121-Year-Old Drugstore Still Delivers: Homey Service and Soda Fountain Nostalgia

There’s nothing fancy and not much modern about Goolrick’s Modern Pharmacy, where the druggist still delivers prescriptions and the soda fountain waitresses call everyone “Baby.”

The store today is much as it was 50 years ago, employees and customers say.

“They got real wild in 1950 and changed the outside some. Why change something if it works?” asked the former owner and pharmacist, Charlie Rector.

The new owner is looking to replace a new Pepsi machine with one that looks old because the regulars don’t like it.

At $2.25, an egg salad and bacon sandwich is the most expensive item on the lunch counter menu. Behind the counter, cigarettes are stacked in wooden racks beside tins of snuff and Goody’s headache powder.

“We get lots of tourists in here who say, ‘Look, an old-fashioned drugstore! You don’t see them like that anymore.’ I say, ‘Yeah, and you know why? Because you wouldn’t patronize them,’ ” Rector said.

The drugstore has been in business on the same downtown corner for 121 years. It has survived a fire, floods, desegregation and the rise of chain stores that put many other independent pharmacies out of business.

Rector bristles at a suggestion that the store is an anachronism. “This is not a curiosity. This is what a drugstore is supposed to look like.”

When he took over the business from his father and uncle in 1953, he had four competitors within two blocks. When he retired and sold Goolrick’s this fall, it was the only drugstore in the business district in this city between Washington, D.C. and Richmond.

Fredericksburg merchants suffered hard times in the 1960s and 1970s, but shopkeepers have been able to capitalize on local Revolutionary and Civil War sites and the city’s proximity to the capital.

Antiques shops and boutiques now occupy buildings that once housed supermarkets and a five-and-dime. On sunny weekend days, tourists and collectors swarm over the brick sidewalks and fill up the stools at Goolrick’s.

A group composed mostly of elderly natives gathers weekday mornings. Each regular has a favorite spot at the counter or at one of the half a dozen tables.

“It’s not just a drugstore, it’s a way of life,” Rector said.

The store, first opened in 1869, remained in the Goolrick family until Rector’s father bought the business in 1933, Rector said.

As a boy, Rector chipped ice, swept floors and delivered Coca-Cola and Camels to downtown beauty shops on Saturday mornings, he said.

The pharmacy has prepared prescriptions for generations of residents and still delivers medicines at any hour. A few people who got their first Goolrick’s prescription before World War I are still customers, Rector said.

New owner Stephen May has pledged not to make any major change, although he does plan to add a few trinkets for tourists.

“I think everyone was worried I was going to rip the fountain out, or, worse yet, fire all the help,” said May, 39, a pharmacist who plans to keep the store until he retires.

The regulars are touchy about even the smallest changes. “They don’t like the new Pepsi machine I put in here, so I’m going to try to replace it with something that looks older,” May said.