This year the Old School History Museum (OSHM) has been sharing some of our docents’ favorite artifact stories with you. For May, we are featuring a very important piece of furniture in our museum’s drugstore. The drugstore cabinet is one of our treasures, and we invite you to come to the drugstore, climb up on a stool, have a pretend milkshake, cherry coke, or Black Cow soda, and step back in time! Depending on your age, you may have had a similar drugstore in your hometown.
While you are in the OSHM drugstore, take a look at the small photo bulletin board in the corner. On that board are young people who grew up in Eatonton and became doctors, lawyers, teachers, farmers, school superintendents, and the list goes on. The one thing they had in common was that they all were very proud of having worked as a soda jerk at one of the Eatonton drugstores.
Why did they call them soda jerks?
Inspired as a nickname for the soda clerk who operated soda fountains as late as the 1950s, the “Soda Jerk” title was inspired by the jerking action a server used to swing the soda fountain handle back and forth when adding soda water to a fountain beverage.
Ice cream sodas were traditionally made by pouring a flavored syrup into a tall glass, adding a few pumps of soda water, and then scooping in ice cream.
ULYSSES RICE AND THE ANTIQUE CABINET
I never give a tour of the Old School History Museum without thinking of Ulysses Rice. All our guided tours start in the drugstore with its marble-topped counter and mirror-backed antique cabinet, and I frequently have flashbacks as I tell visitors the reason we chose to re-create a drugstore in the OSHM. I can still see Mr. Rice sitting at the end of my kitchen table where we held our committee meetings back in the early 2000’s. Both The Plaza Arts Center and the Old School History Museum were just dreams then, but they were definitely dreams with promise!
Mr. Rice, who was blind, would lean back in his chair and say, “When we get our museum built, I will pull the old drugstore cabinet out of my storage building and put it in our drugstore!” Some of us on the museum team had seen only photographs; others had grown up in Eatonton and knew it first hand. However, we all knew he was talking about a historic drugstore cabinet more than a hundred years old...a beautiful Eatonton treasure!
The cabinet was originally in Connally’s, Walker’s, Sills’, and Whittman’s drugstores. As one pharmacist moved away or went out of business, another would move into the space, and the cabinet kept on serving. The drugstore was located just two doors from the Marion Street/Jefferson Avenue corner. (The large 1943 photo on the OSHM drugstore wall features that block on Marion Street.)
Sadly, Mr. Rice passed away in 2005, three years before the grand opening of The Plaza. Not only had we lost one of our leaders, but we also had no idea where the cabinet was stored. Fortunately, one of his nieces led us to the storage building. The large cabinet was loaded onto a truck and delivered to the museum. Then came the restoration process! Since the cabinet had been put away for years and definitely needed a face-lift, we called on our friend Roger Pierce.
Roger, the man who built StepBack, carefully cleaned and restored the magnificent cabinet to its present condition. Roger also enlisted Maude Hicks, the creative genius behind the Old School History Museum, and gave her the job of cleaning the lovely beige and brown stained glass panels at the top of the cabinet. Here’s the best part…as Maude washed the panels, a dreadful odor floated up from the basin, and the beige and brown panels turned into the gorgeous yellow and blue stained glass you see today. The water had turned brown as it washed off years of nicotine from customers who smoked at the counter!
I wish Ulysses Rice had lived to know The Plaza Arts Center and the Old School History Museum as they are today. He would be so very proud!
Sandra Rosseter, Director
Old School History Museum