The place made quite an impression on a young girl.
Decades later, Jane Lamon still remembers the green-and-white linoleum floor. She still remembers the Cokes and the banana splits and the showy cars out front and the crowds of teenagers from The Lovett School or The Westminster Schools that gathered there.
Back when she was little and following her big sister around, the soda fountain at Wender and Roberts Pharmacy on West Paces Ferry was the place for many Buckhead teenagers to be and to be seen.
“It was the hangout. It was the meeting place,” she said. “I just remember everybody in here. You could smoke. … Well, I didn’t smoke. I was 12 years old.”
Wender and Roberts held the title of the Buckhead teen hangout for years, decades even. “You sat in booths and saw high school kids from North Fulton, Northside and Westminster mill through,” was the way writer Doug Monroe remembered it in a 2004 article in Atlanta magazine.
The pharmacy held its title as the center of the teen scene at different times for different schools and even at different locations.
Flash back a couple of decades or more before Lamon was drinking Coca-Colas at the Wender and Roberts at 1262 W. Paces Ferry and you could find Wade Mitchell hanging out and drinking a chocolate shake at the soda fountain at the Wender and Roberts Pharmacy at 3073 Peachtree.
That location, in a skinny Peachtree storefront between Buckhead Avenue and East Paces Ferry, dated back to the 1920s, and the business was started even earlier, according to Buckhead historians. Mitchell says the place on Piedmont had “the best egg salad sandwiches in the whole world.”
As Mitchell remembers it, the soda fountain at the pharmacy on Peachtree was a place where “girls and boys did what girls and boys do – flirting and carrying on.”
It was so well known as the gathering place for a certain generation that poet James Dickey returned there in verse when he wanted to reconnect with the Buckhead Boys of his youth. “I must go to Wender and Roberts Drug Store …,” he wrote in “Looking for the Buckhead Boys.” “It’s one of the places the Buckhead Boys used to be.”
That’s how Mitchell remembers it, too. “If you went to the Buckhead Theater,” Mitchell said, “you might also end up at Wender and Roberts before and after… and maybe also during.”
Mitchell’s 77 now. His son, Wright Mitchell, who’s president of the Buckhead Heritage Society, is too young to have witnessed the heyday of the Peachtree soda shop, but says he’s heard of the place for years from his dad and others. “It was the local soda shop back when Buckhead was the kind of place that had a local soda shop,” Wright Mitchell said.
Buckhead’s different now, of course. But long after the pharmacy removed its soda fountain and Buckhead teenagers started buying their Cokes at McDonald’s or from other businesses in the neighborhood, old customers such as Jane and Hollis Lamon still are fans of Wender and Roberts.
Recently, the shop’s new owner, Loren Pierce, who bought the West Paces business and a couple of other Wender and Roberts pharmacies from the Wender family last year, hosted a customer appreciation day. Long-time customers dropped by to eat ice cream and drink bottled Coca-Colas and remember the old days.
Twins Veneda and Geneva Hilton said they’d been shopping at Wender and Roberts for half a century. “It’s a drug store you inherit,” Geneva Hilton said. “It’s one you never want to lose.”
Part of the pharmacy’s appeal comes from continuity, customers said. Melanie Germany, the store manager, has been working there 24 years. Now her daughter, Caroline, a first-grade teacher, sometimes drops by to work on the weekends.
Pierce, the new owner, sounds proud when he describes the store as a place where his employees know their customers by name. “Every store develops its own characteristics and I don’t want to change that,” he said.
He’s put up photos of the old Wender and Roberts’ pharmacies he said the Wenders gave him when he bought the business. “It’s such a cool experience having a store like this, where the community, they embrace you,” he said.
And with a cup of chocolate ice cream or a sip of Coke, they still can remember when Buckhead was younger and so were they and a part of Wender and Roberts was theirs.
“This was the place,” Hollis Lamon said.
