Dad's Story in the Doings of Dudley Doolittle

 

The time is right to put this story up. This month is my dad's birthday.  John A. Grimsud was born June 29, 1908. I miss him.

This is a story about Peoples Drug Store in the Roaring Twenties told to me by my dad when I was a child.

Dad was sixteen years old in 1924 while America was riding the speculative economical rollercoaster fueled by post WWI industrial expansion.

Prohibition had the country swilling clandestine bootleg booze in gangster controlled speakeasies

Hyperactive 138 pound Dad was self-motivated at an early age. He had three newspaper delivery routes at the same time employing a helper. He mopped floors and did janitor work mornings before school at Peoples Drug and repaired bicycles in his spare time.

Early one morning as dad was slipping his key into the door at Peoples Drug Store to begin his janitor job, a big long car screeched up to the curb, stopped and three machine-gun wielding men scrambled out.

Dad was pushed inside and forcefully ordered to open the safe at gunpoint. He nervously told the menacing gangsters his only duty was to mop the floors and carry out the trash 

These Al Capone type gangsters were in a big hurry and luckily only locked Dad in the basement coal room instead of blasting him to bits.

In the pitch-blackness of the coal room dad’s thoughts quickly turned to the idea of escape. He felt his way around in the blackness and found the coal shoot leading up to the small street-side door.

This would be his escape route. 

Dad then stealthily crept his way up the coal shoot and carefully pried open its little door. As he cautiously peered out he was terrified to be looking down the barrel of a machine gun. Dad thought that his heart would explode as he gingerly lowered the little door with a trembling hand.

The gangsters grabbed what they could quickly picking up items, breaking into the narcotics drawer, and then sped away with little more than a sack full of Parker fountain pens and lots of drugs.

Dad said that the incident didn’t bother him for about a week and then suddenly flashbacks would startle him out of a sound sleep with sweaty terrifying anxiety.

Dad went on to get his pharmacist license and eventually became the owner of the Peoples Drug Store by the early 1940’s buying it from O. B. Olson, the original owner.

Postscripts:

Those gangsters were apprehended a few weeks later and one of the things that helped convict them were all of those expensive Parker fountain pens.

Five cents: Nowadays five cents doesn’t seem like a lot of money but when I was a kid ten years old back in 1950 it would buy you a newspaper, five U. S. postcards, three second class postage stamps, soft drink, candy bar, ice cream cone, refillable cup of coffee or a bowl of rice at the Chinese restaurant. 

Peoples Drug Store had an ornate soda fountain/lunch counter featuring hamburgers that were greased to kill. My favorite soda fountain beverage at the lunch counter was the 5¢ Coca Cola that came in several flavors all made from extracts known as phosphates, the charged water was added. Cherry flavor with a dash of chocolate was sensational. 

I started working at Peoples Drug Store when I was fourteen cleaning shelves, washing bottles, washing windows, shoveling/sweeping the sidewalk, and burning garbage. 

At sixteen years old I started waiting on customers, stocking shelves, and doing the inventory. When I got my drivers license I did deliveries and got to know a lot of people in the five years I worked there.

The store had three full time pharmacists, Bob Cleary, Bud Dice, and my dad.At the time there were fourteen drug stores in Superior, and none were chain operated. 

There you have some of my Peoples Drug  recollections.

The 1950s: The 1950s opened with witch hunting McCarthyism and Eisenhower's team headed by Richard Nixon and Earl Butts that set out to undo all of Franklin Roosevelt's social justice programs. 

Community oriented mom and pop businesses along with family farming, labor unions, and Indigenous rights vanished. Murdered by capitalism.

John's author's page