Updated: date
Published: SEPTEMBER 2024
Rev up your Dingbat motor!
A world-class museum located in the middle of nowhere
By WARREN PERLEY
Writing from Montreal
If you blink your eye, you’re liable to miss the town of Castor, Alberta. But it’s impossible to miss the Dingbat Wall of Fame inside the Castor Pharmacy Museum: it boasts the world’s largest display of Dingbat calendar illustrations spanning the years 1915 through 1993.
The museum is the brainchild of retired pharmacist Mike Bain and his wife, Wendy, who started it in 2008, collecting antique equipment, hand-made wood cabinetry, old packaging, medicine bottles, and other knick-knacks found in Alberta drugstores dating back to the late 1800s.
Oh, and don’t forget those iconic Dingbat calendar illustrations that Mike’s father – also named Mike and also a pharmacist – collected and kept in storage for decades after putting up a new wall calendar that he received every year from Montreal-based Charles E. Frosst & Co.
After Mike Sr. and his brother, Patrick, sold Castor Drugstore to Mike Jr. in 1977, Mike Sr. decided to organize all his stored Dingbat calendars into a collection. So he cut out all the calendar illustrations and framed each one. It was left to Mike Jr. to build a 10-foot-high-by-18-foot-wide Dingbat Wall of Fame in 2016 (3 meters h x 5.5 meters w).
Of course, without the calendar grid displaying the dates, a visitor can’t tell which year each illustration appeared – although Mike Jr. says they are displayed in order starting with a photo of Dudley Ward’s first illustration from the 1915 calendar with the theme ‘Research in Dingbat Land’.
The Dingbat Wall of Fame was built about eight years after Mike began converting his old 2,500 s.f. drugstore, (232 square meters) into the current site of the museum.
In a July 10, 2024 telephone interview, Mike Jr. told BestStory.ca that there are about 12 Dingbat calendar illustrations missing from his collection. “I’m still on the lookout,” he said. “But they’re so rare to find.”
Mike Jr. believes that the Frosst company might not have published during some years spanning the First and Second World Wars due to supply shortages. Mike Jr. shared a letter dated February 21, 1978 written to his father, Mike Sr., and signed by a Mrs. B. Lunn who worked in the administration of Charles E. Frosst & Co.
In the 1978 letter, Mrs. Lunn stated: “The calendars for 1942 and 1944 were not issued. Otherwise, they have been published every year from 1915 onwards.”
Be that as it may, there is no known Dingbat collection that has a calendar for every year between 1915 and 1993. BestStory.ca could find no documentation as to the reasons for the missing calendars or which years were skipped – other than the Frosst company letter of 1978. that citeds only 1942 and 1944 as missing.
To give an example of the hit-and-miss nature of the Dingbat publishing schedule, although the 1978 Frosst company letter stated that there were no Dingbat calendars printed for the war years of 1942 and 1944, Mike Jr. does have a 1941 Dingbat calendar illustration created by Ross Wiggs, who succeeded Dudley Ward after his death in 1935. Wiggs’ 1941 illustration is titled, ‘Germ Annihilation in Dingbat Land’ and shows bumblebee-like Dingbats attacking a Nazi.
Despite the mystery surrounding the missing years, Mike describes the Dingbats as “a piece of history”, adding: “When you get them all put up on the wall, it tells you a little bit about what the concerns of that era were. I’m sure it was a large part of Frosst’s business. It kept them kind of front and centre.”
Dingbats are just one aspect of the fascinating collection of pharmacy artifacts on display at the Castor Pharmacy Museum. It is likely that most Canadians have never heard of the tiny town of Castor, Alberta – population 1,000 located about two hours west of the Saskatchewan border.
So why would anyone expect to find a world-class drugstore museum there? Like most things Canadian, the museum and its owners – Mike and Wendy Bain – are understated. At what other museum in the world can visitors phone or email in advance to make an appointment for a private tour – with no admission fee?
Visitors to the museum are given a front-row seat to what constitutes pharmacy history and artifacts typical of small towns in Western Canada at the turn of the 20th century when tens of thousands of European immigrants established homesteads on the Prairies. Towns sprung up around those farms with drugstores serving as their social hub. The drugstores were a critical element for patients seeking both prescriptions and medical advice, often in the absence of hospitals and physicians. In addition to being dispensaries, the drugstores featured soda fountains and sold a wide range of merchandise including cosmetics, perfumes, giftware, candy, crockery, kitchen utensils, and spices. Castor, founded in 1910, was one such town with one such drugstore.
Mike and Wendy Bain are a big deal in Western Canada in recognition of their work in single-handedly starting and financing the Castor Pharmacy Museum, On June 21, 2017, Mike was presented with the Alberta College of Pharmacists (ACP) Honorary Life Membership Award for his work in creating and curating the Castor Pharmacy Museum. The ACP calls the museum “a must-see for pharmacists and history buffs alike – a true Alberta hidden gem.”
But polishing that “hidden gem” spanned more than a decade and many miles on a succession of three GM Suburbans and a Ford F-150 pickup used by Mike and Wendy as they crisscrossed Alberta and Saskatchewan hunting down pharmacy antiques. Each expedition would last between seven and 10 days, taking them hundreds of miles.
“We didn't really know what road we were going to go down when we pulled out of the driveway,” Mike recalled in his interview with BestStory.ca But then again, they didn’t care where they ended up. “It was really great entertainment because, you know, we’d go into these small rural towns – maybe 200 people or something – sit down in the local café, and, you know, it's like, ‘What's interesting around here to see?’ You could get sent to all kinds of little places that nobody else would ever go to. You know, they wouldn't be on the tourist radar.”
Every trip started with Mike and Wendy hitching the truck to their well-stocked 27-foot camper – replete with beds, fridge and stove – pulling out of the driveway, and heading to God knows where. Oh yeah, there were some big decisions to make once they hit the road outside their house. Should they go north, south, east, or west? Because truth be told, Castor is smack dab in the middle of nowhere. Take Highway 12 and head east for a couple of hours towards Saskatchewan? Or perhaps steer west 86 miles (139 km) to Red Deer, Alberta? Or how about rolling up Highway 36 towards Fort McMurray 366 miles (590 km) to the north? or 211 miles (340 km) south to Lethbridge? – both in Alberta.
Decisions, decisions… But one of the best ones they ever made was the day in about 2015 they hopped into their F-150 and headed 152 miles (245 km) southwest towards Strathmore, Alberta where they had been tipped off to an old pharmacy dispensing cabinet being stored in a barn.
“So we went down there and I walked in, and here's this absolutely gorgeous pharmacy cabinet with rolled glass and a sliding top drawer built between 1914 and 1918,” Mike recalls. “When you view the glass in the cabinet from the side you can see how wavy it is. And so you know it's original glass that hasn't been replaced. Oh my God, I couldn't believe it!”
The backstory was that the farmer was a kid in the 1960s when his dad bought all the equipment from an old drugstore that had closed in Standard, Alberta, which is about 130 miles (209 km) southwest of Castor and about 22 miles (36 km) from Strathmore. “He probably had 3,000 bottles of drugstore product dating from the 1950s.” Mike said.
Employing the ‘good-people’ skills he had honed in his decades as a pharmacist, Mike asked the farmer whether he would be willing to sell his stash and, if so, for how much. Falling back upon the patient, plain-spoken manner he had honed in his decades as a man of the earth, the farmer replied: “Let me think about it.”
And so the negotiations played out for more than one week, with Mike calling every so often to ask whether a decision had been reached, and the farmer replying that he was still thinking on it. In their final phone call, Mike was a wee bit more insistent, explaining that if there was a deal to be made, he would need to know the details far enough in advance to have some idea as to how much money he would need, as well as how big a trailer and how much manpower would be required. Well, replied the farmer in a deadpan tone, he still had not made up his mind, quickly adding: “But if I was you, I’d bring a big trailer, lots of help, and I’m sure we can work something out.”
So Mike and Wendy wasted no time: they recruited four sets of helping hands among their friends, jumped into their GMC Yukon XL, and hitched it to a 25-foot farm trailer they borrowed. They knew there was a substantial haul waiting to be packed up: about 4,000 old medicine and pill bottles secured in cases, as well as the antique hand-built wood pharmacy cabinet. It took two round trips and cost Mike about $7,000 (Cdn), including $2,500 for the cabinet.
In the intervening years, they’ve added many more thousands of old drugstore bottles and packaging including a 6-foot-by-9-foot pharmacy dispensing cabinet donated by Covenant Health which Mike uses to display some of the small bottles that contained Frosst medicinal products.
A lot of the museum contributions came from the Alberta College of Pharmacy, previously known as the Alberta College of Pharmacists. “They turned over some really amazing stuff to us,” Mike says. The University of Alberta’s Faculty of Pharmacy was also very helpful in referring many relatives of deceased pharmacists who had drugstore antiques to donate. In many cases, Mike and Wendy would cold-call existing pharmacy owners who would send them down to their basements to retrieve old materials being held in storage.
Mike and Wendy give a special call-out to Dave Ritchie, the first inspector for the Bureau of Dangerous Drugs in the province of Alberta between 1962 and 1989. Ritchie, who passed away in Calgary on February 3, 2018, donated 1,500 of the 2,000 labelled bottles that contained narcotics, including Frosst bottles that at one time had been filled with diacetyl morphine, which is the chemical name for heroin.
In his job as an inspector for 27 years with the Bureau of Dangerous Drugs, Ritchie would dispose of unused and/or dangerous and expired products. After disposing of the product, he would ask the pharmacist if he could keep the empty, clean bottle which still had its original label. “About 99 out of 100 pharmacists would say, ‘Well, yeah, knock yourself out,” Mike told BestStory.ca “So Dave Ritchie collected those bottles, but he got to an age when he had to downsize, so he ended up donating his collection to us.”
Thanks to Dave Ritchie, the Castor Pharmacy Museum has one of the largest collections in the world of empty narcotics bottles that contained products such as heroin, cocaine, arsenic, and strychnine.
But like Dave Richie did more than a decade ago, Mike, who turned 75 on September 11, 2024, is starting to look ahead to the time when he will no longer be in a position to support and run the Castor Pharmacy Museum.
“What the heck am I going to do with this thing?” Mike asks rhetorically in reference to the museum. “It's out in the middle of nowhere. We need to try to find it a home.”
The Government of Alberta does not seem interested in preserving it as a heritage site, he said. His alma mater, the University of Alberta, could be a potential home for parts of the collection or perhaps the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, but neither of those options would likely make enough space available to display his collection. He is concerned they would instead opt to put it into storage – meaning it would not be available for visitors to view.
But God willing, Mike hopes that he has at least another 10 good years left to maintain his passionate calling as curator of the Castor Pharmacy Museum and is hoping for more visitors now that word is getting out about its amazing historical content.
You could take the reconstituted drugstore depicted in his museum and drop it into probably 500 little towns across Western Canada as an historical picture of the industry in the early 20th century, Mike says.
Besides the attraction of the museum, the town of Castor is a verdant oasis offering summer visitors fabulous kayaking and paddle-boarding activities in a lake-like creek framed by sandstone cliffs. In autumn, it is a stopover for migrating waterfowl.
‘Castor’ – the French word for ‘beaver’ – reinforces its fun-loving image with a sculpture of the wood-chomping Canadian symbol standing tall next to the town’s municipal sign: ‘Castor WELCOMES YOU.’ Sounds like the kind of shindig destination relished by Dingbat fans!
Editor’s Note: Tourists wishing to visit Castor Pharmacy Museum can email Mike Bain at mhbain@telusplanet.net or call him at 403-741-6202 or on WhatsApp to arrange a private tour at no cost.
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