A main street American institution, drugstores were where the pulse of the community was measured. Unlike the hardware and feed stores where men gathered or the grocery where women shopped, the drugstore was where everyone congregated. Women with small children dropped in throughout the day, businessmen lined up at lunch break, and teenagers crowded in after school let out. A typical drugstore had a soda fountain on one side and a merchandise counter on the other. In the back of the long room was the pharmacy. If it was wide enough, there were small, round tables and chairs set out in the middle for the customers to use while they ate and visited. Unlike stores today, the merchandise was kept on shelves and cabinets behind the counter and produced by the druggist or his clerk upon request.
In a counter cabinet that could be seen through the window from the street, fancy cut-glass jars packed with colorful penny candy were set at eye level for children. A wooden rack by the door held newspapers and the latest national magazines like McCall's, Woman's World, Red Book, Farmer's Wife, and Delineator (the latter contained the latest and much anticipated Butterick sewing patterns). The glass cabinet in front of the checkout displayed ornately printed cigar boxes. Further down the counter there were popular dime novels and books. There were boxes of aromatic toilet soaps, a brightly colored display of Diamond fabric dyes, a decoratively scrolled cabinet of Willimantic sewing threads, and stacks of stationery and school supplies. Razors, brushes, mirrors, creams, and perfumes were displayed inside other glass-front cases.
In the back of the store was the pharmacist's counter. Behind the counter was a wall covered with matching apothecary jars labeled in incomprehensible Latin. The pharmacist poured and measured liquids and powders; he dispensed cascara, sulfur, soda pot ash, powdered charcoal, and quinine from a spice drawer cabinet. He poured calomel, mercury, Black Draught, iodine, pine oil, glycerin, alcohol, digitalis, and a dozen more from dark brown bottles. Shelves were stacked with packages of Castoria, Pe-ru-na, Hall's, Piso's, Bromo Seltzer, and Pond's Extract. On the counter sat boxed jars of Mentholatum and perhaps a few rival brands like Musterole, Saratoga Ointment, or Dr. Sayman's Healing Salve. He always had a new remedy to show to the customer.
When a family came in from the farm for supplies, the drugstore would be their first stop. Before Dad went over to the hardware store, he would start a tab with the clerk and grab a few cigars and a box of matches. The children made a beeline to the soda fountain and scrambled up the tall stools to sit at the shiny marble counter. They ordered chocolate ice cream sodas and banana splits. While waiting, they spied their reflections between and through colored bottles of lime, root beer, vanilla, sarsaparilla, and cherry syrups that lined the mirrored wall and watched the soda clerk (later called "jerk") assemble their treats. Mom consulted in back with the druggist and caught up on the town's gossip.
The druggist was a respected neighbor, a church member, and a trusted community leader. He could be an understanding friend and always knew the names of his customers. He was easily approached for health tips and for his opinion about goings-on in the community. Besides the front-door trade, the druggist also conducted business out of the back door. In the South, Jim Crow laws forced black customers to wait outside the back door for access to the pharmacy. Despite this insulting segregation, they were still paying customers, and the druggist would be there to fill their orders. In most cases, he was their only link to medical care, as he was for just as many in the poor white community. All too often there was no money to pay and he took trade goods or services in exchange.
For those people without means to consult a doctor until their illness became serious, a knowledge of packaged and home remedies was very important. Jane Baker remembered that around 1915 her mother collected and dried sweet flag root and catnip leaves to store until she needed to make tea for a sore stomach. When Jane caught a cold, her mother would rub Mentholatum on her chest and wrap her up in warm flannel. To loosen the phlegm in her throat, her mother would make a towel tent over her head and a pot of steaming water. The water contained a dab of Mentholatum, and she inhaled its vapors. Other basics in her mother's medicine chest were castor oil, ipecac, and Epsom salts.
Helmuth Huber, whose German/Russian parents immigrated to America and homesteaded outside Ashley, North Dakota, said his family was never without Mentholatum. For sore throat, his mother heated it as an inhalant and rubbed it on his neck, wrapping a sock around it. He remembered it got hot and made him feel good.
Joyce Gibson Roach, from Horned Toad, Texas, reported her grandmother didn't bother with camphorated oil and turpentine for the flu, because, she said, "Mentholatum was her personal choice for nose and chest. But then she also treated cuts, scrapes, callus, bunions and sores with Mentholatum-anything short of brain surgery." Mrs. D. C. Gibson of Buffalo, New York, wrote to the company, "I call Mentholatum the Little Doctor." For good reason, the company used the slogan "The World's Medicine Chest" for many years.
American industry boomed during the first decade of the century and employed all who wanted to work, yet denied labor its fair share of the prosperity. Farming, like factory work and mining, was an unregulated and dangerous occupation, and like other workers, farmers labored long hours for extremely low wages. The men in charge hid behind syndicates and trusts, monopolizing wealth and flouting America's democratic values. President Teddy Roosevelt tried unsuccessfully to regulate the trusts before his term ended in 1908. His successor, William Howard Taft, had no better luck with antitrust suits. Not until the presidency of Woodrow Wilson (1913 - 1921) would the Federal Reserve Act (1913) and the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914) be passed, which would lead to an increasingly open economy and more equitable distribution of wealth.
But until then, cash was scarce in working-class and rural communities, and druggists routinely kept a tab book for customers who wanted to pay at the end of the month. One such book, surviving from a drugstore in Willard, Ohio, then called "Chicago Junction," gives us an eight-month window into the buying habits of its patrons between December 10, 1907, and August 10, 1908. The most common purchases were cigars, pencils, magazines, books, and stationery. The druggist received a surprisingly small number of doctors' prescriptions but filled more orders for measured quantities of camphor oil, cascara (a laxative), cough syrup, and turpentine. One citizen went home with quinine, castor oil, and whiskey, while another took home camphor, turpentine, blue bark, and cough syrup.
The top-ten-selling packaged remedies were:
1. Doan's pills (sixteen packages of various cures)
2. Chamberlain's (fifteen bottles of various cures)
3. Castoria (fourteen 35¢ bottles)
4. Mentholatum (twelve 25¢ jars)
5. Nervine (ten $1 bottles)
6. Hyomei (eight 50¢ bottles)
7. Vaseline (seven, various prices charged according to the amount taken from a bulk container)
8. Pe-ru-na (seven $1 bottles)
9. Ma-le-na (three 10¢ tins)
10. Omega Oil (two 50¢ bottles)
The top two brands, Doan's and Chamberlain's, could be expected to head the list because they packaged a range of remedies for colds, constipation, nerves, etc. The book did not detail the kind purchased. Castoria (a laxative) and Mentholatum were specialized products. Mentholatum topped the cold and catarrh remedy list, ahead of Pe-ru-na and Ma-le-na. Because the book was used exclusively for tab accounts, it can provide only a sampling of brand popularity. In 1915, Mentholatum and Castoria topped a more comprehensive survey by a regional sales agent for Mentholatum. He surveyed total sales by the jobbers he knew in four western states, and the top sellers were Mentholatum and Castoria: the former in Montana, Washington, and South Dakota, and the latter in Minnesota.
The American West Was Mentholatum Country!
In 1910, Mentholatum's customer base lived on small family farms and large ranches, at remote mining and logging camps, and in thousands of small towns scattered over the wide prairies and among the high mountain valleys. There were fifty million rural Americans, compared to forty-two million urban residents. Rural populations in aggregate were much larger in the western and southern states than they were in the industrialized northeast. Overall, the nation had nine thousand towns with populations of less than a thousand, and only three cities with populations of more than a million.
No matter how remote, rural families were never completely isolated from the world. They read the newspapers and discussed current events with their neighbors at church socials and the local drugstore. Like their city cousins, country folk were assaulted everywhere they looked with advertisements. Remarkably, by the turn of the century America's remote and empty expanses were covered with ads. Signs were painted on farm buildings and even on roadside rocks; they were nailed to trees and utility poles. They reached into the humblest homes with Sears, Roebuck and Co. and Montgomery Ward catalogs. They filled up monthly subscription magazines such as Ladies Home Journal, Woman's Home Companion, and Cosmopolitan. Children poured over their colorful rotogravure illustrations and steel plate engravings, memorizing every detail in drawings of pretty ladies, modern gadgets, furniture, and automobiles.
A distant relative of A. A. Hyde was one such child. Growing up in Duncan, Oklahoma, Harold T. Hyde (1910 - 1993) remembered when he and the other boys would cut out a magazine coupon and send it in with a nickel postage for a free sample "box" of Mentholatum. Sometimes they were given a tin by their teacher, which they carried in the bib pocket of their overalls. When the salve was gone, it might be replaced with a lucky bird claw or coin. The tins wore a characteristic circular imprint on the outside of the bib, as did the Rooster Snuff tin placed in their hip pocket.
The drugstore in Duncan, Oklahoma, recalled by eighty-two-year-old Harold Hyde was typical of stores in the center of a block. The front was twenty or thirty feet wide with a central door flanked by display windows. If it was a corner drugstore, there was room for more display windows along the side street. Keeping the windows dressed was a big concern for druggists. To help them out, colorfully lithographed, die-cut display boards were provided gratis by the Mentholatum Company. There were also oversized Mentholatum boxes to use as props. For inside the store, the company provided point-of-purchase easel-back display cards for the counter. Harold Hyde recalled that Mentholatum jars were displayed on a cardboard "step-up."
