Ted and Dorothy Hustead bought the only drugstore in a town of 326 people and gave themselves five years to make it work. Boone tells what happened in the last hot summer of that bargain.
The idea came to a tired woman who couldn't get to sleep, but you'll need the five years first. December of nineteen thirty-one, and Ted Hustead stood shivering on a wooden sidewalk in Wall, outside the only drugstore in town, which he and his wife Dorothy had bought with the three thousand dollars his father left him. Wall had three hundred and twenty-six people, most of them farmers already wiped out. Her own father called it "just about as Godforsaken as you can get." They lived behind a blanket strung across the back of the store, with four-year-old Billy, and Dorothy had been a high school literature teacher in Sioux Falls. "Five good years," Ted told her, and he was starting in on what they'd do if it didn't work when she cut him off. "Don't worry about then." You try watching cars go by for five years and not worrying. By the summer of nineteen thirty-six the business had hardly grown, the trial was up in December, Billy was nine, and there was a month-old baby besides. One hot Sunday in July, Dorothy took the children down for a nap, and an hour later she was back. Ted asked if it was too hot to sleep, and she said it wasn't the heat, it was the cars on Route Sixteen A. "The jalopies just about shook the house to pieces." Then she asked him what I'll ask you, what do those people want, after that prairie? Ice cold water, and she'd made up the lines for a sign. It wasn't Wordsworth, Ted allowed, and you have to remember that's a druggist teasing a literature teacher. The next weekend he and a high school boy put up the boards, and he felt a little silly, and by the time he got back, people were at the counter, and they ran through the cracked ice, and a father wanted five glasses, and a boy wanted one for Grandma, out in the car. At sundown they sat out front. "Well, Ted," she said, "I guess the ice water signs worked." The signs spread for years, until a federal law in nineteen sixty-five put most of them at risk. Ted got the last word on his father-in-law. "There's absolutely no place on God's earth that's Godforsaken," he said. Somewhere on that road, if you look, a boy is carrying a full glass out to a hot car, taking it slow.
Photo: Arthur Rothstein, Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-fsa-8b27830, public domain · Public domain