OPINION

REX NELSON: The gathering place

It's nearing the lunch hour in downtown Dumas, and a stream of customers is coming into Meador Pharmacy to pick up sandwiches from the soda fountain. The drugstore soda fountain has almost become a thing of the past, but at Meador all of the classics are on the menu--ham, ham and cheese, grilled cheese, tuna, chicken salad, pimento cheese and even peanut butter and jelly. It's hot outside, reminding me of the line from the Bobbie Gentry classic "Ode to Billie Joe": "Another sleepy, dusty Delta day."

As he has been doing almost daily since 1967, Bill Canada is minding the store, having opened up shortly before 6 a.m. so farmers and businessmen can come in for coffee. Canada made the news in October 2013 when he shot and killed a masked man who tried to rob him at gunpoint at 5:30 a.m. on a Friday, but that tragic incident hasn't slowed him in the least. He's 76 years old, and retirement isn't on the horizon.

"Everybody I know who retires gets sick and dies," Canada tells me as I eat a pimento cheese sandwich and sip on a vanilla milkshake. Canada says the Thursdays and every other Saturday he takes off are enough for now. His daughter, Kara Beth Crow, is also a pharmacist at Meador, and a third pharmacist drives to Dumas each day from DeWitt.

On July 1, Meador will celebrate its 100th anniversary. It's one of the oldest locally owned businesses in the state that still has its original name. And with a second generation of the Canada family in line to take charge, it appears there will be many more anniversaries to come. Like other towns in the Arkansas Delta, Dumas has struggled in recent decades, falling from a population of 6,091 people in the 1980 census to 4,706 in the 2010 census. A number of businesses left downtown and set up shop along U.S. 65. There's competition from the pharmacy at a Fred's discount store on the highway, and there used to be a Wal-Mart in Dumas. It closed.

"People think we put Wal-Mart out of business," says Canada, who has a dry sense of humor. Through all of the changes in Southeast Arkansas, Meador Pharmacy has not only survived but thrived as a cornerstone of the community. When I was a boy in Arkadelphia in the 1960s, we had four downtown drugstores, all of which had soda fountains. None of the four remain. A similar story can be told in towns across the state. The downtown drugstore was a staple of small-town Arkansas--part pharmacy, part coffee shop, part gift shop. Stepping into Meador is like stepping back in time.

The store opened July 4, 1917, the same day electricity came to Dumas. Clifton "Rock" Meador and his brother, Bowles Meador, were 23 and 21 years old respectively at the time and saw potential in the growing town. Dumas more than doubled in population from 519 residents in 1910 to 1,124 in 1920 while serving as the retail center for thousands of sharecroppers and tenant farmers who lived on area plantations. It was hard to find a parking place downtown on Saturdays when those farmers would come to town. On weekdays, men would begin gathering at the pharmacy as early as 5 a.m.

"I remember when Rock would come out his back door to go open the store, yelling his call to breakfast all the way," Bowles Meador told the Dumas Clarion in a 1966 interview. "And it was only a little after 4 a.m. The Town Crier they called him. Not many folks had alarms in those days, so Rock woke them up, even those who preferred to sleep."

The Meador brothers also were in the fur business, a sideline that Canada continued until about a dozen years ago. Canada's father was, after all, a fur buyer from England in Lonoke County. The Meador brothers even sold hunting dogs. Rock Meador told the Clarion: "We sold one hound three times. When we had to take him back for the third time, we turned him loose." There also was a filling station owned by the brothers. Tires were shipped on the Mississippi River to Arkansas City on the riverboat "Kate Adams" and then trucked to Dumas. Meador Pharmacy even handled flower sales for the area until 1955 when a florist came to town.

Canada maintains a small museum of sorts in the front of the store. There are typewriters that were used to type prescription labels, adding machines, old prescription bottles and remnants from the fur-trading days. The store still sells a locally produced hair growth and straightener product with the brand name "Dog Mange."

Canada graduated from England High School in 1959, played that summer in the high school all-star football game and then went to what's now Henderson State University in Arkadelphia to play football for legendary Reddie head coach Duke Wells. After college, Canada attended pharmacy school in Little Rock, worked for two years as a pharmacist in Poplar Bluff, Mo., and worked for a year in Newport. He partnered with his uncle, Charles Rector, in 1967 to purchase the drugstore from the Meador brothers after they had operated it for five decades.

The store, which originally was in a building next door, moved to its current location in 1956. The building was remodeled in the 1970s, and there have been few changes since then. "It used to be open on Sundays, but we don't do that anymore," Canada says. "But we're here from 6 a.m. until 6 p.m. on other days, and our business is still good."

I ask him why he never added the Canada name to the business. He answers, "I don't know. I never really thought about it."

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Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.

Editorial on 06/24/2017

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