Back when the word Mother was more than giving birth
By Harrison Absher | 9th October 2008
After Frankie became cute enough to take to Chinatown, we became almost inseparable friends. On Saturday nights we went to the early movie, window shopping, then grabbed that 15 cent tenderloin before going home. Certainly our childhood was a place far flung from today’s “mad world.”
After school during the week, we often went to our local drugstore soda fountain. Drugstore soda fountains arrived about the same time as prohibition. Frankie and I arrived during prohibition.
They already had mineral and soda waters, and the drugstore itself, carried flavored oils, extracts and various syrups. The development of refrigeration along with other things enticed the druggists to install the “soda fountain.”
Syrups and flavoring agents then moved from the pharmacy shelves to the newly installed fountain. Their names were soon lost and forgotten.
These fancy pharmaceutical names became plain “cherry, raspberry, chocolate and orange syrups.” However, sarsaparilla hung on to its’ drugstore name for several years. It now, of course, is good ole “root beer.”
When Frankie and I were growing up, our downtown drugstore became a gathering place for many of us schoolkids. Just entering the place was a special challenge. Back then all the girls wore peekaboo clothes. Those clothes being just simple short-skirt dresses. No jeans, slacks or other boys apparel were ever seen on a girl. You did have to note which washroom they entered in order to decide if they were girls. Only around home during ball games did a girl ever don jeans or overalls.
It was the kids who came up with the double dip cones, triple dips, lemon or cherry cokes and a lot of other concoctions. Many neat things you buy today were designed by yesterday youngsters, NOT by product developers or sales managers as you might well think. Naturally we paid more for double and triple dip cones, but flavored cokes were still just five cents.
When you ordered your favorite drink, the man behind the counter would pop bits of ice into a glass, pump in three squirts of syrup, slowly add the carbonated water down the inside of the tipped glass, being careful not to disturb the carbonation. If you ordered a flavored coke, he’d add a half squirt of the chosen syrup. Most important was that last touch – a gentle swirl with a long-handled spoon.
In our home town, as we stepped inside, the soda fountain was the first thing we saw. It was elevated over a marble step and filled a considerable section of one wall. The surface of the counter was a large cool slab of white marble, with light streaks of gray.
The stools were covered with leather cushions, banded with wide chrome rings. Each stool swiveled on tapered pedestals. As Frankie and I enjoyed a lemon cola, the stools would creak as we nervously turned from side to side.
Since the back of the fountain was all mirrors going the full length of the fountain, we lingered and stalled over our drinks while studying our reflections. The purr of that large compressor was “music to our ears” in the good old days of drugstore soda fountains.
P.S.: I see Webster has added 100 new words to our dictionary. While looking them over, I noticed many reminded me of the names us kids called each other during school yard fights back in fourth grade.