Topeka Daily Capital
Dec. 2, 1959

It has been announced that the country’s biggest drug store will be built here soon, and every time it’s mentioned, I can’t help thinking back to Snider’s Drug Store in Britton, Okla.

It was a store that would be totally out of place in today’s scheme of drug stores. That is, it was just a drug store. No appliances, no jewelry, no automobile parts, no clothing – nothing except drug store items. We had a soda fountain, tobacco counter, prescriptions (filled promptly and accurately) and the usual assortment of patent medicines and other drug items.

My dad put in coffee once, by popular demand, But the owner of the cafe across the street stormed over and said they’re damn well better be no more of that, so there wasn’t. Back in Britton, you just didn’t try to sell anything that wasn’t strictly in your line.

Our store was between Harry William’s barber shop and Hobb’s grocery store, and directly under the lodge hall, which was on the 2nd floor. Every month, when the Eastern Star ladies finished marching, dust would be an inch deep in our place.

We had rats in the building that really were rats. My dad and Mr. Hobbs used to argue occasionally over which store was attracting them, but nothing came of it until Hobbs learned my dad preferred rats to cats. Hobbs got some cats and kept the rats on our side. We used poison and traps and got a lot of rats – and one of Hobb’s cats.

Harry Williams, On the other side, was a barber’s barber. He cut your hair his way, and you liked it or went to another barber shop, and there wasn’t one. He wouldn’t even let Jelly Roberts, the local pretty boy, in his shop, because Jelly insisted on a hairdo.

Harry also told some people to go home and wash their hair before he cut it. Harry used hair dressings liberally, always sprinkling a little from each bottle on every customer. I’ll never forget those odors.

Besides rats, our long suit was ice cream. People came from near and far to get a double dip for a nickel. And likely is not, they’d charge it.

My dad probably had the country’s first – maybe only – genuinely “easy” credit plan. Anybody could charge anything, and he’d write it down in a nickel notepad. Years after he was out of the store, he was still trying to collect some of it.

There was one unique feature to our drug store. It had the post office in the back, and this created traffic. But the day came when a new senator was elected, and he moved the post office into another store down the street. I haven’t completely trusted a politician since.

My dad seldom ran an ad in the weekly Britton Progress, but he had his own way of moving the slow items. He had a table, about the size of a pool table, with a sign on it that read: “Any Item, Ten Cents.” Every once in a while, he’d dump everything that was too flyspecked, too faded or too old on the table. It went fast.

It’s funny, but the story I remember most about the about the store concerns the time somebody told my mother that snuff would help her ailing plants. She sent me after some. I breezed into the store, which had quite a few customers in it at the time, and shouted, “Hi, dad. Mother wants a box of snuff.” After he had regained his voice, my dad kept every customer there until I explained it.

My dad was just about the whole staff at the store. My two brothers and I helped in the summer and after school and on Sundays, But for years he opened at dawn and closed at 11 PM or later.

He very seldom took a vacation, even half a day off, and he ignored the warnings that such a pace would kill him. I guess it will someday, too.

He’s almost 80 now. He has been out of the store about 20 years, But we drove past there the other day and he admitted he’d hate to put in 16 hours a day in the place now.