On a drive through Owensville in Clermont County, I stopped to buy a soda in a drab old drugstore. The steaming heat of late summer dropped from villagers’ brows and swirled, almost visibly, around the front door of Woodruff’s Pharmacy. Inside, the talk was of the heat. Too hot for the county fair. When will the heat break?
Heat was always a harbinger of good business at the country drugstore, a 32 x 50–foot room on the first floor of Charles Woodruff’s house on Main Street. The wooden floors were rough and dark. Color advertising signs were lined and faded. Woodruff’s was among the last of the independents in the rolling countryside, a throwback to an older time and place—rural America.
Woodruff was sixty-seven years old, with gray hair, an easy smile, and a rather wide midsection. He had worked behind the fountain since he was nine. From this lofty vantage point, he had seen all manner of things, and he had seen many country stores come and go.
“One morning,” he recalled, “I guess it was in the 1930s, old Doc Haas was sittin’ here at the counter. Somebody came runnin’ in asking for a doctor, and I said, ‘Well, we got one right here.’ The fellow said there’d been a wreck out on U.S. Route 50, and the victim’s ear had been cut half off. Doc turned around and said, ‘Oh, we can take care of it right here. We don’t need to go to the hospital. Just bring him on in.’ I said, ‘But Doc, you ain’t really gonna do that in here, are you?’ He said, ‘Sure, son, we’ll just get a little Lysol and my needles and sew it on.’ So we went right to the back room and did the job. And I went from fixin’ sodas to being a physician’s assistant in one day.”
The story made his wife, Ruth, moan in mock disgust from the rear of the store. Then he finished: “Well, the funny thing was, that man who was in the wreck stopped in the store about a year later. He said, ‘I bet you don’t remember me, do you?’ I just looked at him and said, ‘Oh, yeah, I helped sew your ear back on.’”
The tale brought hearty laughter from the customers sitting on the stools that face the scratched fountain counter. Woodruff smiled and gently dipped some more ice cream. Many of his customers came here out of habit, as they had for years. They enter, greet Woodruff, and sit in a room crammed with an unusual assortment of bottles, amber jars, a red penny scale, oak and cherry cabinets, hand-lettered signs, and kites.
“We used to have chickens out back when I was a boy,” Woodruff said. “Some of the fellows would come by about one in the morning when they came home from dates. They’d stand out front and yell to me upstairs, ‘Get up, Chuck! We got some chickens for you to fry.’ At the time, of course, there were no all-night sandwich places around here. So those boys would come by the store and bother me. I’d come downstairs and fry chicken for them at one in the morning. Oh, we’d have a great time sittin’ around eating all that chicken.”
“Tell it all,” Ruth said.
“Well, the next day, I’d come out back to find that I had fried my own chickens. Even Red Boy, my prize pet rooster. Yeah, those old boys had gotten into our henhouse. And Red Boy was the worst for it.”
The villagers probably had their own impressions of Woodruff’s confectionary anachronism, and so do city people. Local people mostly thought of his store in connection with some childhood idyll. City people, however, looked at the store and saw what they wanted to see: The myth of agrarian life, small-town happiness, and a place where everything moves as slow as seasonal change and is as simple as a chocolate soda. Woodruff knew these things weren’t necessarily true, but why should he be the one to tell them?
“Yeah, the good old days,” he said. “Oh, I guess the ’30s and ’40s were good days for this town; people was workin’. But that wasn’t always good times, either, with the war comin’. There was a lot of hard work then, and before. When I first started workin’ in here as a kid in the ’20s, I had to pack everything in ice every day. Now that’s hard work. Put a little salt around it, and keep it good and cold. Ev’ry mornin’ you had to draw the water off and pack it again. There was a lot of work around here. Old Bob Jones, the ice man, he used to drive up here every other day from Batavia in a Model T Ford. We had to have a three-hundred pound block of ice every other day.”
The drugstore had been a part of Owensville longer than even Woodruff could remember. His father, Roy, bought the store in 1924 from the brother of a Mount Orab physician, and it was renamed Woodruff’s. Chuck Woodruff had an old photograph, the kind with a hard backing, lying on a shelf above the fountain. Taken around 1927, the photograph shows Roy and Chuck standing stiffly behind the cherry counter and its marble top. The soda men look proudly across the room, toward small round tables and chairs with tiny wire legs. A metal sign for Bruck’s Near Beer hangs on the wall.
When the infrequent someone would ask about near beer, Woodruff would pause in disbelief. “Why, it’s near beer,” he told me. “Looked like beer, tasted like beer, but it had to be less than one percent alcohol. Same as a soft drink, really. I hated it then, I hate it now. In them days, of course, there was no Seven-Up. You had your orange, sarsaparilla, root beer, lemon-lime, and your Co’-Cola. During Prohibition, we sold Bruck’s Near Beer—you see, they weren’t allowed to call it beer—and old Bruck’s kept right on goin’. It was the only brewery in Cincinnati that worked, that I know of.”
When the Depression hit in late 1929, things toughened in Owensville. Woodruff was in high school, the old Owensville High School, where all grades were in one building. He continued to help his father in the store, and played guard on the championship basketball team of 1930. One of his teammates, a farm boy, rode a mule to every practice that year.
The Depression was momentarily set aside in the early 1930s when gold was discovered in Brushy Fork Creek. “It all started when some flakes of gold were found in the water,” Woodruff said. “Pretty soon, people were comin’ down here pannin’ for gold, and one fellow brought a good-sized little hunk into the store for us to see. A farmer used his land for a little strip-mining, and he brought a gold mining company in. But they never did make much money out of it. I even panned a little myself. Probably washed it all away.”
The gold-mining farmer had a daughter who was an actress in Hollywood. She brought her husband, a songwriter for Hollywood musicals, to Owensville on a vacation about this time. The next time they came, they brought some friends: Alice Faye, George Gobel, and George Jessel. “They all came into the store pretty near every day when they were in town,” Woodruff said. “I wouldn’t have even recognized ’em, but I had heard they were in town. Alice was in here twice. She didn’t try to show off or anything.”
In those times, Roy Woodruff kept a good supply of horse liniment, mineral tonics, and veterinary Absorbine, which the older people liked to use as a liniment. Woodruff also stocked things such as Dr. Lyon’s Tooth Powder and Sozodont, “the timely, delicate tooth wash.” Chuck Woodruff still carries it too, because one man in town uses it. As a pharmacist, Woodruff also keeps a lot of things that his customers find difficult to find in convenience stores and supermarkets. His version of the store, however, has moved ahead, if ever so slightly. The nickel ice cream cones were twenty-five cents—inexpensive by 1980s’ standards. Sodas cost sixty-five cents. But the wooden floors were still gritty, and the whole store looked liked something out of a faded color postcard. Woodruff’s groped to find its way in the modern world.
“I haven’t changed things much since I moved to this location in 1948,” Woodruff said. “I guess I’d lose my identity if I changed it. I don’t know, maybe I’m looking at it the wrong way, but you’d be surprised at the number of people who like to come in here just to remember.”
Perhaps Woodruff’s ways were good for business. Shopping was a circumspect matter to many small-town residents. Newcomers, of which Owensville has had a liberal share, didn’t seem to care as much about buying tradition. Maybe that’s why the subdivision dwellers outside of town preferred to stop at the new discount drugstore so frequently.
“Oh, I hear they’ve got nearly everything in that store and not much of anything,” Woodruff said nonchalantly. “You see, I’ve never actually been in it, but that’s what I’m told. The other day a man said that the place looks like a hardware store that got stunted in growth.”
They do things differently at the chain store. The police scanner doesn’t blare and, unlike Woodruff, the chain’s operators don’t close whenever there’s a fire in town. Woodruff, the only charter member of the Owensville Fire Department, will leave the store if the department needs him. Some things, he said, are more important than business.
He extends that philosophy to public service, too. He served three terms on the Clermont Northeastern Local School District’s board of education. He enjoyed it; it had purpose. Whatever his reasons, Woodruff served, time moved on, and his three children grew up and took their own old-town memories with them. One son became a physician, and the other children made it known that they wanted no part of ever operating a country drugstore. Woodruff respected their decisions, without being upset.
Ruth looked sternly at him. “I told the kids I’d kill them if they ever went into this business. It’s a lot of long hours and hard work.” The look on her face showed she meant it. To avoid her stare, Woodruff turned toward the end of the fountain and observed a curly-haired young man sitting on a stool, sucking down a chocolate soda. He had overheard a part of Woodruff’s old school tales. “Yeah,” he said with a straight face, “they sure upgraded the board of education when you left it, Woody.”
Chuck Woodruff shook his head, his contagious laughter shaking the store. “And they sure upgraded the school when you left, Squeaky. Now, what else will you have, anyway?”
Ruth walked over to her husband and gently took his arm. She smiled at him. It was the smile of a wife who was proud of her husband and their life together.
Woodruff sat down on a stool and stared at the scuffed soda fountain counter. “Well, I’ll just work as long as I can,” he said. “What else you going to do? Oh, I haven’t made a lot of money, but I do feel that I’ve made a lot of friends in this town. I’ve made a small contribution. And I’m happy. You have to be happy.”
And the myth goes on.