Old Missoula

Closing up shop

By Jim Ludwick of the Missoulian

Smith Drug, which has operated in downtown Missoula for more than 100 years, will close at the end of the month.

“I’m retiring – going into other things,” said owner Byron Dodd.

Dodd said the store already has downsized and it wouldn’t be practical to sell it.

The store was established in the 1890s, in a building just across Broadway from its present location at 227 N. Higgins Ave. University of Montana archives contain many of the old prescriptions, dating back to 1904; cod liver oil for Baby Long; acid sulphurec aromatic for Mrs. Johnson; calcium sulphide pills for E. E. Bagby.

In the old days, Dodd said, “you had your pharmacist, who worked behind the counter to mix prescriptions. There were veterinary products, bandage materials, probably needles for suturing – people did a lot of their own work and they had those kinds of things.

“There would have been laxatives – at that time, laxatives were thought to be the cure for everything. There would have been hot-water bottles. There was a soda fountain – the old Smith Drug had a soda fountain. And shortly after its inception, there was a barber shop and beauty parlor in the basement, and doctors’ offices and a dentist upstairs,” Dodd said.

Dodd became the owner in 1972. He’d been a chemist for Coca Cola but returned to school and went into the pharmacy business.

“We took it over as a business that was broke. We brought it back to a viable business, through service and goodwill,” he said.

The downtown area had its ups and downs as a business location. Dodd said. Often, it’s been a very good location for a store, even in recent years. Right now, it’s not quite as good as it had been the past, Dodd said.

Dodd said it can be difficult to run a small store these days. It’s hard to compete with large chains, because of their financial strength and flexibility, he said.

In his years at Smith Drug, the store established family record systems and had one of the first computers in the drug-store business in Missoula.

The store “has gone through a whole lot of upgrading – mechanization of the prescription process – and yet it has maintained the personal contact. The pharmacy profession has been acknowledged by the public as an integral part of the health-care system,” he said.

The above article appeared in The Missoulian on March 1, 1998.

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