.”

Eckels worked at Ken-Mar as a teenager and has remained close to the family. She said she learned much from Steinshouer.

“His work ethic was unbelievable.”

After store hours, Eckels said, “People would press their face against the glass and say, ‘Darrel, are you open?’ ”

Eckels said her reaction would be, “Really?” Steinshouer, though, simply would open the door.

“He was just that person.”

He had the pharmacy phone transferred to his house when it was closed in case anyone needed anything.

Steinshouer would deliver medicine if people couldn’t pick it up. Once, he did that after a snowfall, and his wife wondered what was taking so long. Steinshouer was shoveling the customer’s entire block.

Sometimes, customers couldn’t pay.

“He would give them credit,” Eckels said. “You don’t hear about that nowadays.”

When the store closed, Sylvia Steinshouer found all kinds of IOUs, but she didn’t mind.

Eckels said Steinshouer was part pharmacist, part doctor for customers.

“They trusted him. Some of them, I wonder if they ever went to a doctor.”

Years after she no longer worked at the store, Eckels said she’d mention to her mother that she had some ailment, and her mother always would say, “Did you call Darrel?”

“It was uncanny the way he knew things,” Eckels said. “A person would come in and say, “I want my white pills.’ ” Steinshouer always knew what they meant.

Faust said people would pop by at all hours.

“Some of them didn’t even pick up prescriptions. . . . They would just talk and talk.”

Jared Steinshouer said there was an old-fashioned food counter within his father’s store that he kept open well beyond the time it was profitable so the men who came and met there still would have a place to go.

“That was like a piece of the community those men could count on.”

He described his father as a man of few words who would let actions show his kindness.

“He was a guy who always did the right thing, and the right thing was being nice.”

That included regularly — with almost comic constancy — stopping to help people with their cars on the side of the road.

Steinshouer coached many of his son’s soccer and basketball teams, and he would pick up players on the way to practice and inevitably stop to help stranded motorists. All the boys would pile out of the family’s VW bus to help. Jared Steinshouer said the longest they once pushed a car was a mile.

“They were people he cared about. He loved being part of that community.”

In addition to being a pharmacist, Steinshouer had a law degree and passed the bar. His wife said to practice the kind of patent law he was interested in, he would have had to move to Washington, D.C., but the Hoxie native wasn’t interested in big-city life.

“He just bought a lot of books, set up a library and never did anything.”

She called her husband an absent-minded professor.

“It didn’t really matter what you talked about, he was knowledgeable.”

Chloe Steinshouer, a pulmonary critical care physician, said her father was a brilliant man with an incredible memory except for small things, such as remembering he had money in his pocket.

“It would just fall out.”

She said there always was “some secret story that would come out” about her father that would be hilarious or shocking or even absurd.

Once, Jared Steinshouer said he and his father got in a game of pool against some people in New Orleans, and his dad shocked him by running the table.

“I look at my dad, like, ‘What just happened?’ ”

His mother later explained that Steinshouer paid for part of college by playing pool.

For a long time, Jared Steinshouer said he thought of his father as “this buttoned up guy,” but more kept coming out about who he was, like when he was young and was a Bleacher Bum, spending a whole summer going to Chicago Cubs games.

“He’s got, like, this really interesting side of him.”

Steinshouer looked the part of a clean-cut pharmacist, but he quit shaving and cutting his hair after he no longer had the store.

“And then he looked like a biker with a weird beard,” his wife said.

He looked like a hippie.

“He did have the heart of a hippie,” she said. “He was the ultimate nonconformist in every way. He just did what he thought was right, and he didn’t care what anyone else thought about it.”