The Drug Store: A Fisherman's Account

Part One

Before modern drugs came the patent medicines. Their makers made outrageous claims about their abilities to cure disease and relieve symptoms. Image by E.C. Buchanan

Chapter One – Blackfish

On a sultry summer afternoon in 1961, in a backwater of the Trent River near Pleasant Hill NC, Mr. Jimmy and I were fishing for jacks and chubs. He cast his red-headed darter across the river and was slowly working it back – dive and sit, dive and sit, dive and sit – when a great big head slowly came out of the water and engulfed his bait, leaving only a washtub-sized boil in the tea-colored water. Mr. Jimmy pulled back on his rod and it bent near a right angle. Not an easy thing because he was using his favorite short steel bait-casting rod.

Both of us hollered Holy shit! I was certain he had a world record chub on the line. Mr. Jimmy couldn’t turn the fish that torpedoed upstream, coming to rest among some cypress knees on our side of the river. I thought that lunker had broken off there among the knees. Holding his rod high, Mr. Jimmy started reeling and walking upstream to free his line. He reeled up to the tip of his rod putting it down under water next to a cypress knee. Then he reached down with his right hand to see if he could free his line. As he pulled the line off the cypress, the fish took off again. The line cut his finger and the blast-off nearly jerked the rod out of his hand. There were deep furrows in his brow and he licked his lower lip furiously but he managed to hang on.

The fish charged out into open water and jumped. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was the biggest damn fish I had ever seen (pardon my French). Mr. Jimmy held his rod tip up trudging, slip-sliding along the muddy river bank, cussin’ under his breath. He was wearing blue work pants, white socks and old work boots with slick soles. His clothes were soon covered in mud as he stumbled along the bank. After going under the bridge, he started pulling up his rod and reeling down, up and down – over and over. Then that fish would take off again. He yelled, C.C. go down and pull that big limb out the water so he don’t hang me up no more. The limb was old and water-logged but I managed with a lot of falling down and pulling to get it up on the river bank. Wearing my old dungarees, black, high-top tennis shoes and a white T-shirt, I looked like I’d been mud-wrasslin’.

For what seemed like an hour, but probably more like fifteen minutes, they fought it out – toe to toe – so to speak. Mr. Jimmy was getting real tired but finally was able to wind him in to where I could see him in the dark water. I started to go into the water to pull that chub out but Mr. Jimmy commanded, C.C. don’t get near that fish. He a’ bite yo’ han’ off. I was close enough to see that bulldog of the river plain as day.

Huge is not the word for it – more like an alligator than a fish. Mr. Jimmy reared back to heave him up on the bank - - the line went limp. And this was 30 pound nylon line!

I said, Mr. Jimmy you woulda had a world record there for sure.

He just sat back on the bank huffing and puffing – all tuckered out. After he caught his breath, Mr. Jimmy said, in a halting, aggravated way, That warn’t no chub, it was just the biggest damn blackfish I ever seen. I’ve caught some big ‘uns but he’da took the cake. How’m I gone teach you to fish, if I’m too wore out to catch a big ‘un m’self?

We sat on the bank and rested and told each other the story all over again. Besides big, he was some sort of copper color. His head was shaped kinda like a bullet. He had somethin’ like an ‘eye spot’ on a funny-looking tail that was too small for his body.

We just sat a while and finally he said, He got my darter but thank the Lord I warn’t usin’ my good Zaragossa. I’da hated to lose that bait. I’m ‘bout done in. Let’s call it a day. The ‘skeeters is ‘bout to eat me alive. The darter was a run-of-the-mill wooden fishing plug but evidently a Zaragossa plug was something special. It would be dark soon and the mosquitoes were coming out of the swamp in swarms but I hated to leave the scene.

I was 15 years old, not old enough to drive, so I rode shotgun thinking about our adventure: What was a blackfish anyway? In fact, what was a Zaragossa? Mr. Jimmy said he’s glad he didn’t catch that blackfish because they weren’t good to eat and you really had to steer clear of their mouth because they were loaded with big, sharp teeth sticking out of a jaw like a steel trap.

He said he could get another red-headed darter at the hardware store but he couldn’t buy another Zaragossa. Why – ‘cause you cain’t buy ‘em no more. The good thing was that he really had a fight and he’d just have to come back another time with live bait or crawdads and a bigger rod and catch that old sum’bitch. See - you had to understand Mr. Jimmy, otherwise known as James Leroy Cheney. He’d been fishing his entire life around eastern North Carolina. So he’d caught blackfish before, whether he wanted to or not. He had taken a special interest in teaching me all about fishing. Maybe I was like the son he never had.

Mr. Jimmy was proud of his fishing skills. He was a bait-caster and didn’t much hold with the new-fangled spinning reels strung with plastic fishing line. He used a four foot, True Temper octagonal tapered steel rod with a Pflueger Trump reel that had level wind and imitation pearl handles. His fishing line was Western-brand braided nylon made in a camouflage pattern. Once the line got wet, surface tension held it on the reel spool, helping to prevent the dreaded bird’s nest.

Mr. Jimmy’s rod, reel and tackle box.

Image by E.C. Buchanan

His tackle box had two fold-out trays and a real leather-covered handle. When he was sneaking up to fish on creeks, he preferred to put a couple of baits (in their boxes of course; those raw treble hooks don’t come out of pockets in a hurry and could cause some serious damage to tender parts) into each of his front pants pockets so that he could move up and down the bank in a hunched over position.

He could side-arm a three-quarter ounce fishing plug up underneath any overhanging bush within 30 or 40 feet of where he was kneeling on the bank. I’d seen him do it lots of times. His fishing plugs were expensive too, some over a dollar apiece. So he didn’t want any of them chewed up by an old blackfish. Me on the other hand, I had mostly caught bream and perch with the spinning rod that I bought last year with money I had earned at the drug store. So I was convinced that catching any fish as big as that blackfish was not only worth doing but would confer sainthood on me among my fishing buddies.

In our part of the country, we call game fish, most any fish for that matter, by a different name from what Yankees would call them. To give you some idea - what we call a chub is really a bass, large mouth type. We call a chain pickerel a jack. We call a grass pickerel a red-fin pike and a bream or sunfish, a perch. The redbreast sunfish, we call a robin for obvious reasons. Which brings us to blackfish.

Before seeing that monster blackfish, I had never seen or heard of such a fish. When I got home, I found my Golden Nature Guide to Fishes. (I had won this in a fifth grade game of The Price is Right with a guess of $1.03, including tax.) My Golden Guide described a blackfish as a large marine mammal, evidently much larger even than the monster blackfish that I was trying to learn about – not to mention that we had been fishing nowhere near salt water. Looking through the guide, I did find a family tree of bony fishes and saw a picture that looked pretty much like our blackfish, except that the guide called it a bowfin, distant relative of gars.

Bowfin (a.k.a. blackfish)

Image by M.Yanega on bowfinanglers.com/bowfininfo.html

What was a bowfin? Looking in our 1957 encyclopedias, I found out. A bowfin is a primitive ray-finned fish, a contemporary of the dinosaurs, a species so ancient that fossils had been found that were 150 million years old. Bowfins have a very long fin running along their back and a single lobed tail with a black eye spot high up on the tail. They have a large bony head and they will eat anything from insects, to crawfish, to frogs and other fish. To my amazement, I learned bowfins can reach a length of three and a half feet and can weight more than 20 pounds. I really don’t think Mr. Jimmy’s blackfish was that big but who knows? My aim was to be as good a fisherman as Mr. Jimmy and catching that monster was how I would do it.

* * *

Chapter Two – The Drug Store

That evening we rode back to town in Mr. Jimmy’s 1951 Nash Rambler, a car he had bought second hand and was mighty proud of. It was a yellow two-door model with a black hardtop, white side-wall tires, full wheel covers, an AM radio, floor mats and a hood ornament that looked like a naked lady flying like Superman. It had no air conditioning of course. But with the windows down, I felt like we were riding in the lap of luxury - even though the Nash Rambler looked like an up-side-down tea cup with wheels poking out underneath.

1951 Nash Rambler

Image by www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1951_Nash_Rambler

We were so dirty, Mr. Jimmy took up the front floor mat and draped it over his seat, and the back floor mat and draped it over my seat, so we could ride back without messing up his seat covers. He’d had us put our shoes in the trunk of the car, so we rode back barefoot. I didn’t mind; it was cooler that way. Mr. Jimmy said that he had learned to drive bare-foot out on his father’s farm so this was natural for him.

We were listening to Hank Williams sing I’m so lonesome I could cry when he asked, C.C. (that’s my nickname because nobody wanted to call me Cicero Chichester like my mother did and thank goodness for that) when do you start driving? It was my fervent hope to get my driver’s license directly on my 16th birthday, even though I wouldn’t take drivers’ education class for several months yet. This was a required class for which we got an hour’s credit but I had to take it during Christmas break, as I explained to Mr. Jimmy.

Well, C.C. what are you in such a big hurry for? Are you want’n to take your girl out for a date? Silence. Whas a-matter? Cat got your tongue? I had never had a date much less a girl friend; so I just said, Nope, hoping he would drop the subject.

Well why not?

I just turned 15. I don’t’ know that much about girls, on account of all I’ve got is brothers. And my mother’s not like a real girl.

C.C. let me tell you a story.

I was stationed near Yongsan, Korea and I met a Korean girl when I was on leave. She spoke a little English and after a while, we got to be friends – even though the officers advised us not to mix with the locals. We enjoyed each other’s company. I taught her how to jitterbug. She laughed at my jokes. I bragged about her cooking. She made me flat cakes stuffed with pieces of meat. I thought about marryin’ that little gal but I never could bring myself around to askin’ her. Her name was Kim Kuo Yun. Now here I am 34 years old and ain’t got no prospects of marryin’ and sometimes I miss her right smart. I don’t know where she is or even if she lived through the war. That was a pretty rough part of the country. So you don’t want to end up like me with no wife and no family. I hope she did find a good man and settle down. Believe you me, she’d a’made someone a mighty fine wife.

We rode along quietly except for the radio playing country music. Mr. Jimmy seemed kinda’ sad and here I thought he was so lucky. He could drive around in his Nash Rambler. He could go fishing when he’s not working. I was so lucky that he worked in the drug store that my Daddy owns.

About 8:30 that evening, we pulled into the back of the drug store where Daddy was still at work. We had made it back before dark. That was important because Daddy closed the back door at dark and put a big wooden bar across, so he wouldn’t be surprised by a robber. The other reason was that there were no lights under the tin-roof shed over Daddy’s car back of the store. Even as grown up as I was, I though it was a spooky place. There was a heavy door and a tall window in back. The window had iron bars, some of which had been bent by burglars trying to get in to steal cash or drugs. On the right, just before you got to the back door were two small rooms. The first one was the coal bin, and lurking inside were rats and mice, and snakes slithering around trying to eat rats and mice. The other door was the drug store’s only rest room. It was for family and employees only but once in a while Daddy let customers use it if they were in dire need. The rest room had one bulb with a pull chain in the ceiling to light a flush toilet but the room had no sink. Its other features were the mouse holes around the edge of the wall, a toilet with a brown wooden seat and a rust-stained bowl as evidence of not having been cleaned very often.

Going down two tall steps into the back of the store, I had planned to help Daddy clean up and close the store so we could go home together at nine o’clock for supper. When Daddy saw me barefoot with mud all over, he said, Son, you better just sit down here on the bench and wait for me. You know your mother’s not going to be too happy to see you looking like that.

My father was Roebuck McKinney but most folks called him Mr. Buck. Though some called him Doc - the only pharmacist in the drug store. I told Daddy all about the big blackfish that Mr. Jimmy almost caught. He said, Son, what on earth would ya’ll have done with that fish if he had caught him? Then he asked if I was hungry. He let me and my brothers eat just about any food in the store, without even paying for it. Daddy called it business overhead. So I got myself a pack of Nabs crackers and made a big cherry Coke.

Daddy had bought the drug store from old Mr. Newton about a dozen years before. He rented the building from Dr. Hobgood, one of the town’s well-to-do doctors. The drug store had been at this location since the early 1900’s, right across Main Street from the county courthouse. Daddy had changed the name from Newton’s Drug Store to Hickory Hill Drug Company. Evidently company sounded more modern to him than store. Nevertheless, everyone knew it as the drug store. Daddy had paid $8500 cash to buy the drug store, lock, stock and barrel.

He had given the drug store a new name but he hadn’t changed much else. The store was narrow but deep, front to back, including the car shed. The ceilings were really tall and made out of tin squares, pressed and painted a dingy white to look like fancy plaster. Two ceiling fans, each with two long blades, hung down low, one over the soda fountain and one over the booths in front of the prescription department toward the back. We ran the ceiling fans year round. There was no air conditioning in the store until after I went to college. In the summer we turned on a big floor fan at high speed keeping the air moving on the side of the store opposite from the soda fountain and opened the front doors to let in fresh air. Even with the fans, summertime made the drug store a hot, muggy place to work.

When Daddy first bought the store, a doctor had rented the office in the attic in the back of the store over the prescription department. He moved out before I was old enough to remember but he left a lot of interesting things behind. Things, like trusses for hernias with a pad on the left or on the right or on both sides and he left a steam bath. The steam bath was white enamel and was just big enough to hold a metal chair inside with a hole on top where you poked your head out. The front doors closed and the top doors closed around your neck before the steam was turned on. I always wondered what the doctor tried to cure with a steam bath.

While we boys were still in grade school, Daddy brought the steam bath home and put it in the back yard for us to play in. He was able to sell a few of the trusses to some old men. But mostly the stuff in the attic just collected dust and served as an interesting place for us boys to play hide-and-seek.

A while after the doctor moved out, Daddy pushed the dusty stuff to one side and a jeweler moved into the attic. He didn’t stay long because the jewelry business was poor and it got too hot up there. To pay his last rent to Daddy, the jeweler gave him an old watch that a soldier from Fort Bragg had dropped off but had never picked up. The watch was a WWII era timepiece with a round white face and black hands, including a second hand dial, and attached to a brown leather wrist strap. The back of the watch said ORD DEPT USA OF 31116 BULOVA WATCH CO. When I turned ten years old, Daddy gave me that watch, the first one I ever owned, and it lasted me through college. Daddy poked me on the shoulder and said, OK son, let’s go home. It was Friday night. Tomorrow was a Saturday.

* * *

Chapter Three – Saturday

Rise and shine, Daddy whispered as he shook my shoulder. We have to get breakfast and be out of the house by 7:15. I rolled out of bed while my two brothers slept, one in the double bed beside me and the other in his own twin bed on the other side of our small bedroom. Lucky guys! I washed my face, shaved a few scraggly hairs, pulled on a pair of dungarees, white socks and Weejuns. I ate breakfast in my under shirt, so I wouldn’t mess up my good button-down shirt for working at the drug store. In the comic books, soda jerks wore white jackets and a paper hat that looked like a soldier’s cap, sharp on both ends, folding flat to hang from the soldier’s belt when he was indoors. We just wore nice street clothes to work in the drug store, hair combed, and shoes shined. I didn’t like to polish shoes.

Mother was up, running around in her house coat, fixing breakfast. The house smelled like eggs and bacon. I started with toast wrapped around a big spoonful of grape preserves – loaded with hulls. She had picked the grapes from my granddaddy’s big grapevine last summer and had put up a dozen jars of preserves. The older they got, the more sugar crystallized out, making chewing a little crunchy.

~ ~ ~

Jethro Bates worked at the ice house where Daddy bought coal in the winter and ice year round. Jethro was a huge Negro man with biceps as big around as my thighs but he had a soft rather high-pitched voice. Mr. Buck, what’ll ya’ll have this morning?

Morning Jethro, I need two 50 pound blocks of ice.

What cha need all dat ice fo’? Hit mus’ be sad’dy. As he talked, he tied binder’s twine around the middle of each block of ice.

Yeah, it’s gonna be a hot one today and I expect we’ll have a lot of traffic at the soda fountain. How much will that be?

Jes’ like always, fithdy cent’ a block. Daddy pulled out his wallet, removed a dollar bill and handed it up to Jethro standing on the loading platform.

Daddy looked around at me and said, I’ll take one and C.C. here can take the other. I felt good that I could heft one of the big blocks onto the newspaper that Daddy had laid out in the trunk of his car.

As Jethro handed me the ice, I acknowledged that I had it, Thank you sir.

You’ wekkome, Mr. Cicero. I knew he meant respect by calling me, Mr. Cicero but I would much rather he’d of called me C.C. like everybody else. But I let it go – too shy to say anything back to the older man.

We got in the car and made haste to get to the store. Along the way, Daddy, in a reproving tone, said, You don’t have to call Jethro, ‘sir’. Taken aback, I wanted to know why. Daddy explained that he was a nigra and that whites didn’t have to say sir and ma’am to nigras – even if they were a good deal older. Mother always taught us to say Yes, Sir and Yes, Ma’am to our elders. I wasn’t quite sure why good manners didn’t apply to black folks; however, I thought Daddy was trying to help me understand. Daddy was my hero.

I was quiet for the five minutes it took us to get to the store. It didn’t occur to me at the time that I had been calling Mr. Bates, Jethro, just like Daddy had. White men, I would have called, Mr. Smith or Mr. Johnny.

Arriving at the drug store, my job was to unlock the front door. Meanwhile, Daddy drove around to park his car under the shed. I went through the store to remove the bolt and opened the back door as Daddy pulled in. He parked the car on the dirt floor and opened the trunk. We each took an ice block. One block went into the bottle drink box to keep Co’colas and the other drinks cold and the other block was to crush to make fountain drinks.

Saturday was the busiest day of the week. Many years ago, the drug store had been popular with downtown business folks but as time went by, business moved farther north up Main Street. When Daddy bought it, the drug store was past its prime. In spite of my mother’s best efforts, Daddy kept the store crowded with dusty merchandise and left the aisles narrow.

At that time most pharmacies in Hickory Hill had a soda fountain. That was my job; I was the soda jerk. Before the drug store opened at 8 o’clock, I had to replenish the various drinks that we would serve. Upon checking the drink machines, Coke and Pepsi, I found the Coke syrup needed to be filled. So I took the lid off the Coke machine and poured syrup into the tank. The dark, thick liquid made a sound like glop, glop, glop. I got a pointed cup (the cheapest kind), filled it with fountain Coke and drank it to test the mix of syrup and carbonated water. The carbonation came from one of the tall tanks that contained pressurized carbon dioxide located in the prescription department. If one of those tanks ever got knocked over, it would explode like the biggest fire cracker ever made.

Then, using an ice pick, I chopped off a big block of ice and took it