In 1931, when Ted Hustead and his wife Dorothy were looking for a place to open a drug store, he told the local paper years later he picked the thinly populated town of Wall because the local doctor told them he’d give them all his prescriptions.
Despite all their hard work, though, most of their potential customers passed their little prairie town along the highway, rarely noticing the store.
The Husteads’ dire future all changed one hot summer night when Dorothy Hustead could not sleep. Irritated that the parade of cars along U.S. 16 was keeping her awake, she wondered how could they make all of those people at least stop at their store and maybe buy a thing or two.
Out of that mild irritation came a plan: Plant signs along the highway offering free ice-cold water to weary travelers. And not just any signs, but clever ones like the humorous Burma Shave signs that were famously posted all along small highways in the 1920s.
Her idea was both simple and genius. More importantly, it worked.
...Those original signs have gone from handmade to nostalgic and colorful billboards, thousands of which dot the prairie beginning before you depart Iowa or Minnesota for South Dakota. Those signs are so ingrained in our culture that soldiers during World War II and the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan planted the “Free Ice Water at Wall Drug” signs everywhere.
...In this little prairie town exists this community where people from all different socioeconomic and geographical places feel that connective tissue with each other and with a druggist family that punched above its weight class.
It is something they find lacking every time they consume the news, go to buy a product, or even watch any major sporting event. Everything about Wall Drug from its early trials to its innovative path to prosperity reflects that frontier spirit America was built on; it is an enduring quality that has embodied us and still embodies us to this day.
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