Lunch at the drug store

Published 1:42 pm Thursday, August 20, 2009

By The Town Crier



When I was a kid, every so often my Dad would show up about half an hour before noon, completely unexpected, and say, “You want to go get the best hot dogs in town?” I knew exactly where we were headed.

I’ve never asked how those days came to be. Did he have to run errands in town and so could include me at lunch? Was work slow and therefore he had nothing else to do? Or, in those pre-Food Network days, was watching me wolf down wienies the only way he could approximate the vicarious thrill of a “Man vs. Food” type of experience?

Didn’t matter to me then. What mattered were the wonderful memories of going downtown to Owen Pharmacy, climbing up on a counter stool next to my dad, and ordering the best hot dogs in town.

I know, you were going to guess that those hot dogs were at a little diner somewhere, or maybe a barbecue shack somewhere that had incredible wienies smoked for hours over hickory. But no, it was at a place you wouldn’t guess much anymore because they don’t have these places much anymore: the luncheonette at the drug store. All over Dalton, in just about every pharmacy in the days before the chain drug stores, you could grab a bite to eat while you were picking up a carton of Epsom salts and a styptic pencil.

For all you youngsters out there, (as Ed Sullivan used to say before the Beatles would play), I’ll set the scene. You walked in the drug store, with aisles of regular drug store stuff leading to the pharmacy counter in the back where the pharmacist in his white coat stood ready to fill your order of little kids cough syrup with codeine or a bottle of paregoric for baby’s upset tummy. Just like today, except they don’t pass out the narcotics like they used to.

But along one side of the store was a little restaurant, with a long counter lined with stools on single poles and a raised footrest, and maybe two or three booths at one end. Lots of stainless steel, vinyl upholstery and Formica.

Usually there were a couple of ladies manning it. They would chat with you and praise your manners to your dad. A lot of work in the days of the 30-cent tip. Looking back, it does seem a little strange to eat in a pharmacy, but then it was the norm. Nowadays, if someone told you to meet them at Walgreens for lunch, you might need a dose of that paregoric yourself.

The menu was pretty similar from place to place. It wasn’t about trying out new and exotic fare; it was about a quick, inexpensive meal, or maybe an afternoon treat while you were out and about. Any dish that required more hardware than a grill, a fryer, a soup heater and a shake mixer was beyond the scope of what was required of the drug store eatery. And beyond the desires of the diners.

There were hot dogs with slaw or chili, burgers, grilled cheese, grilled ham and cheese, maybe tuna or chicken salad, chips, hot fries, soup and chili and cokes and coffee and maybe ice cream and milk shakes. Lunch might even include a pack of peanuts or a package of snack crackers from the end of the counter where they sold the candy.

This is a memory piece, not a history piece, so I don’t know where this started. Did a pharmacist in the old days realize there weren’t enough medicines back then to fill the store so he started selling food? Or did a guy with a little café realize the profit margin increase if he sold drugs as a side item to the toasted pimento cheese? I guess one good thing is that if the lunch wasn’t so good you could just swivel in your seat to grab the Tums. Wherever the idea came from, the drug store lunch counter was an American standard.

Dad always took me to Owen Pharmacy, which used to be in the building on the corner of Pentz and King, for the best hot dogs in town, slaw dogs with ketchup and mustard and those big crinkle cut fries, not those skinny, potato-dust filled ones so many places have now. And a Coke with a paper elbow straw. But a lot of my friends swore by Bradley and Weaver Drugstore on the street level of the Landmark Building (the old Hotel Dalton).

I think that’s where I first heard of a cherry Coke. It was in the heart of town and only half a block from the Wink Theatre. On the east side of town, where Morris Street ends at that funny little traffic island with the fountain that never, ever works, was Collier Drugs, where our family did business and so we ate there a lot as well. Why Dad proclaimed Owens as having the best hot dogs but ate everything else at Collier’s I don’t know. Can a mile across town make one boiled hot dog better than another boiled hot dog? Maybe it was the slaw.

Dunaway Drugs, in Bry-Man’s Plaza, had a big lunch area and when they moved across the street to Bry-Man’s South they had almost an entire separate restaurant. I remember going there in the middle of the morning when the seats were empty and ordering a chocolate milk or something else extravagant for a kid. And I believe the first Eckerd’s in Dalton, which bought out Dunaway’s, kept the lunch counter for a while. That tied them in comfortably with the locally owned and managed drug stores, but at the same time it was the beginning of the end for the drug store luncheonette. With corporate bottom lines, the profits came from people buying boxes quickly. Doesn’t matter so much what’s in the box … shampoo, makeup, eye drops … it just matters that as many boxes are sold as quickly as possible. And the store should be filled with boxes. No room for a kitchen, and certainly no room for people to sit and chat with their kid when boxes could be sitting there waiting to be sold.

I remember going in to a drug store lunch counter and looking up at these big, garish, backlit photos of the food the place sold. The food was fresh and tasty and giant. If you had a burger as big as the one in the picture it would be as big as a sofa cushion!

But over the years, as the mom and pop drugstores closed, and the big chain pharmacy companies put the profit pressure on themselves and everybody else in the business, those pictures stopped being updated. The colors started to fade and the lighting started to dim. It was like a culinary “Picture of Dorian Gray.” I think the last time I ate at a drug store lunch counter was in the early ‘80s at college in North Carolina. That’s 20-plus years ago. And all I can say is: They don’t make hot dogs like they used to.