Inspired by a handful of photographs that I inherited of my great Uncle from the late 1930’s. I never met him as he died before I was born. He was a druggist by trade and was said to have had a thyroid condition.
The Dr. West’s toothbrushes in the upper right case of the painting were the first toothbrushes to utilize nylon bristles back in 1938. Prior to that time, most of us were brushing our teeth with pig’s hair bristles, if at all. These toothbrushes were in fact the first commercial use of nylon. The polymer itself was first produced earlier in the decade by the DuPont company. It was an innovative time, and shortly thereafter women’s nylon stockings were first introduced. This leads us to the advertisement behind our druggist. I thought the provocative legs a bit risqué for the times, but research shows that similar ads were commonplace then.
Fudging the timeline a bit, I included a few bottles of Hadacol near the bottom shelf. In the 1940’s, Hadacol was a Louisiana product marketed heavily as a medicinal elixir by “Coozan Dudley” LeBlanc (no relation that I am aware of). It’s true value was it’s high 12% alcohol content. One marketing technique was the infamous Hadacol Caravan, a roving show of entertainers including musicians, jugglers, clowns, boxers, comedians, etc. It reportedly numbered over a hundred vehicles packed with entertainers and Hadacol product as it travelled from town to town putting on shows and hawking the elixir.
In the mid 2000’s, I had business in the town of Erath, Louisiana down in Vermilion Parish, not far from Abbeville where Coozan Dudley LeBlanc himself is buried. While there, I met a man who said he ran a nearby barroom back in the heday of the Hadacol Caravan. Country music legend Hank Williams was performing with the Caravan at the time. One day Hank strolled into the bar and ordered a fifth of whiskey. He told the barkeep to bill it to Coozan Dudley as he tipped his hat and left. The man told me that he was still waiting to this day to get paid for that fifth of whiskey…
