A Couple of Smiths

C.D. Smith Drug Stores—Arsenic and Albilena

              Drug stores were familiar landmarks in the downtown landscape, being traditional gathering places for pontificating politicians, discriminating smokers, and shoppers who appreciated a variety of goods.

The Grand Valley Pharmacy was the first in town, located around 2^nd and Colorado Avenue.  

                                                                                                        Early GJ drug store medicine bottles                                                                       

The most familiar stores bore the name, C.D. Smith. Claud De Nel Smith came to Grand Junction in 1900, at age twenty-one. Already a certified pharmacist, young Smith and a partner bought the Adams Drug Store, on the southwest corner of 5^th and Main. 

First C.D. Smith Drug Store located in the Currie Block, directly across the street from the Grand Valley National Bank. Today the Currie Block’s first floor houses a sports clothing store.  

Smith was able to buy out his partner in two-and-one-half years, with success eventually allowing him to purchase six more drug stores, located in Fruita, Grand Junction, Palisade, Debeque, and in Grand Valley (modern-day Parachute). Smith’s soda fountains served all the regular fountain drinks, including phosphates (a soda with a tart flavor enhancement that added fizz). Only fresh, crushed fruit was used. Ice cream treats included their specialty, the “walnut and buffalo sundae, both rich and smooth.” [i]  

      C.D. Smith’s Palisade Drug Store had a beautiful soda fountain. Courtesy Museum of Western Colorado.

   C.D. Smith and five of his stores, ca 1907-ish. Courtesy Hy-Grade website.

            A variety of medicines, goodies, and necessities were sold at Smith’s first store. It was one of The Daily Sentinel’s most prolific advertisers:

            “We offer $100 reward for a better hair tonic than our Dandescide.” [ii]  

                “Smith’s Diarrhoea (sic) Mixture, a most excellent medicine for the relief and cure of all summer complaints, such as diarrhoea (sic), irregularities of the bowels, so common among adults and children during the warm months. Every bottle guaranteed.” [iii]

                “Everyone who buys soft drinks and ice cream from us, we will please.” [iv]

            In addition to the pharmacist’s own remedy recipes, he carried nationally-known items like Albilena (a cathartic, “unadulterated” water that stimulated the liver), [v] as well as stationery, palm leaf fans, after shave, and chemical pure arsenic “for spraying.” [vi]

Gertrude Cartmel ca. 1897. Courtesy Ralph Schmidt.    

In 1903, Smith married Gertrude Cartmel, and they had four children: Burrell Douglas, Melba Irene (Schmidt), Claude De Nel Jr., and Sterling True. A fine family man as well as astute businessman, Smith enjoyed the admiration of many in town.

That admiration grew when the Currie Building, where Smith’s store was located, nearly burned down in late 1904. He took advantage of the fire to make changes. Physical improvements included a new soda water counter and an ornate tin ceiling, but Smith’s biggest change was his new payment system. Patterned after the Scholtz Drug Store in Denver, an elevated enclosure was built where “obliging young ladies” sat at a desk and took the customer’s “check” along with his cash. At the soda fountain, the patron received small, round checks, which could be “given in trade” or paid for at the desk. Smith had created a streamlined experience for his customers. [vii]

Smith’s grandson, Ralph Schmidt, remembers his grandfather as a “time and study man. Home and business were run alike, though he wasn’t a taskmaster or autocrat by any means. Everything ran smoothly and everyone was expected to do their part without complaint.” [viii]

            By 1907, the C.D. Smith Company was one of the top businesses in town, and Smith wasn’t even thirty, yet! The decision to sell all retail establishments in order to focus on a wholesale drug business came in 1910. Each manager of the individual retail stores was given the option to buy the stores under a very reasonable buy-out plan.           

The Dowrey Bldg, on the northeast corner of 2^nd and Colorado. Courtesy Museum of Western Colorado.  

            The company built a warehouse in the Dowrey Building, at the northeast corner of 2^nd and Colorado, and had a laboratory installed in January 1911, for Smith’s popular remedies. In 1916, when he branched briefly into candy, Smith employed fifty people. The Dowrey building was home to C.D. Smith’s wholesale warehouse for over twenty years. When the operation outgrew that location, they built a large, state-of-the-art facility on the northwest corner of 5^th and Ute Avenue. It was completed in late 1935. This had been the original site of an old livery and had become a hangout for winos. When construction began, they unearthed a graveyard of rusty sterno cans. [ix]  

When his wholesale business outgrew the Dowrey Bldg, he built this state-of-the-art facility at the northwest corner of 5^th and Ute. Today it houses the C.D. Smith wing of the Museum of Western Colorado.  

            The new warehouse had air conditioning, humidifying equipment for tobacco products, and a refrigerated candy room. It also had a “cork-lined cooler for draft beer.” [x] Its second story was where orders were filled. Drug stores all over the Western Slope utilized Smith’s inventory, as well as eastern Utah and the Four Corners area. Doralyn Genova worked at Copeland’s Drug Store, on the northeast corner of 5^th and Main, in the late 1950s-early 1960s. There were times when a prescription came in, and the pharmacy didn’t have all the ingredients, so she or another clerk would be sent to Smith’s warehouse to retrieve the needed item. Doralyn remembered the busy second floor, with clerks scurrying around on roller skates (another example of Smith’s time savers). They’d skim down the tall rows of shelves, pulling out orders and parceling them into containers. A conveyor belt moved the process along. [xi]  

The modern warehouse was a bustling place. Courtesy Museum of Western Colorado.  

            After C.D. Smith went wholesale, Hy-Grade Lotion was invented and became available in 1924. Smith grandson, Ralph Schmidt, recounted the Hy-Grade story to me: “The formula was probably derived from an old Kansas farm remedy. Working with bales of hay or washing clothes on a washboard made hands red and raw. C.D. Smith created his lotion with ammonia, which opened the pores so the smoothing agents could be absorbed deep into the skin. Relief was almost instant.” [xii]

            One success story Ralph related was of an older gentleman whose unwrinkled face and youthful complexion caught the eye of a lady friend. She finally asked him what his secret to such beautiful skin was, and he told her he used Hy-Grade as an aftershave.[xiii]

            At one time, Hy-Grade Lotion was advertised in live commercials on KREX-TV, with Betty Rankin as the star. Hy-Grade Distributing LLC, in Grand Junction, is still producing the product, along with lip and heel treatment.

            Several thousand employees passed through the ranks in C.D. Smith Company’s ninety-three-year history, and Smith and his family appreciated every one. Claud D. Smith died in 1939, at the age of sixty. His sons continued the business in the tradition of their father. The Sterling Smith family donated the warehouse at 5^th and Ute to the Museum of Western Colorado in 1997, where it became the C.D. Smith Wing of the Museum of Western Colorado. Some of the Smith family memorabilia collection is on display.  

This is Smith (center) with his sons behind him, and Smith’s employees on their 30^th Anniversary. Courtesy Hy-Grade website.

Bob Smith, KKCO Weekend News Anchor

Bob Smith’s smooth voice, calm hazel eyes, and thoughtful insight as KKCO’s weekend news anchor have enriched the Grand Valley for seven years. He came to Grand Junction from Chicago in 2000, to Channel 11, Western Colorado’s NBC affiliate, after many years of television and radio experience.

He began his television career in 1956, when the major studios, CBS, NBC, and ABC, had not yet started to buy up block programming from the local stations. That didn’t stop television stations from cropping up all over America. In Grand Junction, KREX-TV debuted, and like everyone else, scrambled to fill up its programming. This national trend was fortunate for Bob, as his first job came from winning a contest to replace a regular star of a program called, Pantomime Hit Parade. The focus of the show was to lip-sync popular songs.  

  Bob remembered: “It was a time when you could go into the boss’s office with an idea for a show, and he would say, ‘Let’s put it on the air tomorrow and see if it works.’”

Born to a white-collar father and Southern Belle mother, Bob grew up in Ft. Thomas, Kentucky—across the river from Cincinnati. To make money he shined shoes at the Army base and set pins in the bowling alley. He liked school, but in fifth grade he discovered memory work was a challenge. Perhaps it was because the prayers he was supposed to learn in order to become an altar boy were in Latin. A popular athlete, he earned a scholarship to Miami University in Ohio after excelling in the pole vault.

After college and a stint in the Army, Bob won the spot on Pantomime, which lasted five years in Cincinnati and two years on the ABC network. Even though television was a tough business to learn, he’d found his niche.

That time in Cincinnati gave him the opportunity to direct and produce television and radio. He even became a disc jockey and program director for a radio station. Television shows included an all night movie on Saturday nights with celebrity interviews interspersed throughout the evening. He hosted and produced a controversial late-night talk show, and served as a vacation replacement for Dick Clark on ABC’s Dick Clark Show.

            Eventually he became an announcer for Face the Nation, and host for Repertoire Workshop on CBS-TV. Guests from that show included actor Fritz Weaver, who was in many movies and television shows, and Gary Burghoff, one of the stars of M*A*S*H. He was also the spokesman and host for the Singer Sewing Machine Company’s television specials, starring such big names as Burt Bacharach, Barbra Streisand, Herb Alpert, and Elvis Presley. Among other venues, Bob’s acting extended into commercials for Alberto Culver, StarKist Tuna, Reynolds Aluminum, General Mills, Schlitz Beer, Sears, Real Lemon, Monsanto, Kent Cigarettes, Buick, and many other products. From 1980 to 1986, he became exclusively contracted with Monsanto Company as their spokesperson. These are the folks who, for decades, had futuristic attractions at Disneyland and Walt Disney World.

            In 1996, Bob married his wife, Noelle Goslee Smith, a gifted cellist who plays with the Grand Junction Symphony. He has a grown daughter, who is a businesswoman, by a previous marriage. As a media professional, Bob Smith has few equals. Well past the age when others have retired from the business, Bob has kept the desire to make a difference in the world and live life to the fullest. He continues to bring to the public issues close to his heart, in hopes that humanity can think seriously about the consequences and benefits to such issues as our environment and stem cell research. He looks forward to “whatever the Good Lord has” for him, and feels the future will be good even if he doesn’t know what it is or when it will happen.

Long ago he adopted a secret to happiness that would bless everyone. Have someone to love, something to look forward to, and something to do. With the kind of man Bob Smith is, such thoughtful insight coming from that smooth voice and those calm hazel eyes gives one hope.

  Dead in the Water

              In 1958, Bob was hosting a weekly local television show from Coney Island Amusement Park in Cincinnati, Ohio. This beautifully maintained park opened in 1925, and is still in existence. The park has the distinction of being the one Walt Disney studied before building Disneyland in 1955, and its biggest attraction is Sunlite Pool, the world’s largest re-circulating swimming pool. [i]

            Bob’s job entailed three hours of live interviews with acrobats, swimmers, and guest singers who performed on the little stage. Included in the park is Lake Como, where today tourists enjoy paddleboats, bumper cars, and thrill rides on the island. Back in the 1950s, it also showcased an afternoon water show starring twelve stunt skiers called the “Water Skiballers.” Bob became good friends with them and always took footage of their performances for his program.  

            Towards the end of the summer of 1958, Bob’s producer decided to do a closing show with the Skiballers. He sent Bob to Hamilton, Ohio, where the troupe practiced, and he began working out a routine with them on nearby Miami River. The team used two boats, and Bob was assigned to work with the first boat. One afternoon practice, Bob was slalom skiing. As he went outside the wake and veered back across to jump it, he saw that the other skier in the routine had come too close to where Bob was supposed to land. Bob let go of the pull rope to avoid a crash.

            Not wearing a life jacket, he sunk halfway in the water and tried to put on his ski. With trepidation, he heard the vibration of the other boat approaching, yet couldn’t gauge the distance. The driver of the boat had his head turned to watch the skiers he was pulling and had no idea Bob was in the water. The boat was coming straight at him. Bob saw and quickly rolled to try and get the ski between him and the boat’s propeller, but it was too late. The boat zipped up the left side of Bob’s body, nearly severing his arm.

            Fortunately, the triceps, which held most of his left arm’s nerves, was still connected. Rushed to the emergency room, the doctors used over 2,000 stitches to sew Bob back together.

            The injuries he suffered were horrific enough, but the filthy Miami River caused him to get gangrene. The antibiotics used back then to cure this were almost as bad as the condition itself, and it was usually a toss-up as to which would kill a patient first. Bob didn’t react well to the medicine, causing him to stop breathing. Though clinically dead, his doctors didn’t give up, and Bob was brought back to life. It is a testament to his strength and determination that three months later, and after twenty-two operations, Bob finally walked out of the hospital.

            Though he doesn’t remember anything about dying, Bob knows his living is a miracle. The whole experience gave him a deep love of life and all it has to offer, and he can’t imagine not being totally involved with the world around him.

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