Stone descendant recalls old days in young Jasper
By SHARON KERR Staff Writer

Detail on tile floor near front window

What will be the Jasper Historical Museum at 165 N. Main was once the Stone family pharmacy in the 1920's.

Mary Sanders is the daughter of Clarence Ryall Stone, the pharmacist, and the granddaughter of Thomas Edwin Stone, "an old horse and buggy country doctor," Sanders said. She never met the elder Stone, who is buried at the old Ryall cemetery off U.S. Highway 63.

Country doctors did not make a great deal of money a hundred years ago, but old Doc Stone did well enough to send both sons to Georgetown University in Texas, where Clarence and Joel Edwin Stone became pharmacists.

"My father was one of the few college-trained licensed pharmacists of his time," Sanders said. "Most learned by being an apprentice."

Things were looking good for the Stones. They had a large house near the courthouse square.

Sanders remembers being a small child in the store, tracing the design of the Stone name in the mosaic black-and-white tiles. The soda fountain was on the south wall, and beyond that, the candy counter with the "perishables," the Hershey's and Pangburn's chocolates.

Nothing was air-conditioned of course, but there was a big ice chest under the stairs and the soda fountain had frozen treats.

"On Saturday, there was a man who lived off Verna where it crosses the creek. He would make tamales and bring them to town in a coffee can. That was his livelihood," Sanders said. "As children we saved our dimes so we could buy tamales on Saturday, and we ate them sitting under the stairs by the big ice box."

The store also had marbletopped cafe tables with iron curlicue chairs, "the same kind that are popular again," she said. The soda fountain had stools and a big mirror behind the bar.

"Those Debney boys, Alice's sons, worked as soda jerks," Sanders said. "And Curtis Renfro did bicycle deliveries of prescriptions for people too sick to come and get them."

At the back of the store was the pharmacy, but like drug stores today, they had a variety of merchandise from dolls and toys to decor items, including electric lamps and other wonders of the modern age.

It was the roaring twenties, and everyone assumed the new prosperity following The Great War would continue forever.

"When the Wall Street crash of 1929 was followed by The Great Depression, suddenly no one had any money," Sanders said.

Her family kept the store as long as they could. Sometimes that meant just giving desperately needed items to families who no longer could pay.

Eventually, inventory was exhausted and the store closed. Sanders said her father spent the rest of his days alternating between carpentry and construction jobs in Jasper, and being a relief pharmacist when he could find work elsewhere.

"Those jobs often took him a long ways away," she said. He would sometimes fill in for a pharmacist who was sick for months.

The family never reopened the store. Over the years, it was home to many businesses. Sanders is unsure how many, because after graduating from Jasper High School in 1939, she was in pre-med at the University of Texas until World War II interrupted.

It would be several years and more interruptions, before she returned with a baby and a husband, Dr. William S. Sanders.

Dr. Sanders and a very young Dr. Joe Dickerson worked at the Hardy Hancock Hospital, and dreamed of building a small private hospital with all the modern tools. But that's another story about a different building.