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The Pharmacist · The Doctor

2006–2008 . . . Charles Schultz grabs a lifeline . . . Prabhakara Tumpati sees the promise of RX Limited

n the summer of 2006, Charles Schultz was struggling to figure out how to stay afloat. A seventy-four-year-old pharmacist in Osh- kosh, Wisconsin, he had been in the drugstore business for his entire adult life. He had opened his first local pharmacy more than forty years earlier, in the early 1960s. Together with his wife, Jeanne, he had built Schultz Pharmacy into an established business, set on a quaint street in downtown Oshkosh, a city hugging the western shore of Lake Winnebago. In the 1980s, he bought a second store, Medicine Mart, 130 miles south in the town of Monroe. For de- cades, Schultz, who even into his seventies carried himself with an impeccable posture reminiscent of his college ROTC days, was known in the community as a generous boss and devoted family man who cluttered up his house with books.

Over the last few years, however, a plague of misfortune seemed to have set upon him. His business was in steep decline as big-box drugstore chains crowded out independent pharmacies like Schultz and Medicine Mart. A business that had once afforded him enough income to buy a vacation home was now selling items below cost