The Center of Town
Ronald Esson, a registered pharmacist, came to Sandy in about 1912 where he operated a drug store in several places including the “new” Shelley Building and later in the Junker Building. In 1923 when the beautiful Sandy Hotel was destroyed by fire, Esson soon bought the lot where the hotel had stood and had an attractive, fire-proof building constructed in 1924 for his Sandy Drug Store. This building, presently housing the Double Dragon Restaurant, has been in constant use for 100 years!
The store thrived and soon became “the center of town” where people gathered for coffee and to visit at the soda fountain. Esson had one of the first radios in the area and people would come there to hear special events such as heavy-weight boxing. I remember going there with my parents to hear the famous Dempsey-Tunney (“long-count”) fight in 1927. Except for Army service during World War I, Esson was Sandy’s pharmacist for about 20 years. Esson‘s health began to fail in the early 1930s and the store deteriorated until Ivan and Agnes Barker bought the building and business in 1933.
It was a lucky day for Sandy when the Barkers arrived in the middle of the Depression, as they were top-notch people who would become probably the hardest-working civic volunteers that Sandy had ever seen. Ivan was the great-grandson of Southern Oregon pioneer Jesse Applegate, who was involved with forming the Territorial Government in Oregon in 1849.
The Barkers soon built up the business and renamed it Sandy Rexall Drug Store. It again became “the center of town.” People got their prescriptions there, gifts were available, film could be left for developing; coffee, cokes & ice cream were handy at the fountain; it was the State Liquor Store, and it was the bus-stop for the old “Blue-line” buses to Gresham and Portland. For a number of years, the U.S. Post Office was located in the west end of the building. Judd Mills, who was one of our historical society’s volunteers, remembered spending time in the drugstore as a boy looking at cartoon magazines on display. It was a busy place and continued to be “the center of town.”
The Barkers backed any proposal that was good for Sandy. They were so respected that anyone carrying a petition for a civic project would try to get Ivan to sign it first knowing that if others saw Ivan’s name on it, they would sign.
Ivan and Agnes were legendary civic volunteers, active in church work, lodges, school-boards, youth activities, budget committees, etc.
Doctors were scarce in Sandy in the early days, so injured people would often have to get Ivan to patch them up until they could get proper medical help in Gresham
or Portland.
There was a story that a local young lady, while fishing, accidentally got a fish hook caught in her derriere. With no doctor available and in desperation, she called on Ivan for help. Ivan reluctantly agreed so he had her draped over a stool in the back room and was working away on the fishhook when who should stop by but his wife, Agnes! “It sure took a considerable amount of explaining,” said Ivan. (Surely, Ivan wasn’t pulling our leg with that story?)
In the early 1950s, Ivan added a second drug store (Economy Drug) on Proctor Blvd. The State Highway Dept. had paved Proctor Blvd. in the 1930s so that it carried all the two-way traffic through Sandy, so many other businesses obviously wanted to be on the busy street where they could be seen.
In the 1960s, the Barkers consolidated the two stores into a new building on Proctor Blvd. located adjacent to Sandy’s present City Library. It was a spacious building that soon again became “the center of town” meeting-place. In about the early 1960s, two pharmacists: Gerry Barker (Ivan’s nephew) and Olin Bignall joined the crew. This group started a branch Drug Store in Welches in about the early 1960s known as Hoodland Drug Store. The Sandy store site has since been divided up into small shops.
Because of the Barkers’ attention to business and their civic contributions, their stores thrived for about 50 years from 1933 to about 1983 with no real competition. This all changed in the mid-1980s when the chain drug stores arrived at the Safeway complex, Sandy Marketplace, and the Fred Meyer store a few years later.
Story information and illustration are from Hometown Sandy Oregon by Phil Jonsrud, copyright 2011 by Sandy Historical Society, pp. 35-38.
