| By BRIAN WILLIAMS, Herald Staff Writer
For more than 50 years, the soda fountain at Kramer Drug was a place to have a malt, a cup of coffee and good conversation.
“A lot of things happened that were very enjoyable there,” Helena Kramer, 96, said. She bought the store with her husband, W.F. “Bud” Kramer, in 1950.
The soda fountain will take its place in Ottawa history with the grand opening of a historical exhibit at 1 p.m. Sunday at the Old Depot Museum, 135 W. Tecumseh St., Ottawa.
“We’re real excited to have it,” Deb Barker, Franklin County Historical Society director, said.
Barker isn’t the only one happy to see the soda fountain preserved for future generations.
“I’m so pleased with that. I smile every time I think about it,” Barb Hickman, 59, Ottawa, who worked at the soda fountain when she was in high school in 1965 and then began keeping books for the store in 1971, said.
“We used to have a really good time at the fountain.”
A new start
When W.F. “Bud” and Helena Kramer bought the drugstore at 134 S. Main St. from Earl Rohrbach Jan. 1, 1950, Helena Kramer never had worked at a soda fountain.
From previous drugstore experience, Bud Kramer already knew how to make everything. But it was up to his wife to learn how the fountain worked and train the staff at what was then the most profitable part of the business.
“I was pleased to find a notebook, about 2 [inches] by 4 [inches], that had recipes about what to have at a soda fountain,” she said.
The soda fountain had been in the store since the early 1930s and needed a lot of work. B.H. Bennett, owner of Bennett Creamery, agreed to pay for the replacement of the soda fountain and allowed the Kramers to make weekly payments.
“Not only was he the man behind it and he paid for it, he helped with promotions,” Helena Kramer said.
One successful promotion of Bennett’s involved eggs.
Every child who brought in a fresh egg got a free ice cream cone. For Bennett, it was a way to get eggs for the creamery.
“It was a store full of kids. It was a lot of scooping to keep up with all of them,” Helena Kramer said.
The Kramers were able to pay off the fountain in no time, Helena Kramer said.
Hickman recalls Bud Kramer’s attention to detail.
“He knew how many ice cream scoops would come out of a 5-gallon container within a half of a scoop, if you did it right,” she said.
A family atmosphere
“A cross-section of people worked for us,” George Kramer, 71, said. As a son of Bud and Helena Kramer, he began sweeping floors at the store and working at the fountain when he was 12.
The soda fountain crew was mostly guys, but that changed to girls by the time he was finishing high school.
“They’d really form a tight clan and run around as friends. Not always, but it often happened,” George Kramer, who obtained partial ownership from his parents in 1956, said.
George’s brother, John, also became a pharmacist and worked at the store before selling his share back to the store and moving to Nevada in 1969. George’s wife, Jacque, became a pharmacist and completed her internship at the store in 1974.
Bud Kramer retired in 1974 and died in 1998.
A lot of Hickman’s life revolved around the drug store. After working at the soda fountain when she was in high school, she became the bookkeeper for the store in 1971 and still does billing for the store, which Gene Millbern bought from George and Jacque Kramer in 2006.
Hickman’s daughters also worked at the soda fountain, and her father had delivered prescriptions on a bicycle for Kramer when he managed Crown Drug Store.
“It was very, very family oriented,” she said.
Hickman remembers that even though there wasn’t a grill, there was a time when several people in town would gather for lunch on Fridays.
It was simply an informal potluck, where people would take turns bringing in dishes on Fridays, she said.
Hard work
For Hickman, sundaes were the easiest, because it only took a scoop of ice cream and topping.
“It was whole food topping. It was the real stuff. You don’t get it like that anymore,” she said.
On the other hand, Sundays were the most difficult.
Sundays were the slowest day for the store, so that was when a lot of the detailed cleaning got done. Gum was scraped from underneath the stools. All of the cups were bleached.
The fountain itself was taken apart to clean all of the residual “gunk” from the CO2 that had built up after being mixed with the syrup and ice in the machine, Hickman said.
Hickman remembers cleaning the chrome on the stools with a toothbrush.
“We had a bunch of good girls. The store needed to be spotless when you left in the evening,” Helena Kramer said.
“Whatever needed to be done, they did it without any backtalk.”
Lessons learned
“At the fountain, a lot of kids learned about life. You learned about counting back change, inventory and the way you should treat someone as a customer,” Hickman said.
In a move that was ahead of its time, George Kramer banned smoking and then stopped selling cigarettes at the drug store in the 1980s.
“We were surprised they took them out,” Hickman said.
Jacque Kramer said they knew cigarettes weren’t safe, so it didn’t make sense to keep selling them.
Some people grumbled and quit coming in, but that didn’t last long, Hickman said.
“Within two weeks, [those people] were back in. That shows how much the fountain meant to them,” she said.
The impact of Kramer’s soda fountain is felt still.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Kramer Pharmacy received a card from a girl who worked at the fountain at Kramer Drug years ago, when she was a teenager.
The card said she had been taught by nuns in school that anything taken that amounted to an hour’s wage needed to be paid back.
The girl wrote that with minimum wage at $7.25 and with “the mints, gum and sodas with cashews on top,” she owed $20. A check was enclosed.
“The kids working at the store were an important part,” Jacque Kramer said. “I miss knowing that you had an important effect on their lives.”
Copyright 4/16/2009 • www.ottawaherald.com
|
Kay Wilburn
