FAIRVIEW—It’s a place where everyone knows your name. And if they don’t, they will greet you like you’re family and will get to know you before you leave.
On the corner of Main and Broadway in downtown Fairview, Kidd Drug opened its doors and its arms decades ago to welcome any and all customers.
Owner Susie Kidd Martens has been serving the community and its surrounding areas for over 40 years with the philosophy that people are first and the pharmacy is second.
“That’s why God has me in this position for, to encourage others,” she said.
Her high school sweetheart and late husband Mike Kidd had always dreamed of owning his own pharmacy. He went to Southwestern Oklahoma State University School of Pharmacy to become a pharmacist, and worked during the 1970s for Don Phillips at Phillips Drug in Enid’s Indian Hills shopping center.
When Mike heard about a pharmacy for sale in Fairview, he was very interested and called Susie, who was in Boston at the time, saying “I think we need to buy a store,” Susie recalled. But by the time she returned to Enid, Martens Drug (formerly Johnson Drug, which originally opened in the 1940s) had sold.
Mike wasn’t deterred. When the owner of Smith Drug in Fairview decided to retire in 1981, that gave the Kidds the opportunity they were looking for. Smith Drug was located across Main Street from Martens Drug.
The couple moved to Fairview and set up shop. Mike worked the back in the pharmacy and Susie worked the front with the people.
“Drugstores had everything back then,” Susie said, from guitar strings and fishing tackle to veterinarian supplies, but there was no place for gifts, so Susie added that department right away.
Coming from a retail background—her father is kin to the Drummond family, i.e. Ladd and Ree Drummond, and managed the Pioneer Store in Hominy where Susie learned her customer service skills—she wanted to add the element of a trading post to the drugstore.
That included bridal and baby registries, which were a bigger deal in the 1980s and 1990s than they are now, Susie said.
Not long after they opened Kidd Drug in the old Smith Drug location, Martens Drug went back on the market. Apparently, Susie said, the wife of the new owner said she wasn’t about to move to a rural town like Fairview.
The Kidds immediately purchased Martens Drug, consolidated the drugstores, and reopened for business in the location they are today in 1983.
Then tragedy struck.
Mike was killed in a car wreck in December 1985.
Susie was devasted.
“Our agreement was he does the pharmacy and I do the rest,” she said. Without him, would she stay open or close?
God intervened, she said, as two doctors in town approached her and asked her to stay. To the community, she was the go-between the doctor and the patient, and she was vital to Fairview.
Susie agreed to stay. She already had the knowledge so she trained to become a pharmacy tech. She then hired a pharmacist so Kidd Drug could remain open to take care of the needs of its customers.
“That’s the beauty of Susie,” said Kidd Drug’s social media coordinator Delena Hardaway, who used to be Fairview’s Chamber of Commerce director. “She knows the heartbeat of the community.”
Customers were, and still are, Susie’s No. 1 priority.
She firmly believes in getting to know them as a whole person, such as what’s going on in their lives, how they’re living, and what they’re taking. By doing that, customers know they can come in or call at any time for assurance of what they need or don’t need.
She also fights for them when it comes to drug companies and insurance policies.
“I see them more than their doctors do, more than that five minutes every six months,” Susie said. “People need that extra touch. They are hungry for connection.”
The devotion goes both ways.
During this interview many loyal customers came up to sing their praises about Kidd Drug and its staff—the attention to detail, the compassion, the faithfulness to clients and community, and the list went on.
It’s not just a job to Susie, who remarried in 1990 and had three children with local farmer Erland Martens (no relation to Martens Drug). She raised her family in Fairview, and her kids were what the staff affectionally called “store babies” because they’d be in their carriers on the corner of the old-fashioned soda fountain counter.
“It does take a village to raise a child,” Susie said with a grin, commenting that gruff and burly customers were just big ‘ol softies when it came to her children and would pick up her babies to carry them or rock them when they were crying.
The community watched her kids grew up at the store (her son Bryce passed at the age of 6 but his classmates still stop in to visit Susie); her kids have since married and returned to Fairview to work and raise children of their own.
Susie and the Kidd Drug staff, which includes accounts manager Michele Campbell who has been there over 30 years alongside Susie, have watched at least a couple generations of Fairview children do the same.
“Many Fairview graduates are moving back and working remotely,” Campbell said, adding they see the value of small-town living and small-town shopping.
Kidd Drug does offer more than pills and medical supplies. Susie saw a need way back when for customers to not have to drive to Woodward or Enid to buy certain items.
People from across Northwest Oklahoma now drive into Fairview to shop at Kidd Drug specifically because the store is unique, from boutique clothing and jewelry to kitchen gadgets, gourmet food made in Oklahoma, and home décor.
Merchandiser Debbie Bowers selects items customers can’t find elsewhere and she changes the displays often. In fact, they will be celebrating Pink Friday, the Friday before Black Friday, with storewide holiday specials and food demonstrations tomorrow.
But perhaps one of the most nostalgic draws is the old-fashioned soda fountain counter. In the building since the 1940s, Johnson Drug updated the fountain in the 1960s and Kidd Drug opened up the wall to reveal the brick façade and put the mirror up. The stools are all still original.
Senior citizens and students alike rave about the old-fashioned cherry limeades made with homemade cherry syrup, hand-squeezed limes, and soda water as well as the hand-dipped premium ice cream in the old-fashioned milkshakes and root beer floats.
That brings joy to Susie.
“I want laughter. I want people to feel good when they’re in the store,” she said.
Kidd Drug’s advertising slogan is it’s more than a drugstore. They’re not kidding.