Charles Kendrick, Class of 1955
Charles Kendrick embarked on the road to pharmacy school from a very humble beginning. His first job was working at the Texarkana, Texas, stockyards, in the 1940s. It was difficult and dangerous work, especially for a 10-year-old boy.
“When the white kids showed up for work,” he says, “they would hire us [the black kids] to work for them. They were getting 35 cents an hour, so they would hire us for 20 or 25 cents. The last day I worked there, it was raining and thundering and some razorbacks got into the wrong pen.”
Razorbacks are ill-tempered and aggressive hogs. Mature males can grow to five feet in length and weigh up to 300 pounds.
“They wanted me to go separate the hogs,” explains Kendrick. “I was just a young kid and so decided just to go home. I never did get my money from the kid who hired me. He was H. Ross Perot.” Smiling, Kendrick adds, “He still owes me for two hours of work.”
Kendrick’s father moved to Tucson in 1935; Kendrick moved to the Southwest to join him in 1948. It was in Tucson that he finally got his opportunity to attend pharmacy school.
“I applied in high school and my grades were good enough, so I got accepted out of high school. In those days the college of pharmacy was just like any other college. There was no extra tuition. But I was the poorest one in the class.”
It was always a challenge for him to come up with the money to pay for tuition.
“If you were [a few] cents short, you couldn’t sign up for classes. One time I was about $25 short, I had to go home and go through the piggy banks and everything else. My daddy had to look around and see what he could do to drag up the last $25.”
After graduation, the time came to take the state board exam. Kendrick passed the exam with no problem, but that wasn’t the real obstacle to becoming a pharmacist.
“The day we took the exams, all the store owners showed up and offered people jobs. They wouldn’t even say good evening to me.” No one offered Kendrick a job.
“It was a bad feeling,” he remembers. “You go to the same school, with the same people, you studied the same thing and everyone is offered a job but you.”
After he took the state board exam, instead of becoming a pharmacist, he became a second lieutenant in the Army. It wasn’t until after his discharge that Kendrick finally was able to practice pharmacy.
About three decades into his career as a pharmacist, Kendrick opened an eatery called Mr. K’s Barbeque on the south side of Tucson. In 2011, his daughter opened a new Mr. K’s restaurant at Stone Avenue and River Road.