page_title: The Owl Drug Company
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: The Owl Drug Company / History
caption_attribution_description: Top of a patent medicine tin. The medicine was Captain John Orderleys and was produced by the Owl Drug Company in San Francisco. At one time, the company had branches throughout the US, but was found primarily on the West Coast. The tin has owl faces around its rim. This version of the medicine was prior to the US Food and Drug Act of 1906; a toxic substance is listed as one of its ingredients. The post-1906 version is without the toxic substance, has different wording re: what the medicine was to be used for and notes that this formulation was post-Food and Drug Act in 1906.
context_page_description: The Owl Drug Company was an American drugstore retailer with its headquarters in San Francisco. It was a subsidiary of Rexall stores at its peak in the 1920s through 1940s. The company sold medicines and pills, and later ventured into cosmetics, perfumes, and other goods.
context_section_description: The founder of the Owl Drug Company was Richard Elgin Miller, R.E. Miller. The Owl Drug Company was established in 1892 in San Francisco, at 1128 Market Street. In 1903, with their contract with the Whitall Tatum Glass Company, they began making triangular, cobalt-blue bottles of various sizes to store poisons in, which was widely emulated. According to the book Old Owl Drug Bottles & Others (1968), Owl Drug created a variety of bottles for prescription medicine and pills, and also soda bottles, with an owl sitting atop a mortar and pestle molded into the glass. The bottles were produced in various sizes from .5 ounces (14 g) up to a (rarer) 32 ounces (910 g), over 10 inches (250 mm) in height. The bottles were also produced in other colors such as green, amber, and clear, and the logos on them often fluctuated from owls with a long tail to owls with no tail, with a short tail, with a potbelly, and others. These bottles are now collectors items, as are other company items such as tarot cards, receipts, advertising, stationary, calendars, and catalogs.
  In the late 1900s, the main store at Mission and Sixteenth Streets was entirely rebuilt; it reopened in February 1910 with a soda fountain, one of the biggest in San Francisco at the time.
  Until the mid 1920s, the company bought their goods directly from E. R. Squibb & Sons, but the agreement ended following a bitter legal battle in 1926. Elizabeth Winston Todd began working as a secretary for the firm in April 1929. In January, the firm announced a merger with United Drug Stores (Drug, Inc), one of a plethora of companies to fall under its wing over the years. In November 1931, the sub-manager of The Owl Drug Company placed $11,000 in the company safe, only to find all of it missing the next morning. The case was never solved. The following year, Owl Drug Company filed for bankruptcy, an act which was described as a "sham, simply a device to defraud preferred stockholders and void burdensome leases".
  In October 1935, an employee of the company, Emma Bartholomai, suffered severe burns as the result of a fire which broke out in a false ceiling of a storeroom in the branch on Sixth and Broadway in Los Angeles; a worker of the Soule Steel Company had been welding in close proximity to the hazard. She took the company to court in 1940. The Bureau of Fire Investigation investigated the case and the court concluded in December 1940 that The Owl Drug Company had been negligent in permitting welding to have taken place, ruling: "The general rule is that persons in the lawful use of fire must exercise ordinary care to prevent it from injuring others".
  Baseball player Rugger Ardizoia worked for the firm in the late 1940s during off-seasons. Cecil W. Law was chairman of the company for over 40 years.
caption: Captain John Orderleys laxative from The Owl Drug Company
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