The Turnage Drug Store Soda Fountain: An Interview with Binford and Robert Turnage

Turner Wolffe

“There’s something to be said for gathering,” Robert Turnage, my grandfather, says looking fondly upon the Water Valley Literature Club who are sitting in booths parallel to the fountain, merrily chatting only momentarily about this month’s book. Robert and his brother, third generation owner of the Turnage Drug Store, Binford Turnage have a way of speaking simple truths that transcend platitude, their presence a respite from garden-variety cynicism and alienation. I sat down with them to discuss the history of the store and its soda fountain. 

“If y’all could: give me a basic history of the store.”

Binnie: “June of 1905, Grandaddy, Wade Smith Turnage, got off the train and opened up Turnage Drug Store.” [Wade Smith] graduated from pharmacy school in Atlanta. They didn’t have a pharmacy school in Mississippi in 1904. And so, He graduated in 1904 and came here in 1905. And dad graduated from pharmacy school in 1932 at Ole Miss, and then I graduated in 1962 at Ole Miss, and Bobby, the fourth generation graduated in ’99. All four of us have different degrees, but we’ve had the soda fountain ever since it started.”

American interest in and production of soda water stemmed from a desire to recreate the healing mineral waters of natural spas. As early as 1806, Yale chemist, Benjamin Silliman began selling artificial mineral water.³ Encouraged by his success, Silliman expanded production, and with business partners Jeremiah Day, Stephen Twinning, and Noyes Darling, were some of the first to market this effervescent beverage.⁴ However, the cost of bottling necessitated new and cheaper technology, and so the soda fountain was born.

Technology lagged behind many proprietors’ ambitions for the first half of the 19th century, but by 1870 soda water had become a treat rather than treatment and was popular fixture in barber shops and drug stores, especially in rapidly growing cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, New York.⁵

Of course, what’s a soda fountain without syrup? In the latter quarter of the 19th century, many drugstores were making and selling their own syrups, sodas. But most famously, John Pemberton invented the recipe for Coca-Cola in 1886. Production skyrocketed. By 1899, they had sold “almost 281,000 gallons of syrup.”⁶ As temperance movements ebbed and flowed, soda remained a consistent nonalcoholic alternative, and the fountain a moral community center.

Mississippi state legislature banned alcohol sales in 1908, were the first to ratify the 18th Amendment and the last to repeal it in 1966.⁸ Yalobusha County, home to Water Valley, remained a dry county until 2007. Drugstore fountains flourished during Prohibition. A 1934 print of the Coffeeville Courier announced that there were “430 drug stores in Mississippi with soda fountains.”⁹ The Turnage Drug Store very quickly became a popular fixture in Water Valley but like the rest of the nation, struggled during the Great Depression.

Binnie recalls how his grandfather bought out his partner’s share in 1926, just before the market crash. Robert chimes in, “Yeah they struggled for a while. My Aunt told me one time she was going to a movie. She said ‘Papa why don’t you ever go to the picture show with us?’ He said ‘Aw baby, don’t you know if I ever left here I might not ever come back?’” Those days the store was open 365 days a year. Not until 1944, when Binnie and Robert’s father, Wade Watkins, took over the store did they close on Christmas.

Soda fountains fared better than most retail locations during the Depression, “primarily because of the luncheonette trade,” cheap, quick food options offered midday.¹⁰ Diners unable to afford restaurant prices often patronized the fountain. Robert and Binnie mentioned such offerings as they grew up in the 40s and 50s: “As for food, we had a lady who made pies—cherry pies, sometimes apple. Of course, the public didn’t get much shot at them. When she brought them in, we’d grab ‘em pretty quick,” Robert laughed. Binny laughing, continues “We had a little infrared oven,  we’d get [sandwiches] frozen. We’d take them out and heat them up in the oven—bbq, hamburgers, things like that.” Robert follows, “they were pretty good. There weren’t a lot of places to get a quick meal, and get lunch and so. We had a pretty good crowd of folks that ate here.”

Contemporaneous with these luncheonettes was a greater demand for convenience and self service. The 20th century brought with it chain drugstores, notably Walgreens and Rexall, and fast food. Chain stores’ sales method of high volume at low margins left them in much better standings during the Depression than their independent counterparts; more than “64% of chain drugstores had annual sales of at least $50,000,” and independents claiming only 4%.¹¹ At the same time, chain stores began streamlining their services, placing products on open shelves and removing that personal factor so revered in independents. Restauranteurs such as Roy Allen and Frank Wright began experimenting with drive-in locations where customers could be served with out leaving their vehicles. The pair novelly expanded the company by franchising up and down the West Coast, providing each new proprietor with meticulous, identical designs, floorpans, and recipes.¹² Walter Anderson similarly promoted standardized “inexpensive, predictable food in familiar surroundings” with White Castle.¹³ Though soda fountains co-existed with national chains for the remainder of the pre-war period, they could no longer retain market share amidst a concerted push towards individual consumption. 

What had necessitated fountain technology would initiate its decline. Intra-industry rivalry between Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola expanded the bottling market at the expense of fountain sales. No longer able to ignore Pepsi’s domestic packaging success, in 1955 Coke “introduc[ed] three new bottles: 10, 12, and 26 ounces.”¹⁴ These two industry titans continued introducing new packaging strategies throughout the 1960s, later blossoming into the Cola Wars.¹⁵ Combined with mass suburbanization and a growing car culture, the majority of independent drug stores subsequently could no longer justify a soda fountain. By 1965, only a third of city and half of small town stores still had fountains, most of which were housed in retail chains.¹⁶

“Has there been a deliberate choice to keep the soda fountain, even it if might not make money anymore?” I ask.

Robert: “Your gotta have something to get them in there. A man outside a gas station in Meridian told me: ‘Bob, if you want to catch a chicken, you gotta throw some corn.’ Well, its not corn but [people] gather here every morning to drink 50 cent coffee.”

Binnie, who still leads a daily 7AM devotional, evinces a genuine commitment to service, and from him (along with everyone else in the store) emanates a generosity and kindness seldom seen. I asked him and Robert what kind of impact their father, his running the store had on them growing up.

“Well, he didn’t have much time to do anything but work, because we opened at eight, closed at eight, [but] community. Community, man. It’s important. He was just like us. If someone needed medicine on Sunday night or in the middle of the night, he’d come down and open up and get it for them,” Binnie says assuredly. 

Robert, somewhat solemnly: “You learn some things by osmosis. All my life, from being here, if a guy came in, he needed to be waited on. You take care of people. Of course, Daddy with his pharmaceutical background, he could make it happen. But I can remember, it didn’t matter if you were young, id your were old, if you were black or you were white, he took care of you. He didn’t have to say anything. Just see[ing] what’s happening, you kind of get the message after a while: you take care of people.”

Binnie, discussing fountain regulars: “We had, like the literacy club, in the afternoon [at] 2 the men would come. And I was over there one day and I got to looking at them and there were twelve men sitting here…and six of them had lost their wives, but they had a place to come to. To visit and meet with people that cared about them.”

Binnie, after another anecdote and handing me a pale yellow card that reads “SMILE! GOD LOVES YOU and I LOVE YOU,” speaks more on his father and the benefits of an independent store: “you have a loot of freedom that other folks don’t have, even now. Folks would come in and be out of refills and can’t get their medicine, folks with blood pressure medicine who can’t get through the weekend; they can’t be without that.”

Robert: “There’s just not many independent drug stores left. I don’t mean they’re all gone, ‘cause they’re not, but we don’t have nearly as many. So when you come here, this store, this place has really been an anchor in this community for one hundred years. People enjoy coming to something that reminds them of their youth. So many folks have had good experiences here, ‘cause so many folks have worked here.”

“What is the future of the store? How do you continue to foster community?” I ask.

Binnie tells me that Cigna issued a memo that it would not insure prescriptions at independent stores, but remains confident in the store’s future. His granddaughter, Karen is the current store manager and likely to succeed her father Bobby upon retirement. Looking fondly at me, listening to the bustling chatter of customers, Binnie smiled: “I think it’ll go on a while longer.”

1. Image my own. ↩︎
2. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Lib. of Congress, Water Valley Progress (Water Valley, Miss.), June 17, 1905, image 5. ↩︎
3. Funderburg, Anne Cooper, Sundae Best: A History of Soda Fountains, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2002, p 10 ↩︎
4. Ibid, p 11. ↩︎
5. Ibid, p 21. ↩︎
6.  SMITH, ANDREW F. “The Temperance Beverage.” In Drinking History: Fifteen Turning Points in the Making of American Beverages, 155–65. Columbia University Press, 2013, p 159. ↩︎
7. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Lib. of Congress, The City Itemizer (Water Valley, Miss.), August 18, 1910, image 7. ↩︎
8. Frazier, Allen, “Why Did Prohibition Last So Long in Mississippi, and What Happened on the Coast?”, The Sun Herald, July 28, 2023.  ↩︎
9. “Amount of Soda Fountains in MS Drug Stores.” Newspapers.com. The Coffeeville Courier, December 7, 1934. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-coffeeville-courier-amount-of-soda-f/135509500/ ↩︎
10. Funderburg, p 141. ↩︎
11. Ibid, p 127. ↩︎
12. Ibid, p 137 ↩︎
13. Ibid, p 138. ↩︎
14. ^{Muris, Timothy J., David T. Scheffman, and Pablo T. Spiller. Strategy, Structure, and Antitrust in the Carbonated Soft-Drink Industry. Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 1993, p 20.} ↩︎
15. Ibid, p 22. ↩︎
16. Funderburg, p 152. ↩︎
17. Image my own. ↩︎

Bibliography

“Amount of Soda Fountains in MS Drug Stores.” Newspapers.com. The Coffeeville Courier, December 7, 1934. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-coffeeville-courier-amount-of-soda-f/135509500/

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Lib. of Congress, The City Itemizer (Water Valley, Miss.), August 18, 1910.

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Lib. of Congress, Water Valley Progress (Water Valley, Miss.), June 17, 1905.

Frazier, Allen, “Why Did Prohibition Last So Long in Mississippi, and What Happened on the Coast?”, The Sun Herald, July 28, 2023.

Funderburg, Anne Cooper, Sundae Best: A History of Soda Fountains, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2002.

Muris, Timothy J,. David T. Scheffman, and Pablo Spiller. Strategy, Structure, and Antitrust in the Carbonated Soft-Drink Industry. Wesport, CT: Quorum Books, 1993.

Smith, Andrew F. “The Temperance Beverage.” In Drinking History: Fifteen Turning Points in the Making of American Beverages, 155–65. Columbia University Press, 2013.