Page 70 - midland

Woodford Drug Store was a popular soda fountain. At one time a travel agency and radio station KCRS were also housed inside the hotel. What the general public didn’t see was the seventh foor penthouse that was home to Clarence Scharbauer and his family and apartments that became homes to others.

Two sisters, Martha Adams and Lynn Collett, have special memories of visiting their “Aunt Matie” who lived in the hotel. “Aunt Matie” was Mary Scharbauer, widow of Philip Scharbauer, Clarence Scharbauer’s uncle. After her husband’s death, she moved into the hotel. Martha’s father, Arnold P. Scharbauer, was a second cousin to Clarence Scharbauer. He and his wife May began taking their young daughter to visit Aunt Matie in the hotel in the l930s. “I was about fve,” Martha recalls, “and very excited because I always got to push the button in the elevator. I remember the colorful carpet that lined the hall to her apartment. I would hop from pattern to pattern.” She also has memories of an oil painting of cherubs that hung over the aunt’s bed. Years later Martha came home from nursing school to briefy help care for the dying aunt. A happier memory is of her husband, John Adams, hiding their car in the garage of the Scharbauer Hotel so that no one would decorate it during their wedding. Martha’s younger sister, Lynn, also recalls her parents taking her to visit Aunt Matie, but her most vivid memory involves the soda fountain inside the drug store. Mae Scharbauer was treating her six-year-old to a chocolate milkshake. Lynn remembers leaning backwards on the three-legged stool and ignoring her mother’s warnings that

she was going to fall. She tilted too far back, fell, and landed underneath the table; the chocolate milkshake covered her from head to toe. “To this day I remember how embarrassed my mother was. She yanked me up and scolded me all the way home!”

The soda fountain brings back memories to other Midlanders. Joy Morgan worked there during the l960s when “Cokes were fve cents.” She recalls that one of billionaire, J. Paul Getty’s grandsons, once stayed at the hotel. “I was younger and more attractive then,” she chuckles, “so when he walked by, he waved at me!”

Jana Morrison’s grandmother, Lovie Newman, also clerked in the drugstore. Due to miscommunication, she may have inadvertently cost the drugstore a customer. One day an unassuming well-dressed rancher sat at the counter fnishing his lunch. Before paying, he asked Lovie if the store carried Picopay. Lovie assured them it did. “What sizes?” he asked. “Small, medium, and large,” she answered. “May I see the cartons?” he inquired politely. Lovie grabbed three boxes of prophylactics off a shelf and held them up for the rancher to examine. “See,” she smiled, “small, medium, large.” The gentleman’s face reddened, and without a word, he paid for his lunch and walked out of the store, leaving a bewildered Lovie still holding the prophylactics. Another clerk who had witnessed the exchange sidled over to her and whispered, “Lovie, the man wanted TOOTHPASTE!” Most guests made repeat visits to the hotel; that gentleman might not have. Jana, like many others, also recalls the beautiful furniture in the hotel, but she remembers seeing it in her father’s