William Rudder Jr. attended the Chicago School of Pharmacy to complete his training as a Pharmaceutical Chemist. When he began his practice as a Pharmaceutical Chemist, there was no such thing as a pharmacy license or a pharmacist license. Up to this time most medicines were made individually in the local drug store as syrups, solutions, powder papers, fluid extracts, etc. During his career, Dick would witness the beginning of manufactured insulin revolutionizing the treatment for diabetes which was always fatal before this. He would have helped dispense some of the first lifesaving antibiotics like penicillin as the World Wars raged on. And from his place on the Indiana State Board of Pharmacy, he would have helped monitor and implement the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 that eventually developed into the FDA. He served on this fledgling Board by appointment of the Governor from 1907 to 1915. William Jr. began managing the store and business at the age of 23 and continued in that work until his death in 1949. He practiced most of those years with his sister Dess.

Lula Dess Rudder grew up in #3 Lyon Block. She apprenticed and practiced all her professional life there. She did this at a time when the pharmacy profession was evolving from an individual practitioner/patient/ medication type of practice to a mass manufacturing/government regulated/dispensing only type of business. Purdue’s newly minted Pharmacy School was pioneering a scientifically oriented pharmacy curriculum, and when Dess entered, she became only one of 2 women in a class of about 20 students that pursued the new four-year degree of Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy. Dess earned her Assistant Pharmacist license in 1903 and became the first woman to earn her State License as a Pharmacist in 1905. She retired from the business after the death of her brother but was an avid painter and a piece of her art work hangs in the store today along with her pharmacy license.