He followed course of a different color.

• Author: Brown, Kathy
• Position: PEOPLE

Joe Miller was born outside the front door of a drugstore. He found fame and fortune inside between the aspirin and laxatives. A pharmacist by training and artist by inclination, he parlayed his desire for art supplies into a retail business that last year grossed about $20 million. So, no, the proprietor of Cheap Joe's Art Stuff Inc. doesn't care at all if you call him cheap.

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Miller, 66, started his career switch in 1984 when he began selling his surplus art supplies in his Boone drugstore. "I stuck a few brushes between the Ex-Lax and aspirin," he says. He hung a sign above that read, "Cheap Joe's Art Stuff." It has grown into a 70-employee business that sells, among other things, brushes, paints and smocks. Most sales are by Internet and telephone, although there is also an outlet store in Boone. Cheap Joe's also holds workshops on topics such as drawing and watercolor painting. Aspiring artists from across the country attend.

Miller was born in a car in front of Boone Drug because his mother didn't make it to the doctor's office upstairs. He grew up on a small farm outside town but returned to work at Boone Drug during high school as "soda jerk, janitor and general gofer." A hunter and fisherman, he went to college at the University of Iowa to study taxidermy but got homesick and quit after a year. The two brothers who owned Boone Drug, Wayne and O.K. Richardson, told him that if he got a pharmacy degree from UNC Chapel Hill, they'd sell him a third of the business. He graduated in 1962 and worked there 30 years dispensing drugs.

A friend gave him four lessons with Noyes Capehart Long, an Appalachian State University art professor who now has a gallery in Blowing...