06  – EARLY DAYS – Chapples & Rexall

When our family arrived in Geraldton in ’53, both Chapples and Rexall Drug Store were thriving businesses on Main Street. Chapples department store utilized a cash railway or cash carrier system. Here is one description of it: ‘[It was] a Rube Goldberg-like contraption of overhead wires, springs, turnbuckles and rails that could zipline money from sales clerks to cashiers and back again.’ [www.AtlasObscura.com] The soda fountain was operating but too expensive for my wallet. I preferred a coke at the Bluebird Grill or the Silver Grill.

“This time when we went to Main Street we had to walk on the road. They were building a wooden sidewalk so we would soon have a smooth walk to Main Street. Where our street joined Main Street, there was a Rexall Drug Store and across Main was

Chapples. It was a big store. The two floors had groceries, clothes and all kinds of other stuff. The most interesting thing about the store was what they did with the money. When you paid the lady at the counter she put the bill and money in a small box, put the

box in a cage and it went up a track to a room upstairs. Somebody up there put the change and the bill in the box and sent it back down to the counter. The stuff you bought was in the bags and your change was back with you. I don’t know how the boxes worked but the right one came back to us.

We looked around the store at all the wonderful stuff. Mom bought lemons, a cabbage and a tin of bully beef and a big box with a picture of a waterfall on the front. I saw other tracks in the store and they all ran upstairs. I watched boxes run up and back and I couldn’t figure out how they knew where to go.

We went into the new drugstore. ‘Oh my goodness, there is a soda fountain,’Mom said, smiling.

It looked like long, narrow table and had round seats all along it. “

DO YOU REMEMBER . . .

a) a cash railway?

b) a soda fountain?