“This is a wonderful book about a unique part of Americana,” states Mickey Smith in the foreword to Drug Store Soda Fountains of the Southeast. And Smith is spot on about this labor of love written by Mary Monk-Tutor and Terry Tutor, who drove a motor home across the region to visit 70 drugstores in 2005.
Drug Store Soda Fountains is a beautifully produced soft-cover book full of color photographs that convey well the spirit of this American institution. The relaxed and fun nature of the book is captured by page 6, which features an array of different soda fountain stools.
More than 50 drugstores from Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, and the Carolinas are covered in detail. For most of these pharmacies, the authors include a short store history timeline; a narrative paragraph, and one to 3 interior photographs. For about a dozen, recipes are included for desserts (eg, “Vanilla Chess Squares”); drinks (“Hobo Float”); ice cream (“Preacher's Special”); salads (“Miss Sheila's Potato Salad”); sandwiches (“Miss Bobbie's Sliced Egg Sandwich”); and soup (“Thomas Drugs Homemade Chili”). Thirty-four recipes are revealed, including several that have been “secret.”
For a review in an academic journal, it would be easy to dismiss a book like Drug Store Soda Fountains as nostalgic and irrelevant. That would be foolish. From the 1890s through the 1940s, the soda fountain was a key component of American culture. During its heyday in the 1920s, thousands of fountains could be found in pharmacies across the nation. With national Prohibition, drugstores and their fountains replaced taverns as gathering places for adults and youths alike. During the hardest days of the Great Depression of the 1930s, soda fountains kept thousands of pharmacies in business and maintained their prominent role in American society.
The authors have performed a dual service of providing both a guidebook and a photographic record. For pharmacy instructors, the book provides a glimpse into an often forgotten component of the profession's contribution to American community life that is disappearing.
This reviewer would have liked a longer, more detailed introductory history of the American soda fountain but that provided by the authors is sufficient. A full-page map of the journey would have been a plus. But these are minor quibbles. I heartily recommend Drug Store Soda Fountains of the Southeast to anyone interested in pharmaceutical Americana and the soda fountain in particular.