Sweet and a Little Sour For Good Measure
by Bryce Martin

It was one sweet block, mostly.

An asafetida bag was something you got from your druggist. It emitted an offensive odor so fetid and foul only the devil could love. A user wore it on a string around their neck. It supposedly had medicinal powers strong enough to ward off a cold. It was also the basis for a joke, an old, old joke I would imagine. The joke had to do with a play on words. When someone wanted to sound as if they were going to use a bad phrase, but instead intended to trick you: "KISS MY AS!-afetida bag," they would say. Another one in the same vein: "GOT DAND!-ruff in my hair."

An old man in Galena was the only person I ever knew of who actually wore one of the asafetida (pronounced locally as "as-fit-tid-e") bags on his person. It was said that he had came in every winter for the past few years to get outfitted with a new bag from druggist Otto Schwartz who owned Schwartz's Drug Store on Main Street. He sold the best ice cream you could buy. He made and packaged it himself using pure and superior ingredients. It was expensive, though, at fifty cents a carton. And that was in 1960. Vanilla was the only homemade flavor offered. I would say that the overwhelmingly obnoxious smell of the asafetida bags, compared to the soothing aroma of the vanilla bean and the rest of the ice cream's creamy ingredients, covered both ends of the smellorama meter for Schwartz's Drug Store.

Otto's son, Corky, often worked the soda counter. The malts, shakes, and ice cream sodas were first rate. You could get a burger, too.

Across the street and on the opposite corner had once stood the Double Dip. Malts, shakes, sodas, floats, the like. An elderly couple owned an operated it. They were gone by 1960, retired or maybe deceased. I last went there when I was very young, and with adults. In its last days, it did little business. The owners appeared too old to keep it up.

Across the street from the Double Dip was Anthony's. No ice cream or sodas, but candy galore. A gigantic Hershey chocolate bar rested in the window deck. My favorite was the peanut clusters.

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