For more than 120 years, there was a place just off the traffic circle in Orange, California, where you could pick up a prescription, order a hamburger, sit down for a chocolate malt, and probably find out what was happening around town.
It was Watson Drugs and Soda Fountain.
Watson’s was one of those businesses that eventually became more than a business. Generations of people grew up with it. Teenagers met there. Families ate there. Old friends returned there. Town news and gossip passed across the counter along with ice cream sodas and plates of food.
And for much of its history, Watson’s looked like the kind of place Hollywood tried to recreate when it wanted to show small-town America.
The difference was that Watson’s was real.
It Started as a Drugstore
The story goes back to the nineteenth century.
A drugstore had operated in Orange since 1875, but in 1899, pharmacist Kellar Watson took over. On August 28 of that year—his 29th birthday—Watson opened his pharmacy under his own name.
Orange was still a small agricultural community surrounded by citrus groves.
Watson’s occupied an especially useful place in town life. For a time, it was Orange’s only drugstore. The post office was nearby, so people regularly passed through to collect their mail, and the drugstore naturally became one of the places where residents met.
Then came the addition that would define Watson’s for generations.
The Soda Fountain
In 1915, Watson’s added a soda fountain.
At the time, soda fountains were commonly associated with pharmacies. Before bottled and canned soft drinks became commonplace, the neighborhood drugstore was one of the places where people went for carbonated drinks, flavored phosphates, ice cream sodas, sundaes and other treats.
Watson’s became particularly well known for them.
Over the years, the fountain expanded into a lunch counter and café. Customers could sit on stools along the counter and order sandwiches, hamburgers, breakfast, shakes and malts.
The combination worked remarkably well.
People might initially enter for medicine or household goods, but the soda fountain gave them a reason to stay.
Eventually, it became hard to separate Watson’s pharmacy from Watson’s gathering place.
Where Orange Met Orange
By the mid-twentieth century, Watson’s had become woven into everyday life in Orange.
This was before shopping centers and interstate highways pulled so much commercial life away from traditional downtowns. A place such as Watson’s could function almost like an informal community center.
Students stopped there after school.
Businessmen met over coffee.
Families came in for meals.
Older residents returned day after day and sometimes occupied the same seats for years.
Local historian Phil Brigandi once described Watson’s as part of a daily-life pattern in which people naturally crossed paths downtown. Longtime customers remembered it as a place to discuss local matters and where much of the town seemed to pass through sooner or later.
That is probably the most interesting part of Watson’s history.
It survived because people did not think of it merely as someplace to buy something.
It was someplace to go.
Watson Drugs and Soda Fountain
The Look of an Earlier America
Watson’s became increasingly unusual over the decades.
Drugstores changed.
Independent pharmacies disappeared.
Lunch counters vanished.
Downtown stores moved to shopping centers.
Fast-food restaurants replaced many of the places where people once lingered over a milkshake or cup of coffee.
Watson’s remained.
Its interior accumulated the visual evidence of its long life—old Coca-Cola advertising, pharmacy fixtures, signs, booths, counter stools, photographs and a jukebox.
By the late twentieth century, it looked nostalgic without originally having been designed to be nostalgic.
It had simply survived long enough for ordinary objects to become artifacts.
The effect can be seen beautifully in a 2012 photograph by Carol M. Highsmith preserved by the Library of Congress. The image shows the long counter, booths, period advertising, and an illuminated jukebox dominating the foreground.
It looks almost like a carefully constructed movie set.
Which is appropriate, because Hollywood noticed Watson’s too.
Hollywood Comes to Watson’s
The store’s remarkably preserved appearance made it an obvious filming location.
Its best-known movie appearance came in the 1996 Tom Hanks film That Thing You Do!, set in the early 1960s.
Watson’s needed relatively little help looking the part.
It was also used during production of the 2006 comedy The Benchwarmers, and various commercials and television productions were filmed there over the years.
Watson’s had accomplished accidentally what production designers spend enormous amounts of money trying to accomplish deliberately.
It had preserved the visual language of the American neighborhood drugstore.
A Family Business for Generations
Kellar Watson Sr. established the Watson name in 1899, and his son Kellar Watson Jr. eventually followed him into the business.
The Watson family era ended when Kellar Jr. retired in 1965.
In 1971, pharmacist Scott Parker purchased Watson’s.
At one point Parker considered removing the old soda fountain. Fortunately, he didn’t.
His son Steve later became deeply involved in operating the business, and Watson’s continued through a period when similar establishments across America were disappearing rapidly.
By 1999, Watson’s celebrated its 100th anniversary.
Few businesses get that opportunity.
Fewer still reach that age while retaining such a recognizable connection to what they had once been.
Trying to Carry the Past Forward
In 2015, Bill and Laurie Skeffington acquired Watson’s and undertook a substantial renovation.
Their goal was not simply to recreate a 1950s diner. Instead, they looked further back, drawing inspiration from photographs of Watson’s from the 1920s and 1930s.
They preserved original features where possible, including old flooring and terrazzo tile. Vintage soda-fountain equipment was restored, and the owners brought historic-looking details back into the room.
Watson’s continued serving the foods people expected—breakfasts, burgers, malts, sundaes and shakes—while adding newer offerings intended to make the business viable in a much different restaurant market.
It was an attempt to solve the problem faced by every historic business:
How much can you change and still remain what people remember?
The End Came in 2022
Watson’s had survived two world wars, the Great Depression, suburbanization, shopping malls, fast-food chains, and more than a century of changes in Orange County.
But it did not survive forever.
In July 2022, it was announced that Watson’s Soda Fountain & Cafe would close.
The final days brought exactly the sort of response one would expect after 123 years.
People did not simply talk about losing a restaurant.
They talked about childhood.
Parents.
Grandparents.
First dates.
Ice cream sodas.
Meals after school.
The booth where somebody always sat.
The counter where somebody’s father had taken them decades earlier.
That distinction matters.
Restaurants close every day.
Very few take pieces of a community’s collective memory with them.
More Than a Soda Fountain
People tend to look at places like Watson’s and reduce them to nostalgia—the chrome, the jukebox, the stools, and the milkshakes.
But Watson’s represented something larger.
For much of American history, communities had informal gathering places that required no appointment and little planning. Drugstores, diners, hardware stores, barber shops, and small groceries gave people chances to encounter one another as part of everyday life.
Watson’s was one of those places.
You might have gone there for aspirin.
You might have gone for lunch.
You might have gone for a chocolate malt.
But while you were there, you saw your neighbors.
That was the part no menu could list, and no renovation could manufacture.
Watson Drugs and Soda Fountain lasted from 1899 until 2022.
The remarkable thing isn’t simply that a business survived for 123 years.
For much of those 123 years, generations of people kept walking through the same door because Watson’s became part of what it meant to live in Orange.
Sometimes history isn’t a courthouse, battlefield or monument.
Sometimes it is a stool at a soda fountain.
