Lunch at the Drug Store

It used to be a common stop after school for children or for the bus passing through town. Located downtown, or to some uptown, the small town local drug store was the place for the gossip, medicine, gifts, and lunch.

Growing up in Birmingham, I never really had the opportunity to experience this that much, and no where near as much as my father, grandfather or great grandfather had the opportunity.

For more than half a century the corner of West Front Street in Thomasville, Ala. was home to People's Drugs - the small, family owned drug store with a soda fountain and lunch counter. Today, the corner and building is the renovated home of People's Corner - a gift shop and lunch stop.

I have few memories of People's Drugs before it closed in 1986. Really, I only have about one memory of the office inside the store - that and when we returned to the building in 1992 to clean out the attic.

People's Drugs was opened by my great-grandfather Theodore Megginson, followed by my grandfather Dick Megginson, who retired and closed the store in 1986. My dad grew up working small jobs in the store, as it became the after school stop. Bonfires were held on the corner to celebrate homecoming. Visitors would take a pit stop at the store when passing through Clarke County via bus.

Today, I felt like I went back in time to Thomasville. I looked for Grandmama and Grand Daddy behind the counter, as I entered into Reeves Drug Store on First Street in Pulaski, Tenn. for lunch. My friend Stacy, a native Pulaskian, and I met there for lunch. The chairs and tables were similar. It was my first trip to Reeves and made me stop and reflect on what it must have been like to take a lunch break in Thomasville and walk down to People's for a chicken salad sandwich.

Just a taste of small town livin'.

Tracking Your Success

Yesterday we had our annual campus wide planning meeting in the dining hall. Part of the meeting included a presentation on the success of the new website launched by the school on March 1. The stats given compared the Top 6 most visited sites for the month of April.

Of course, the school home page was number one, but the athletics home page was a very close second...one theory is that many are going to the school page and then to the athletics page instead of straight to the athletics page, meaning that the home page success is largely in part to that of the athletics page's success. Third on the list was the baseball home page. Fourth was the admissions page, while softball was fifth. I forget what the sixth page was.

The month of April saw 8,497 visitors to the server, making up 22,000 visits to 419, 800 pages and over two million hits. In just 10 days in the month of May we have had 4,448 visitors and 721,500 hits. May hopefully will eclipse April in the amount of visits. It also appears that over 100,000 trips have been made to the school website from the link off the athletics website.

This is all good news, since the websites are really and truly in their first year of actively being update, nearly on a daily basis. Also, figures that will help bring about some possible financial needs to make needed changes to the sites.

What sparked this blog was my little map on the right side of the screen over there, look down below all my links and the "Blogger" logo. You see all the red dots? They show clusters of visits to this blog as of April 1. If you click on it, then click "map with smaller clusters" it will take you to a map that shows a little more detail of who is viewing the blog. Now, I know where the small dot in Florida is coming from and the ones in Alabama. The big dot covering those is most likely myself checking this thing out. However the one that throws me for a loop is the 10-99 visits from the Great Plains area and the 1-9 in New York.

It is neat to see who, at least from what state/country, someone is reading your blog. Maybe I should send this to my friend in Belgium and others to check when they go over seas to decorate the map...nah, I won't cheat that way.

However, one interesting thought...could you imagine what a map like this would look like on the my athletics site with all of our international students' parents checking the site. Hopefully it would be a lot of red.