They set their record early in the first summer of the new millennium. On May 29, 2020, Mary Lou Fullerton, and her staff of high school girls sold 727 malts. A year later, 65,000 malts and milkshakes were sold across the old-fashioned soda counter at the Yellowstone Drug Store in Shoshoni.
The all-time record came during the Old Time Fiddler’s Contest when Margie Frymire’s crew made 944 malts on one long, hectic Saturday. “We ran out of ice cream,” Margie’s daughter Shari (Frymire) Kettlehut said. “We had to call Cream of Weber for more ice cream. We were always the busiest during the Fiddler’s Contest. One evening the fiddlers came down and played in the store and outside in the street. It was cool to watch them play.”
The Yellowstone closed at the corner of Main and 7th Street in 2002. It experienced a brief revival at a new location five blocks east in a building designed for fast food, but that too faded.
All that remains are memories of arguably the best shakes and malts ever served in Wyoming, or perhaps anywhere else.
In an interview in 2002, Mary Lou Fullerton said, “We’re looking for somebody who will keep it pretty much the same as it is and not try to modernize it. It would lose its appeal if you tried to modernize it.”
Owner Bev Surrency had a few serious lookers, and many who were just curious about the property, but no one reopened the Yellowstone.
The building is as old as the town. It was one of the first constructed by legendary Fremont County businessman Charles H. King.
King built the familiar brick store on the corner as a lumberyard and bank as the Chicago Northwestern advanced from Casper west through the desert. Small towns like Waltman, Powder River, Hiland, and Moneta sprang up along the tracks. In October, the line reached its western terminus in Lander.
A hotel opened across the street to the east in 1909 in a building constructed by Lou Shawver. Shawver was a druggist who opened a pharmacy on the first floor of his hotel. The Yellowstone Drugstore did business there until around 1960.
Shoshoni was a bustling agricultural, mining, and railroad town until the late 1950s.
Older residents recall three grocery stores, a movie theater, a drive-in movie theater, a bowling alley, several high-end dining establishments, an A&W Drive-In, and many bars.
The little town even had a house of ill repute on the east end of town on U.S. Highway 20, along with slot machines and gambling halls.
That all ended by the early 1960s.
You might say that the milkshake and industrial progress arrived simultaneously in Shoshoni.
Asmus Boysen brought electricity to the crossroads town from a dam across the Wind River Canyon that went into production in 1908. The ill-designed dam lasted only 17 years. When it flooded the tracks of the recently constructed Burlington Northern Railroad in 1925, the structure was dynamited.
The original Yellowstone Drugstore was a classic early 20th-century business with a full-time pharmacist and an accompanying soda fountain.
Shoshoni was the home of Dr. Emory Lee Jewell, one of the only physicians in Fremont County at the time along with Dr. Francis Welty, practicing 100 miles away in Dubois.
Milkshakes were unknown before the 1920s, it was just too difficult to churn the milk and ice cream. Drugstores offered malts instead. A malt was a mix of soda water, cream, and flavoring, the most popular being chocolate that could be shaken by hand by the clerk behind the counter, hence the name “Soda Jerk” which described the action of shaking two steel cups together before pouring them into a glass.
In 1922, on a hot summer day in Chicago, Ivar “Pop” Coulson created the first milkshake by mixing whole milk, ice cream, and chocolate at a Walgreens Drugstore. It was an instant hit.
Coulson designed an electric mixer that churned ice cream frozen to near zero with small beaters inside. The result was an all-American treat now with a century under its belt.
By 1929, Walgreens outlets in 525 locations from New York City to Miami were cranking out hundreds of thousands of milkshakes and malts.
In Shoshoni, legend has it that the first electric mixer arrived in 1924. It used the electric power from the dam 13 miles north for just a year. In 1922, the powerplant at Pilot Butte went online with power eventually extending to Shoshoni when Boysen’s powerplant shut down.
The Heyer and Berger Building was completed in 1908, the first large structure to go up after a disastrous fire in 1907 that erased much of the early Shoshoni architecture. A year later, the Shawver Hotel was built, with the Yellowstone Drugstore taking up residence in a large first-floor room facing west onto Main Street.
From 1909 to 1960, this was the home of the Yellowstone Drugstore and its growing reputation offering the best milkshakes and malts in the Rocky Mountain Region. Located at the crossroads to Yellowstone National Park, with Highway 26 heading west to the south entrance near Jackson Hole and U.S. Highway 20 heading north to the east entrance near Cody it was the perfect location for a malt shop and café 100 miles west of Casper.
Mary Anne Holmquist is a lifelong resident of Shoshoni or the nearby (3 miles north) little community of Bonneville.
“I know some, but not the whole history. We moved to Shoshoni from Bonneville in 1959. The Yellowstone Drug was already here, except it was in the building across the street to the east,” Mary Anne said. “Main Street was full of businesses on both sides of the street. There was the drug store, Brown‘s Market, a movie theatre, Park Cafe, the Derby, Gambles, the Golden Rule, and much more.”
Vestiges of the bank remained in the building across the street built by C.H. King, most notably a large vault. There was a stained glass window facing Main Street that was set in 1907, a year after the brick landmark was built.
“Wayne Leach was the pharmacist. It was much smaller, and the Masonic Lodge was upstairs. I remember going there with a quarter and you could buy a fountain drink and a bag of popcorn for 5 cents each and a comic book for 12,” Mary Anne said. “A small butterscotch sundae was only 15 cents.
A town without a physician has trouble maintaining a pharmacy.
Leach left, and Leon Palmer took over.
“Leon was not a pharmacist, so they stopped selling prescriptions, but you could still buy aspirin, Alka seltzer, Vicks, rubbing alcohol, etc. At that time, the drug store stayed open until 9 pm,” Mary Anne said.
Art and Doris Zube leased the store in 1977 from Leon Palmer.
Art was a pharmacist, and the couple had two daughters, Renea and Diane and son Ron.
“Art was a pharmacist and once again you could get your prescriptions in Shoshoni. That was short-lived because if people had to go to Riverton to go to the doctor, they usually picked up their prescriptions afterward in Riverton,” Mary Anne said. “Art used to say, “I’m the most educated soda jerk in Wyoming.”
Art worked briefly at CGI, then as a pharmacist in Basin, and Sheridan before he began working at the Safeway Pharmacy in Riverton.
“The drugstore was very busy in the summer with several buses stopping in Shoshoni to try one of their “Best Malts and Shakes”. Sometimes the lines would run three deep, but they kept those malts coming,” Mary Anne said. “You couldn’t use a straw because they were so thick you had to use a spoon.”
Shoshoni had a Trailways bus terminal just across the street from the drugstore and passengers soon learned to make a quick run across the highway to get a malt as they waited for their bus to arrive.
Renae (Zube) McCormack grew up at the store.
“I was seven, and started working,” Renea said. “It was kind of funny because the malts would fly off the beaters. When I was seven, it hit me across the eyebrows, when we left eight years later, it spun off my neck. That’s how we gauged how long we were there.”
The Masonic Temple was above the drug store with an entrance in the alley next to the Lucky Five.
Part of the deal were long-time employees who stayed on after the Zube’s leased it.
“Gladys Petty came with the drugstore,” Renea said.
The Drugstore was the first job for many Shoshoni High School students, dozens of them worked at the fountain, or grill for Art and Doris and hundreds more in the years before and after they owned the business.
Teachers frequented the Yellowstone Drugstore on personal development days, or after school. Coaches made the quick trip to get a burger and malt before home games on Friday afternoons.
“Teachers came come in on PD days,” Renea said. “We put a pickle in the bottom of Mr. Moravek’s shake (Science teacher Gale Moravek.) We stayed behind the counter watching his expression when he found it.”
Celebrities occasionally dropped in for the legendary malts.
“Charlie Pride did an open-air concert. They had wild west shows in the Shoshoni street,” Renea said. “The concert was by the softball fields. We brought him in from the airport. He sat at the end of the counter and had a milkshake and a burger. I remember picking his brain as much as he would talk.
Renea worked that shift with her younger sister Diane and friends Jamie Hagar and Lana Brown.
“At the concert, he recognized us from the drug store, and said hello to the girls from the Yellowstone,” Renea said. “He autographed the glove box of our Lincoln.”
Frymire’s owned the drugstore at that time, and Shari remembers the legendary singer well.
“Charlie came into the store and ate and visited with all of us, and sang a couple of songs,” Shari said. “He was there for a couple of hours, it was really neat.”
Working after school, on Saturdays and six days a week during the summer tied the family to the store. Work comes first in a family business and Renea related how she missed out on a big concert in Casper.
“I never got to see Alabama in concert until we moved to Colorado,” she said. “They were in Casper, Dad let (fellow worker) Jim Collins go to the concert. He got us some t-shirts.”
Not all the celebrities were as gracious as Charlie Pride.
“I was 17, I’d just graduated in the summer of 1988. Gary Busey came in off his motorcycle,” Shari said. “They came in to eat lunch. He was obnoxious, he asked me to marry him, got down on one knee, he worried me. I didn’t know who he was,” Shari said. “When he was ready to leave, he said, “Hey honey, I’m Gary Busey the actor.” On the back of his bike, it said Gary Busey, Alaska bound.”
Ron Howard, Rebecca Beekman, Mike Grasmick, Rose Clemetson, Terry and Debbie McMurtrey, Cindy Horton, Kim Drake, and Charlie Frymire all worked at the store either as high school students or as adults.
“It was a fun time to grow up,” Renea said. “Since the building was used as a bank prior, there were two walk in safes. We may or may not have accidentally got locked in there.”
Renea and Diane were outstanding athletes, excelling in volleyball, basketball, and track. Their parents were familiar fixtures in the stands at Shoshoni and across the Five Rivers Conference.
“If Mom and Dad wanted to see state, they just shut it down,” Renea said. “Dad made it a point to close on Sunday because that was family time.”
Art missed out on a very popular day for malts by shutting down on Sundays.
Chuck and Margie Frymire leased the business in 1985 and opened the business seven days a week.
“We never owned the building, we just rented it from the Masons,” Shari said.
“Margie opened it on Sunday, that was the busiest day of the week,” Renea said.
Like any business, the work became routine. The routine could be boring, but the hectic pace made shifts fly by, and workplace antics kept the kids hopping behind the counter.
“Counting malts on our busy days in the summer was part of the job, we kept track,” Renea said. “We all had dipping muscles, right there on our forearms from digging out the ice cream.”
When they first leased the business, the ice cream came in tall, skinny cans that went from the countertop to the floor.
“They were hard to reach,” Renea said. “Then we went to five-gallon cans.”
Working at the malt shop came with a bit of notoriety for Renea. She went to Black Hills State on a track scholarship.
“My freshman year at Black Hills, one of the seniors kept looking at me, and said you look so familiar,” Renea said. “I said I was from Shoshoni, “You’re the malt girl! he said.”
The building constructed by Charles King remains the oldest in Shoshoni, and its wiring was suspect even in the 1980s. The ungrounded malt mixer could shock you if you touched the metal counter behind it while mixing.
“Everybody was spinning malts. We purposely shocked each other. If you touched the beaters and the counter at the same time you got shocked, if you touched the person at the beaters they got shocked too.”
On hot summer days, they sometimes opened the doors for ventilation when the air conditioning couldn’t keep up. Malts were a year-round attraction, even during the subzero days of deep winter.
“We had a heat register in the middle of the floor,” Renea said “We stood on the grate until we could smell our shoes melting.”
The Yellowstone Drugstore had the first Pac-Man video game in Shoshoni. It was a popular amusement.
“We spent a lot of tip money playing Pac-Man,” Renea said.
Art and Doris were very community-oriented. One September, a major power outage displayed their devotion to Shoshoni.
A failure in the power grid left Shoshoni dark, without electricity. The Zube’s had a generator in the Yellowstone and fired it up. They kept their ice cream from melting, but opened the grill, cooking burgers for anyone who wanted one in the little town until the power came back on.
Art and Doris sold the store to Chuck and Margie Frymire in 1985.
The Frymire’s had a had a great business with Yellowstone Drugstore lasting 13 years. They retained the model with local high school kids manning the counter and grill while selling hundreds of thousands of malts and milkshakes.
The family aspect stayed as well, with Charlie, Chad, and Shari working at the drugstore with their mom.
Busses full of players from schools playing at Shoshoni or traveling through the crossroads town often filled the counter.
Bev purchased the business after Margie and then Mary Lou from Bev before it closed in 2002.
The rustic Americana look is gone. The wrought-iron tables, heavy, 1950s style mixers and the long counter are just memories, even the back bar that came from the Hole in the Wall Bar in Kaycee.
The Yellowstone had the only sidewalk elevator in Shoshoni, and remnants of parking meters still dot the sidewalk out front, along with the handprints and names of a dozen or so teenagers who worked there in the 1990s.
The Shawver Hotel and the businesses south to the Gambles Store have all been demolished. The front door of the Yellowstone Drugstore now looks onto a newly constructed town park.
In a story published a quarter-century ago in the University of Wyoming Branding Iron by
Jay O’Brien an interview was done with Bev Surrency.
Bev related in an April 9, 1999, story that Dave Thomas, founder and owner of Wendy’s came into the store.
“He wrote in the guest register, ‘The chocolate malt was as good as Wendy’s,'” Bev said.
The Yellowstone Drugstore kept a guest register over the years, filling six of them. Within the yellowing pages are the names of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton.
“We had a couple come in from the Netherlands once,” Bev said. “They said their neighbors had been there a month earlier and had told them to be sure to come. It’s always exciting when we go over last year’s numbers. We do a lot of business.”
The total of malts and shakes served rose over the years. In 1994 and 1995, they served 34,000 each year. In 1996 it reached 39,000. It jumped to 55,146 in 1997, and they set a record in 1998 at 63,872.
All those malts and shakes take a lot of ice cream, they used 15,054 gallons in 1997.
The Yellowstone Drugstore offered 2,162 unique combinations in their shakes, but chocolate was the favorite, outselling all the others combined by a ratio of eight to one.
Connie Chavez, a high school student from the little town of Lysite 20 miles east of Shoshoni worked at the Yellowstone Drugstore from 1994 to 1998.
“When I worked there, I remember Good Morning America did a story on quirky things or small town wonders,” Connie said. “They featured the Yellowstone Drugstore. I remember people coming from all over the state, and other countries to get a “world-famous malt” which was cool.
The building remains, but the ice cream is gone.
Venerable locals often remark that they can still hear the grind of the mixers, the cold blast from inside the store as you entered the building on a hot summer day, and the smell of burgers frying drifting over town.
Another bit of Americana is gone.
“It was a great place to work and grow up. I learned communication and business skills early, like how to count back change and deal with rowdy customers,” Renea said. “I loved listening to the locals, serving to the regulars, and the staff at SHS during their PD days. I never tired of eating hamburgers, milkshakes and fresh popcorn. I still run into people that, “Always stopped for a malt when they came through Shoshoni.”