The Library of Congress calls John Margolies's 1980 subject simply “Wall Drug dinosaur.”[1] The combination is instructive: a drugstore name identifies an enormous prehistoric animal. By the time of the photograph, the business could evidently be represented by something with no necessary connection to prescriptions. Its identity had expanded into an invitation to stop and look.
Wall Drug's published history includes founder Ted Hustead's first-person account of buying the town's drugstore with his wife Dorothy in December 1931. He describes a small community struggling with drought and the Depression. Their breakthrough, in this family narrative, came from Dorothy's proposal to offer travelers free ice water and advertise it along the road.[2] It was an offer people could understand immediately, requiring neither a purchase nor an explanation of the store's merits.
A National Park Service profile draws on a January 2003 interview with a later Ted Hustead. He characterized the enterprise in terms of retail and entertainment. The profile also connects the store with service members traveling through the region during the operation of the nearby Minuteman missile system.[3] These associations complicate a picture of the stop as an isolated tourist curiosity: a roadside business can serve vacationers and people moving through the same landscape for work.
The dinosaur belongs to the entertainment half of that equation. It gives someone a reason to pause even without a shopping list. Its extravagance enlarges the visit beyond the immediate transaction. A person may remember the animal and, through it, remember the store.
