I’ve mentioned the neighborhood we lived in when I was very young before. We lived just south of a major street in North St. Louis. On the southwest corner was a brothel. On the southeast corner was a tiny grocery store, Penny’s. Penny’s was perhaps 15′ X 15′ with shelves from floor to ceiling containing canned, bottled, and boxed goods. I do not recall whether Penny’s carried perishables—we’ve talking nearly three-quarters of a century ago.
If you walked east from our street, in six or eight blocks you reached another vaguely north-south thoroughfare. Just south of the intersection was the barber shop where I got my first haircut. Next door to the barber shop was a drugstore. I don’t recall its name.
By the time I was seven or eight years old every so often I would walk down to the drugstore, purchase a comic book, and sit at the small counter at one side of the drugstore, drink a cherry coke, and read my comic book. Cherry cokes were not the noxious drinks then that the stuff you buy in a can are. They were made by squirting cherry syrup into Coca Cola. A coke was a nickel; the cherry syrup cost an extra penny. It was a small luxury but a luxury nonetheless.
Drugstore soda fountains are just memories now, happy memories from my childhood. In many ways they served the same function as fast food restaurants do now but without the commercial, industrial quality that today’s fast food restaurants have. Just as was the case with fast food in the 60s and 70s, many young people got their first paying jobs working at drugstore soda fountains.
I think the cherry Coke now is pretty awful. I also remember it being better back then, but the kids say it is probably just my imagination.
Steve