I grew up in Connecticut and remember the drug store soda fountains of my youth. The one where I went to high school particularly sticks in my mind. We called it "The PO" because it was next to the Post Office, but its official name was the "Green Drug Store" because it was across from the town green in Washington. (Greens are called commons in Massachusetts, but this was Connecticut, so it was a green.) I've been told that a decade before my time, Mrs. Arthur Miller (a/k/a Marilyn Monroe) used to hang out there, but the area so guards the privacy of the many local celebrities that I didn't hear about this story until nearly two decades after I graduated.

The PO made drinks and ice cream treats to order. You could get cherry cokes, cherry lemon cokes, cherry vanilla root beers, and many other combinations of syrup and carbonated water. They made milk shakes, too.

Milk shakes in New England are subject to very regional terminology. Take two scoops of ice cream, add chocolate (or other flavored) syrup, and milk, and then blend until frothy. In Massachusetts, they were called frappes. The Brigham's chain of ice cream shops, based in Boston, also offered "milk shakes" sans ice cream, which is why you had to be careful ordering "milk shakes" in Massachusetts. In Rhode Island, they were called "cabinets" probably due to the influence of the Newport Creamery ice cream shops. Friendly's was based near Springfield, Mass, and the official menu offered "fribbles" (which were thick shakes) and milk shakes (which didn't have so much ice cream in them), but when you went to a Friendly's near Boston, you ordered a frappe instead of a milk shake. In Connecticut, the local term was a "frosted" or a "frost". (Wikipedia hasn't noted that one yet.) Because there were many New Yorkers in the area of my high school (often called "orange platers" because the New York license plate of that day had an orange background), the soda fountain there also understood the term "milk shake." If you added malt powder to the milk shake, it became a "malt" or "malted milk." In other places in America, a "malt" was a milk shake, but where I grew up, a "malt" always had malt in it, and I didn't like malt in my shakes.

My local soda fountain also made egg creams, which are a very New York City thing--chocolate syrup (ideally U-Bet), a little milk, and carbonated water. They also made "dusty sundaes"--malt powder on top of ice cream.

I remember, one by one, watching local pharmacies remove the soda fountains, which were very labor intensive, in favor of additional shelf space to sell other stuff. One other pharmacy in my town turned the soda fountain into more of a lunch counter. But eventually, they were replaced by chain restaurants that originally had made their reputations selling ice cream but had become much broader in service than that--Howard Johnson's (28 flavors), Friendly's (31 flavors), and Litchfield Farms.

It was the mid- and late-70s in Boston that gave rise to the new deluxe ice cream stores (probably starting with Steve's in Davis Square, Somerville), and which have gradually led to the chain/franchise ice cream specialty stores like Ben and Jerry's, Cold Mountain Creamery, Thomas Sweet, etc. Though the Washington, DC area has always had Gifford's.

Of course, soda fountains in pharmacies only happened with locally-owned pharmacies. The idea of one of the national pharmacy chains (CVS, Rite-Aid, Eckerd) offering a soda fountain is inconceivable, and it's a bit of historical lore to be passed along to youth who can only wonder about the mysterious past.


--Charlie Baum