Soda fountain making debut at museum

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.”

Highway Post Office - Remember these coming through Ottawa – I Do!!

This bus was the first Highway Post Office vehicle to operate in the United States. Its 149-mile route, which ran between Washington, D.C., and Harrisonburg, Virginia, was inaugurated on February 10, 1941. The White Motor Company of Cleveland, Ohio, designed and built the bus. The term 'Highway Post Office' is abbreviated either by the initials 'HPO' or by the more affectionate term 'HyPO'.

Highway Post Office service was initiated in response to declining railroad traffic in the early 1940s. As the American population grew, use of the highway system grew as well, meaning fewer passengers traveled by rail. This, in turn, meant fewer trains available to carry mail in several parts of the country. A second HyPO route was not established until 1946 due to the outbreak of World War II. The service grew very slowly at first, not really taking-off until the 1950s, when these brightly-colored buses became common sights on American highways.

Every time the Post Office Department established a new route, it issued a special "First Day Cover" (FDC) cancellation which it created for the philatelic mail carried that day. Several of these FDCs are also in the Postal Museum's collection.

Mail was brought onto the bus in bags that were either stored in the back or brought up to the front for processing. Clerks inside the buses sorted mail in transit just as Railway Mail Service clerks had done aboard trains. The interiors of these buses resembled Railway Post Offices—letter cases and the letter distributing table on one side and the paper distributing table and holders for mail sacks on the other. The rear section of the bus had about 640 cubic feet of space and could hold an average of 150 mail sacks.

The mail's security was very important. Because bus drivers were contractors rather than postal employees, a locked screen door separated the driver from the mail clerks. The bus windows were barred on the outside and screened on the inside to provide security.

The changing character of cities and of the mail itself eventually led to the death of the Highway Post Office. The Post Office Department then moved from decentralized mobile sorting units to large mail processing centers.

Although the bus in the Postal Museum's collection was decommissioned in the 1960s, the Highway Post Office service ran until June 30, 1974. Ironically, the Railway Mail Service that HyPOs were created to replace outlasted the bus service by three years.

After decommission, a postal worker in the Department's Bureau of Transport kept the bus from destruction by hiding it in various post office garages. It was finally discovered and sold. Fortunately, the story did not end there. In 1968 the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) acquired the bus, paid for its restoration, and donated it to the national collection.

Date:

1941-1960s

Markings:

HIGHWAY POST OFFICE / U.S. MAIL

Medium:

metal; glass; rubber; plastic

Museum ID:

0.315456.1

Place:

Virginia

Collection:

National Postal Museum

Nancy A. Pope, National Postal Museum

April 6, 2006

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Remember When this Train Came Down Walnut Street

TULSAN

reprinted by permission with limited pictures from The National Railway Bulletin, Volume 66, Number 6, 2001.

Page 1 of 1

TULSAN

Wilbur Johnson

The Santa Fe added the Tulsan to its Kansas City-Tulsa trains on December 10, 1939. I rode the initial run southbound on that date from Bartlesville to Tulsa. It had made an exhibition run the previous day, then began service the next morning leaving Tulsa at 8:40 a.m. and arriving in Kansas City at 1:40 p.m. In later years, it changed to a 7:05 a.m. departure and arrived at Kansas City a little after noon. It stayed on this schedule until May 1971, when Amtrak came into existence, despite numerous efforts on the part of the Santa Fe to scuttle it. At the time of the efforts to discontinue it, over 1,000 people appeared at a hearing in Chanute, Kansas to protest. One of the greatest services the Tulsan provided was enabling people in northeastern Oklahoma and southeastern Kansas to see their doctors and specialists in Kansas City, affording them an early afternoon appointment, then boarding the southbound Tulsan at 5 p.m. for the return trip.

At its inception, the train consisted of three chair cars, a diner, and the round-end lounge car that operated between Tulsa and Chicago. One of the chair cars was a through Tulsa-Chicago coach. Prior to its being included in the schedule, the Santa Fe had the day trains, No. 49 and 50, the Oil Flyers, and the overnight trains, No. 47 known as the Southern Kansas-Eastern Oklahoma Express, and No. 48 from Tulsa known as the Kansas City Express.

Above: Santa Fe Tulsan (Train No. 212) departing Bartlesville, OK for Kansas City, Mo. in 1941.

For the most part, the Oil Flyers were locals, with No. 49 leaving Kansas City at 8:30 a.m., arriving in Tulsa about 3:34 p.m. and No. 50 departing Tulsa at 12:30 p.m. and arriving in Kansas City about 8 p.m. The advent of Nos. 211-212 not only improved the service on the Kansas City-Tulsa schedule, but also brought about a change in the schedule on No. 50. Instead of a 12:30 p.m. departure, it now departed Tulsa at 4 p.m., and with a through Tulsa-Chicago sleeper, a business man could spend the entire work day in Tulsa, get a good night’s rest, and arrive in Chicago at 8 a.m. in time for a full work day there.

In August 1940, the Santa Fe discontinued No. 48 and 49, and at that time the RPO-baggage car was added to the consist of Nos. 211-212. Also at that time No. 47 became the Oil Flyer and in later years, the northbound Oil Flyer was changed from No. 50 to 48. The Oil Flyers lasted until 1968 and were discontinued because the Post Office Department believed that sectional service centers were better off handling the mail than RPO’s. When the Santa Fe instituted the Texas Chief in the late 1940s, the Chicago-Tulsa sleeper was included in its consist. It had a 6 pm departure from Chicago, with a 1:30 a.m. arrival in Kansas City. This necessitated a 2 a.m. departure for the Oil Flyer and 8:30 a.m. arrival in Tulsa, much to a business man’s liking. I was on No. 15, the Texas Chief, coming out of Chicago one evening and remarked to the Pullman conductor that I was surprised to see the Tulsa car so well patronized. He replied, “Oh, this is the best car on the train.” With Bartlesville being the headquarters of a major oil company, there was nearly as much Bartlesville business as there was Tulsa patronage.

When the Frisco discontinued passenger service between Kansas City and Tulsa in the late 1950s, the schedule of No. 47 had to be changed to a 11:59 departure from Kansas City for mail contract purposes. That necessitated changing the departure on the Chicago-Tulsa sleeper from 6:00 p.m. to 3:15 for the San Francisco Chief, and the sleeper never did well after that. In the mid-1960s, the Santa Fe discontinued the sleeper. In 1966, the Chamber of Commerce in Tulsa and the Santa Fe got together and agreed to revive the Tulsa-Chicago sleeper, and at the same time, add a lounge-diner back into the consist. I moved from Tulsa to Houston in June 1966 but my Oklahoma correspondents told me the sleeper was doing a good business. Then came the dreadful announcement in August 1967 that RPO cars were being discontinued, and that finished not only the sleeper, but also the Tulsa-Chicago coach on Nos. 211 and 212. This caused Chicago passengers from train No. 212 to have to walk across the platform in Kansas City to board the Grand Canyon Limited.

One of the greatest delights in my lifetime came in 1965 when the Santa Fe applied to the ICC to discontinue the Oil Flyers. I testified at the Tulsa hearing, at the Mayo Hotel, practically calling the Santa Fe’s Eastern Division Superintendent a liar because he testified that people were not patronizing the “fine equipment” on the two trains. After departing the Mayo that evening, I happened to run into the ICC examiner who had conducted the hearing. In all sincerity I told him that I felt as though he had handled the hearing fairly and impartially. I always wondered if that happenstance meeting might have contributed to the ICC ruling that the Santa Fe had to run the trains for at least one more year. It was during the next year that Santa Fe reinstated the aforementioned sleeper and Lounge-diner on the Oil Flyers.

Below: Santa Fe Tulsan (Train No. 212) is shown eastbound with F7 diesel No. 30 and an unidentified booster unit on July 4, 1969. By this time the diner had been discontinued and coffee-cart service was offered instead.

I I have always felt that the Santa Fe made an honest effort to stay in the passenger business, but never could understand their total disdain for the Tulsa trains by making moves that discouraged the public from using these trains.