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Posts Tagged ‘Darcy O’Neil’

Old Fashioned Soda Fountains Making a Comeback.

When Joe and I were in the process of opening the new pharmacy, we talked about having a soda fountain in the front. We even looked at gorgeous, antique wood, marble, and glass soda fountain fixtures that had been pulled from a pharmacy that had closed. The counters and cupboards were from a different era, created with intricate carvings and stained glass that you just don’t see in pharmacies today. 

Long before we opened Plain City Druggist, Lucas Drugs, which is shown in the photos here, boldly advertised not only that they sold medicine to the Plain City community, but sodas, too. Joe and I missed our opportunity for a drugstore/soda fountain combo shop by being born a little too late.

Because Joe and I had considered a soda fountain (we were talked out of it by several naysayers), I was really interested to hear a story on National Public Radio (NPR) about the revival of soda fountains and old-time concoctions. 

As the story recounted, soda fountains came in to being, because the medicine pharmacists mixed for their patients was so nasty tasting it required something sweet to help it go down more easily. In the time before pharmaceutical companies mass produced the now familiar bottles of pills and syrups, pharmacists made all of the medications on the spot for their ailing customers. Medicine in hand, those customers would then approach the soda fountain for flavoring.

Perhaps, like Mary Poppins, they also sang, “Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down in the most delightful way.”

Today, we do the same thing when we compound medicines. We don’t have a soda fountain, but we do have a whole shelf of flavoring to help remove the bitterness from some of the medicinal liquids we make. 

From the past, NPR’s story then jumped into present day and went on to tell about modern “mixologists” who have discovered old pharmacy soda fountain recipes and are reviving them in restaurants and bars across the United States. There are a few recipes for flavorful beverages on the NPR web site. You can find even more information about old fashioned concoctions on Darcy O’Neil’s web site, Art of Drink

O’Neil’s book, Fix the Pumps, tells the history of soda fountains and O’Neil provides an abridged history on the site under the heading “Soda Fountain.”

Soda fountains are no longer a memory from the past, however. They are becoming trendy, as people acquaint themselves with flavors their older relations once relished.

Maybe Joe and I weren’t born too late. Maybe we were just ahead of our time a few years ago when we thought about reviving the soda fountain in Plain City. 

To read the NPR story and also listen to the broadcast that I heard, go HERE.