As a teenager, I was fortunate enough to have three pharmicies (or drug stores, as some were called back then) within walking distance of my home. Each pharmacy had much to offer a boy in the late fifties and sixties.
During the lazy days of summer, me, my brother, and my friends would often walk to a pharmacy for one of the main staples of our lives; comic books, baseball cards, candy, or a snowball.
Back in those days, there wasn't a snowball stand on every corner as there is now. And, at least in our neighborhood, snowball vendors didn't drive up the alley in back of our house like the good humor man. So we had little choice but to walk or ride our bikes to the treats.
Thankfully, the closest pharmacy also had the best snowballs. It was a place called The Alameda Pharmacy. It was the hub of the smaller half of a shopping center divided by a road. The soda fountain took up the the back left hand side of the store. It had round green cushioned plastic revolving stools surrounding it. The stools had no armrests or backs and would get notoriously slick from perspiration and spilled drinks. Quite often, one of our gang would simply slide off of one and land embarassingly butt first on the tile floor. Spinning on one, on a hot summer afternoon, was suicidal. There were also a few booths for the less daring patrons.
The snowballs didn't cost much, I think they were a quarter, and it was a good thing because they were served in a funnel shaped cup. What a gyp that was! The farther you went down in the cup, the smaller it got. By the time you got to all juice, there was maybe a thimble full left, and that was if you were lucky. More often than not, much like a dixie cup, the thin waxy paper would begin to unravel and leak out of the bottom, forcing the boy or girl to bend their neck back and hold the leaky container over there open mouth until all the juice drained.
The other problem was that they were top heavy and had to be balanced with delicate precision. One false move and the entire upper ice shelve would be on the pavement.. It was such a problem that the women behind the counter would ask that we crush down the treats with our plastic spoons outside the premises lest the soda fountain area look like the aftermath of an iceberg explosion.
For some strange reason, my favorite flavors back then were lemon and spearmint. A couple of years ago I tried a spearmint flavored snowball and almost gagged on it.
We would walk to another pharmacy a little farther away called The Medical Center. The soda fountain there wasn't as large, but, man, did they serve a wicked vanilla malted milk shake.
Whenever I went there, which was probably at least twice a week during the summer, I'd get the milk shake. Unlike the snowballs, I always felt I got my money's worth out of the milk shake. They were a bit more than the snowballs, but they would come to the counter in a large aluminum container. Depending on who your server was, you could get as much as two full glasses out of it.
The gang and I also liked coca-cola but, when ordered at the soda fountain, they had to be flavored. Back then you had three basic choices, vanilla, cherry, and chocolate. I wasn't that fond of chocolate flavored cokes, so I would usually alternate between vanilla and cherry. Don't let anybody tell you that they tasted the same as the store bought brands of today. They didn't. They had a much stronger syrupy flavor. Man, were they good.
As much as I don't want to, I have to bring up another flavor our gang would order. Ammonia. That's right, we would drink ammonia flavored cokes. Don't ask me why. I certainly don't know why we drank them and I'm sure my freinds didn't either. I suspect that we thought that anything that tasted that bad would give you a quick high. Maybe we heard it somewhere. Well anyhow it was an awful concoction that first cleared your sinuses and later your digestive track. The weird thing is we continued to order them in lieu of tastier fare much to the amusement of the counter workers.
It's possible that we might have ordered food on occasion from the soda fountains that we frequented, but, if so, the meal was too unmemorable to recall. I only remember the snowballs, the malted milkshakes, and the flavored cokes. Oh, and by the way, I don't allow ammonia based cleaners in my house.