Stories of Atlanta, Texas

Stories of Atlanta

Atlanta Stories is the place for you to contribute your story of an experience in Atlanta. If you have a story of something that happened to you or your ancestor in Atlanta, please share it with us. We may put it here.

8/2/2006

Miles Drugstore

3/9/2005
Note: Tucker Conley lives in Longview and is often in Atlanta on business, his wife Diana frequently by his side. He has wonderful memories and experiences from the Atlanta area. Best of all, he excels at sharing them-

Diana and I love Atlanta...especially Miles Drugstore. On a spring day in 2004, we were there for lunch...chicken salad sandwiches and chocolate sodas. The doors were open to the sidewalk and the American flags were gently waving in the breeze. We sat at a table and were joined by Mr. Miles, the heir-owner-pharmacist.

He showed us a photograph of a log truck made 60 years ago as it rolled along in a parade on the street just outside the store's north door. He described where he was with his dad when the photo was made.

I asked him what were some interesting experieinces he'd had as a pharmacist and he related the time a very worried father called and asked to meet him at the drugstore in the wee hours of the morning. There was a medical emergency. Mr. Miles went down and opened up. The dad wanted a little tin of St. Joseph's aspirin!

In the front of the drugstore that day there was a very attractive display of Whitman's Sampler Chocolates. All of the gold boxes were stacked up in the display style of the 1920s. The interior of Miles Drugstore is probably much like it was in the late 1940s-a real step back in time.

After lunch, we snooped around a couple of antique stores. Diana bought a beautiful wooden bowl with a lid that she now keeps by her big chair. It's full of safety pins, finger nail files, threads, needles, paper clips and more. We next explored the local True Value hardware store, one of the largest in Texas.

I have a photo of my great-great grandfather, Dr. Willis Henderson Dodd, and two other gentlemen that was made in Atlanta probably around 1885. His home in Bright Star, Arkansas, was destroyed by a fire in the 1870s. His granddaughter, Verna Lee Murray, was my dad's mother. Her husband, my grandfather, John Smith Conley, founded the Merchant & Planters Bank in Bloomburg around 1910. It became the Bloomburg State Bank. I received from Kathy Peacock a few years ago, a photo of the interior of the Merchants & Planters Bank and the teller windows, and my then 4-year old uncle Murray standing in a chair at one of the windows! Amazing.

8/14/2004 11:43:26 AM

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