6. Music Lessons

But, to get back to Uniondale, and the fascination of the luxury trains on the B. & O., I hope you have not put me down as an insufferable little snob for believing, with all my heart, that good things were in store for me.

Throughout my childhood and youth, and during college days, I. firmly held an intuitional assurance that Destiny would eventually befriend me. Even on dark days, I had that faith. Explain it? No; I can’t account for it; but it is the truth.

In the country round about Uniondale, most of the roads had been graveled. Papa did not have to drive long distances, and traveling was easier. He was delighted to be back among his cherished country people. And Mama was at home again. No formal calls. No Browning Society.

Uniondale was not as large as Monroeville and less compact. Monroeville had one solid block of business houses on both sides of the street. In Uniondale the business places were scattered among old residences which meant to stay where they were, come what may.

We lived on a corner, two blocks from the principal street. When we went “downtown,” we met this main street at a square where, on one corner, lived a man who ran a dray and whose barnyard was cluttered with all manner of vehicles for hauling freight. Across from him was the residence of Doctor English, the only physician this side of Bluffton, our nearest big town. One of the two other corners was a vacant lot, grown high with weeds, and on the remaining corner was Lee Ormsby’s Drugstore.

Lee hadn’t taken naturally to agriculture; so his father, a well-to-do farmer, had set him up in business. This drugstore made no pretense of being a pharmacy. At that time, the doctor did not write prescriptions: he carried his medicines with him. A drugstore, sixty years ago, was a drugstore, a far different institution than the drugstore of today where you can buy anything from a hamburger to a go-cart. Lee Ormsby’s shelves were filled with such patent medicines as S. S. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription, Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, and Peruna. It seemed that many elderly people were greatly benefited by Peruna, for it was immensely popular throughout the country until Prohibition, after which no amount of advertising was sufficient to restore it to the esteem it had enjoyed previously.

The Ormsby Drugstore did a thriving business in Peruna and a wide assortment of patented pain-killers. This was long before the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs law. Anybody could buy as much as he wanted of medicines loaded with narcotics. Babies who cried were promptly soothed with paregoric which was seventy per cent laudanum. If you had paregoric in the house, you didn’t need a baby-sitter. Give Junior a big spoonful of paregoric (and Junior loved it for it was sweet and flavored with licorice) and you wouldn’t hear another squeak out of him until the next day.

I well remember when Lee installed the soda fountain in the front end of his store. It was quite a novelty and soon turned out to be the most profitable feature of his business. Some people said that Lee was his own best customer. Whenever he served a 56 ice-cream soda he had one himself. Earlier in this writing I think I spoke of a soda fountain that had one flavor labeled “Don’t Care.” Perhaps you thought I had made that up. My daughters, my nurses and my secretary warned me that even my most loyal friends might have trouble believing it. It’s a fact! I saw it with my own eyes! At Lee Ormsby’s soda fountain. Lee was a one to show off. It was said that whenever he sold a couple of “two-fers” he would help himself to a 10¢ “seegar,” and put a drop of perfume in the end of it before lighting up.