Monday, July 30, 2007 | 7:05 a.m.
Walk into Decatur Drug, pass the penny slot machines and head to the gold-flecked Formica lunch counter in back.
Frank Lopez refills a cup of coffee. The lunch crowd has left, the waitress has gone home and a customer is talking about a tree on Boulder Highway that once provided shade to overheated cars
"Frank knows about that ol' tree that sits out there in Whitney," the customer says.
"Oh yeah."
"It's still there."
"Ya think so? I haven't been out there in a long time."
"Yeah, it's still there."
Two regulars, a retired couple from North Dakota, listen under the fluorescent lights that turn everything a pale yellow.
George Tigonis, a longtime regular, walks in from the heat, sits at the counter and looks at his watch. "I lost my wife today," he says jokingly, looking at his watch again. "I look for a new wife now."
He'll be in and out the front door, smoking, then returning to the counter several times before his wife finally arrives and they have a late lunch.
Some say it's the diner and regulars like Tigonis that keep the drugstore open. Others say it's the slot machines or the attached bar, Decatur Liquor. But really, they rely on one other as the drugstore seems to be hanging on by a thread. The sparsely stocked shelves are an obvious sign . Newspaper accounts from recent years detail the various times the drugstore at 546 S. Decatur Blvd. was in peril, how it was about to be swallowed by change and new owners. But it hasn't been .
Cashier Camille Francis likens Decatur Drug to a neighborhood community center and says it should be made an official landmark. "I was told that years ago it was the center of the neighborhood because there wasn't a mall."
Decatur Drug long ago sealed itself from the world and created its own landmark status. While everything else changed, Decatur Drug remained mostly the same - save for glass cases that held expensive perfumes, an empty pharmacy that awaits a new tenant and a store cosmetician named Betty.
But now the surrounding Charleston Heights neighborhood is aging and changing, says Greg Warren, a regular, dressed in a blue T-shirt and shorts and seated at the lunch counter. "It's difficult to say if any place like this would last. That no - smoking thing really slowed it down."
Though the closing of the store's prescription service damaged business, it didn't have as much of an effect as the smoking ban that changed the drugstore and diner's atmosphere, figuratively and literally.
"We had a lot of Greeks who used to sit there and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes all day long," the 64-year-old Lopez says, gesturing to a bank of now-empty tables.
After the ban, he says, "they came in, had a cup of coffee, they'd go outside to smoke, but that didn't last. They still come in, but they don't stay as long."
"It's one of those things that have a great intention, but sad consequences," Warren says.
Consequence is an interesting word choice when it comes to drugstore lunch counters that flourished in the 20th century. But big box stores, chain fast food restaurants and busy lifestyles have nearly erased the lunch counter from the American landscape.
In Las Vegas, Decatur Drug is one of two lunch counters left. Tiffany's Cafe at White Cross Drugs on Las Vegas Boulevard is the other. Huntridge Drugs, a sister to Decatur Drug, recently closed its lunch counter and is looking to re open with a new owner.
The outlines on the linoleum tiles of Decatur Drug detail past dreams. A large booth was taken out by owners who wanted to add a pizza place, and counter stools were removed to make room for waitresses going into a back kitchen area. The imprints remain. The pizza place never arrived.
The erasure of drugstore lunch counters baffles Lopez, who says even supply companies don't want to deal directly with small businesses.
"In the '50s, '60s and '70s every department store and drugstore had a lunch counter," he says. "Even Sears doesn't make popcorn anymore. Every once in a while I go to Kmart and buy popcorn. A lot of people in the area don't even know we're here because they don't expect it anymore."
And now Sears and Kmart are struggling.
Decatur Drugs lunch counter has its faithful, those who come every day for coffee, breakfast or the lunch specials. The store is planted in a neighborhood of mostly one-story, single-family homes and directly across the street from the retirement home James Downs Towers.
The customers have kept open this retro fortress at the corner of a strip mall at Decatur Boulevard and Alta Drive, near Arizona Charlie's.
Lopez, who grew up in Harlingen, Texas, came to Las Vegas to visit relatives in 1963 and stayed. He first sat down at this counter in 1988. He was working as a cook at the Gold Coast when he wandered into the diner for a cup of coffee. The restaurant's owner, another Gold Coast worker, was seated on a stool at the other end and offered Lopez a job as cook. Lopez, who worked through several changes in ownership, became the restaurant's owner in May.
As its only cook , he's always there, prepping for the breakfast crowd in the morning, making daily specials and waiting tables when the rest of the staff has gone home for the afternoon.
How long will he be there? "No lease," he says. "I could walk out whenever." But you get the feeling he won't. He never seems to tire. "I've been used to working two jobs all of my life."
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