Summers at the Apache Drugstore

For those born in recent decades, it is hard to imagine how different the world was in the late 1940s and early 1950s. When school let out for the summer, Dad would travel from the dense, humid political machinery of Washington, D.C. back to the agricultural rhythm of Mesa, Arizona. There, Great-Grandpa Clifford spent his medical school breaks working in the family pharmacy, the Apache Drug, where Dad "also hung out a lot".

A mid-century drugstore served as the primary civic and social hub of the town, complete with a soda fountain and a bustling cigar counter. Dad remembered the thrill of going to the store at 4:00 AM with his grandfather, Great-Great-Grandpa George. While the men prepared the store for the day, Dad would "sit on the floor behind the cigar counter, read comic books (at the time five to ten cents) and drink milk shakes which I made myself on real professional mixers". Those mixers (heavy, chrome-plated machines) were the industrial engines of American childhood.

Once a week, they went in even earlier, around 2:30 AM, to let in the floor waxer, who had to "roll up the long, black, chain-like mat behind the counter" to strip and wax the floors. On those mornings, Great-Great-Grandpa George would take him over to a restaurant to have "a ham and eggs breakfast".

By 5:00 AM, before the desert heat became oppressive, the local politicians and ranchers would arrive to map out the town's business. Mesa was still heavily agricultural, driven by cotton prices and water rights. Dad recalled, "Grandpa Goodman was quite prominent in Mesa City politics. He had a whole crowd of buddies, no doubt the revered city fathers, who gathered at his soda fountain from about 0500 on and drank coffee, most of them wearing felt cowboy hats".

Great-Grandpa Clifford "always said that this was where the phrase 'drugstore cowboy' came from," but Dad later learned "that most of them really were ranchers and farmers". Great-Great-Grandpa George would cook them breakfast, and they would "talk, it seemed to me, without end". Discussing crop yields and city zoning fell flat for a six-year-old. Dad was at an age "when one cannot understand why anyone would want to sit around and talk, especially about such incredibly boring subjects," so he "just explored the shelves in the store, or sat behind the cigar case and read the many comic books and magazines that the drugstore had on display".

When he wasn't in the pharmacy, he explored Main Street, annoying the other store owners because of his habit of "incredibly incessantly posing questions". His favorite target was the Sprouse-Rite store three doors east of the drug store, whose owner "introduced me to the concept of elbow grease, as well as to left-handed monkey wrenches". He also frequented the O.S. Stapley store a little west of the Apache Drug. Dad noted that he wasn't mischievous or ill-mannered; it was simply that "lots of reports got back to my grandfather, but were only passed on to me when I was a teenager and thus better able to take criticism".