The Owl Drug Company was an American drugstore retailer with its headquarters in San Francisco that operated the Owl Drug Stores chain. [1] It was a subsidiary of Rexall stores [2] at its peak in the 1920s through 1940s.[ citation needed ] The Owl Drug Stores sold medicines and pills, and later ventured into cosmetics, [3] perfumes, and other goods.[ citation needed ]
The founder of the Owl Drug Company was Richard Elgin Miller, R.E. Miller. [4] The Owl Drug Company was established in 1892 in San Francisco, at 1128 Market Street. [5] In 1903, with their contract with the Whitall Tatum Glass Company, they began making triangular, cobalt-blue bottles of various sizes to store poisons in, which was widely emulated. [6] According to the book Old Owl Drug Bottles & Others (1968), Owl Drug created a variety of bottles for prescription medicine and pills, and also soda bottles, with an owl sitting atop a mortar and pestle molded into the glass. [5] The bottles were produced in various sizes from .5 ounces (14 g) up to a (rarer) 32 ounces (910 g), over 10 inches (250 mm) in height. The bottles were also produced in other colors such as green, amber, and clear, and the logos on them often fluctuated from owls with a long tail to owls with no tail, with a short tail, with a potbelly, and others. These bottles are now collectors items, as are other company items such as tarot cards, receipts, advertising, stationery, calendars, and catalogs. [5]
In the late 1800s, the main store at Mission and Sixteenth Streets was entirely rebuilt; it reopened in February 1910 with a soda fountain, one of the biggest in San Francisco at the time. [7]
Until the mid 1920s, the company bought their goods directly from E. R. Squibb & Sons, but the agreement ended following a bitter legal battle in 1926. [8] [9] Elizabeth Winston Todd began working as a secretary for the firm in April 1929. [10] In January, the firm announced a merger with United Drug Stores (Drug, Inc), [11] one of a plethora of companies to fall under its wing over the years. [12] In November 1931, the sub-manager of The Owl Drug Company placed $11,000 in the company safe, only to find all of it missing the next morning. The case was never solved. [13] The following year, Owl Drug Company filed for bankruptcy, an act which was described as a "sham, simply a device to defraud preferred stockholders and void burdensome leases". [14]
In October 1935, an employee of the company, Emma Bartholomai, suffered severe burns as the result of a fire which broke out in a false ceiling of a storeroom in the branch on Sixth and Broadway in Los Angeles; a worker of the Soule Steel Company had been welding in close proximity to the hazard. She took the company to court in 1940. The Bureau of Fire Investigation investigated the case and the court concluded in December 1940 that The Owl Drug Company had been negligent in permitting welding to have taken place, ruling: "The general rule is that persons in the lawful use of fire must exercise ordinary care to prevent it from injuring others". [15]
Baseball player Rugger Ardizoia worked for the firm in the late 1940s during off-seasons. [16] Cecil W. Law was chairman of the company for over 40 years. [17]
In 1912, Owl opened its fourth location in Downtown Los Angeles at Spring and 5th streets; an ad described its features: [18]
Positively, it's the most modern drug establishment in Western America…money has been lavished on this beautiful store…it has the finest and most sanitary soda fountain in the entire West… made entirely of onyx and German silver…forty-two feet long… as long as the average city lot is wide. The ladies' waiting room is the most…commodious in the city… free telephones, a washroom, easy chairs and writing desk. …Store departments: Drugs and Chemicals - Toilet Articles and Perfumes - Brushes - Rubber Goods - Patent Medicines - Liquors - Candy - Cigars - Cutlery - Stationery - Soda Fountain
Later branches to open in Los Angeles suburban districts included 6380-84 Hollywood Boulevard (at Cahuenga Boulevard) in Los Angeles from 1934, [19] and at Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue. [20]
By the late 1930s, the company had dozens of branches across the United States, operating in major cities like New York and Chicago, and especially in the Los Angeles area.
In Fresno, the company had a branch at the 1000 Fulton Mall Building on Fulton Street and Tulare Street from 1917 until 1951. [21] In San Diego, they operated a large store next to the Plaza Hotel. [22] By the early 1940s, they operated in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, at Nelson Street and Granville Street. [23]
In 1951 Owl opened the large, 44,000 sq ft (4,100 m2) [24] Big Owl supermarket at Valley Plaza in North Hollywood. Big Owl stated that it had completed extensive research on shoppers' in-store behavior, the results of which it used to create a "revolutionary" store layout for Big Owl that would shorten the amount of walking required to complete a typical shopping trip. With the aim of providing the convenience of one-stop shopping, Big Owl also incorporated stores-in-store, which was uncommon at the time, including Van de Kamp's Bakeries, See's Candies, a "soda grill" for quick meals and snacks, a barber, cleaners, watch repair, and sales of china and gift items. It had 12 checkout lanes with electric cash registers, where shoppers could pay for good from all the departments (a relatively recent innovation in markets at the time), 9 entrances for the public, and its parking lot had space for 750 cars. Through a window, customers could watch meat be packed in cellophane, weighed, labeled and marked with a price, then watch a "tremendous, store-long" conveyor belt transport it to refrigerated cases in the store's meat sales area. Big Owl stated that its neon sign was the brightest in the U.S. west of Chicago. [24] Thriftimart purchased the store in 1954., which was rebranded Thriftimart and it became a branch of that supermarket chain. [25]
As a company which also sold perfumes and cosmetics, [26] the Owl Drug Company ran "Beauty Weeks", which included a range of fashion-related entertainment including beauty contests judged by Elinor Glyn, in which winners received a Hollywood screen test. [27] Their fashion shows were a considerable success and attracted many people. [28]
In the mid-1940s, the firm sponsored a San Franciscan baseball team, known variously as the Portola Natives or Portola Merchants; the team temporarily called itself "The Owl Drugs Juniors". By 1949, it was no longer being sponsored by Owl Drugs but by the Theisen Glass Company. [29]
A soda fountain is a device that dispenses carbonated soft drinks, called fountain drinks. They can be found in restaurants, concession stands and other locations such as convenience stores. The artifact combines flavored syrup or syrup concentrate and carbon dioxide with chilled and purified water to make soft drinks, either manually, or in a vending machine which is essentially an automated soda fountain that is operated using a soda gun. Today, the syrup often is pumped from a special container called a bag-in-box (BiB).
W. & J. Sloane,, was a chain of furniture stores that originated from a luxury furniture and rug store in New York City that catered to the prominent, including the White House and the Breakers, and wealthy, including the Rockefeller, Whitney, and Vanderbilt families.
The Harris Company was a retail corporation, based in San Bernardino, California, that operated a chain of department stores named Harris', all in Southern California. Philip, Arthur, and Herman Harris – nephews of founder Leopold Harris of what was once the large Los Angeles–based chain Harris & Frank – started the company with a small dry goods store in 1905, and the company eventually grew to nine large department stores, with stores in San Bernardino, Riverside, and Kern Counties.
J. W. Robinson Co., Robinson's, was a chain of department stores operating in the Southern California and Arizona area, previously with headquarters in Los Angeles, California.
Thrifty PayLess Holdings, Inc. was a pharmacy holding company that owned the Thrifty Drugs and PayLess Drug Stores chains in the western United States. The combined company was formed in April 1994 when Los Angeles–based TCH Corporation, the parent company of Thrifty Corporation and Thrifty Drug Stores, Inc., acquired the Kmart subsidiary PayLess Drug Stores Northwest, Inc. At the time of the merger, TCH Corporation was renamed Thrifty PayLess Holdings, Inc. and Thrifty operated 495 stores, PayLess operated 543 stores.
Bullock's was a chain of full-line department stores from 1907 through 1995, headquartered in Los Angeles, growing to operate across California, Arizona and Nevada. Bullock's also operated as many as seven more upscale Bullocks Wilshire specialty department stores across Southern California. Many former Bullock's locations continue to operate today as Macy's.
I. Magnin & Company was a San Francisco, California-based high fashion and specialty goods luxury department store. Over the course of its existence, it expanded across the West into Southern California and the adjoining states of Arizona, Oregon, and Washington. In the 1970s, under Federated Department Stores ownership, the chain entered the Chicago, and Washington, D.C., metropolitan areas. Mary Ann Magnin founded the company in 1876 and named the chain after her husband Isaac.
The City of Paris Dry Goods Company was one of San Francisco's important department stores from 1850 to 1976, located diagonally opposite Union Square. In the mid-20th century, it opened a few branches in other cities of the Bay Area. The main San Francisco store was demolished in 1980 after a lengthy preservation fight to build a new Neiman Marcus, but the store's original rotunda and glass dome were preserved and incorporated into the new design.
The Joseph Magnin Company was a high-end specialty department store founded in San Francisco, California, by Joseph Magnin, 4th son of Isaac Magnin founder of the I. Magnin department store. Joseph Magnin Co. and I. Magnin Co. were rivals.
Caswell-Massey, founded in 1752, is the first fragrance and personal care product company in America. Originally, Caswell Massey started as an apothecary shop in Newport, Rhode Island, by a Scottish-born doctor named William Hunter. The main product categories include fine-fragrance, soap, bath & body products, men's shaving products and toiletries and other assorted apothecary-style personal care accessories. Its products were preferred favorites of notable historical figures such as John F. Kennedy, George Washington, Cole Porter, Alla Nazimova, John Denver, and The Rolling Stones.
Akron Stores or The Akron was a Southern California–based imported goods and home decorating department store retail chain established in 1947 and was known to carry unusual merchandise, mostly imports. The chain had over 24 stores throughout Southern California from San Diego to San Francisco before it was forced to close in 1985.
Hale Brothers Department Store, was a department store headquartered in Sacramento, California, with branches throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
Walker Scott, also Walker-Scott or Walker's, was a chain of department stores in San Diego and surrounding area from 1935 to 1986 and had eight branches at the time of its closure. It was founded by Ralf Marc Walker and George A. Scott.
Blocki is an American fragrance brand and one of the earliest perfume and cosmetic manufacturers in the United States. It was founded in 1865 by perfumer John Blocki, a pioneer in the American fragrance industry.
Valley Plaza was a shopping center in North Hollywood, Los Angeles, one of the first in the San Fernando Valley, opened in 1951. In the mid-1950s it was reported to be the largest shopping center on the West Coast of the United States and the third-largest in the country. It was located along Laurel Canyon Boulevard from Oxnard to Vanowen, and west along Victory Boulevard. Like its competitor Panorama City Shopping Center to the north, Valley Plaza started with one core development and grew over time to market, under the single name "Valley Plaza", a collection of adjacent retail developments with multiple developers, owners, and opening dates.
Parmelee-Dohrmann was a Los Angeles–based chain of stores that sold fine china, crystal, glassware, silver, and objects of art.
Orange County Plaza, later Garden Grove Mall, Garden Promenade, now The Promenade at Garden Grove, was, upon its expansion in 1959, with sixty stores, the largest shopping center in Orange County, California, and at the time billed itself as "Orange County's first regional shopping center". However, Anaheim Plaza had in fact already opened In 1955, four years prior, and had an anchor department store.
Swelldom was a large women's clothing store variously described as a "cloak and suit house" and a "department store", operating from 1906 until the 1970s in California. It had locations on Broadway in Downtown Los Angeles' shopping district, later on Wilshire Blvd. at Camden in Beverly Hills, and near Union Square in San Francisco.
Thriftimart was an American chain of supermarkets in Greater Los Angeles until 1984, founded by Roger M. Laverty. Many stores continue to operate as Smart & Final stores, now owned by Mexico City-based Chedraui.
