We’ve heard the story so
often we could tell it ourselves. And we do. Another family-owned
business in another Western town closes.
This time
it’s Roedel Drug in Cheyenne, Wyo., dispensing medicine,
greeting cards, lipstick, film, lavender soap, teapots and good
fellowship for 118 years. When I moved here 15 years ago,
Roedel’s employees called me “hon,” and the
78-year-old clerk could find everything I wanted: a finger splint,
essential oils, a lapel watch. Some days I bought soap just for a
friendly visit.
Maybe your town has lost a grocery
store whose owner remembered your mother, or a hardware store with
oiled wood floors and a potbelly stove. Owners cite slow insurance
payments for prescriptions and competition from superstores as
among the reasons for closing, but this story is not about blame.
All 16 store employees of Roedel Drug, playing
together, recently won the lottery. When I ask about the windfall,
a clerk says, “But it wasn’t enough (almost $9,000
each). If we’d won more, we might have saved the
store.” They wanted a different ending, but even winning the
lottery wasn’t it.
Visiting a sprawling
housing development, I’ve often noticed a building, maybe
labeled “General Store,” containing a mini-grocery,
pharmacy, post office and coffee shop. Usually it’s decorated
with shiny farm implements and antiques, a fantasy recreation of
real neighborhood businesses. Developers know they can make money
by creating a small-town ambience, pretending home is a place where
“everybody knows my name.”
Like many
other Western settlements, downtown Cheyenne has historically been
people-friendly, with old businesses thriving in antique buildings.
When someone proposed replacing the Romanesque-style sandstone
Union Pacific depot with a parking lot, citizens said
“no.” The gorgeous building is now a museum and pub
facing a plaza where bands play and a farmers market thrives. The
owner of a jewelry business won a preservation award for restoring
the decorative facade of his building; he lives upstairs, with a
view of a parking garage with a false-antique front.
Yet after a historical hotel was recently restored,
city leaders offered inducements to the hotel’s competition
— a chain motel that’s demanding a skywalk to its new
parking garage. “We’ve got to grow the downtown,”
city leaders say, happy to slaughter both grammar and history as
they seek money for the skywalk.
Meanwhile, at the
corner drug store, customers murmur, “A shame, but what can
you do?” A woman proclaims, “Wal-Mart is
cheaper.” The owners will transfer prescriptions to another
pharmacy. But when I trudge a mega-store’s miles of aisles
and encounter an employee, will she be able to help me find
anything? In another super-store, I ask a pharmacist how the
telemarketers got my unlisted phone number and confidential
prescription information. A clerk whispers an answer with one eye
on the boss; company policy forbids chatting with customers.
In the corner drug store, the 92-year-old
pharmacist listens patiently to an old joke, knowing this may be
his customer’s only outing in a lonely day.
For years, this town’s business district has managed to blend
business and living. Small apartment houses and one-family homes
downtown shelter elderly people able to live independently partly
because they can walk or slo-o-o-wly drive to nearby businesses.
Some of the town’s newcomers say they moved here because it
is so homey, so much like a small town. They don’t have to
drive the strip-mall speedway, already the deadliest street in the
state.
Visitors to the Frontier Days rodeo who shop
downtown for Western clothing and furniture often stay for lunch.
Dozens of people gather in a tiny green park to watch a shooting
club stage gunfights on summer afternoons. Now, the city has
announced plans to pave that park. Creating another street will
move people in and out of downtown faster, experts say. Some cities
lure new businesses with free land or tax rebates; couldn’t
we give rebates to any business that’s stayed solvent and
paid taxes for more than a century? What’s happening to my
town is by now an old story that usually ends with a city centered
on parking lots and office buildings that empty at dark.
Picture instead an urban center that invites
pedestrians to walk cobblestone streets, breathe in fresh air and
visit buildings glowing with layers of human history. And on the
corner? A family-owned drugstore.
Linda
M. Hasselstrom is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service
of High Country News (hcn.org). She plans to
live and write in Cheyenne, Wyoming, for another year, before
moving back to her ranch in western South
Dakota.
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