When I was growing up in the 60’s and 70’s almost every town big and small had at least one Rexall Drug Store. The bright orange and blue signs were hard to miss.

The small town where I spent most of my youth, Quincy, IL had 4 Rexall stores that I can remember. Three of them were known as Brown’s Rexall and the one in the big shopping center on the edge of town (that one day was made into and enclosed mall) was called Key Rexall.

Over the years we spent a lot of time at the Rexall refilling prescriptions, and buying the necessities like aspirin, shampoo and Rexall’s famous Hot Lemon Cold & Flu Remedy.

But my fondest Rexall memory, was the yearly visit from the Duncan Yo-Yo Demonstration Team. I rarely missed their visits to the Key Rexall, and still have a few of my Duncan Imperial and Butterfly yo-yo’s tucked away.

Sadly, due to a hostile corporate takeover most Rexall’s faded away in the mid 1980’s. And while many of the drugstores stayed open, they were no longer affiliated with Rexall, and it wasn’t quite the same.

These days as I travel throughout the south I’m amazed by the fact that you can still see a Rexall sign from time to time. Most of the drugstores are sadly long gone, but I’m thrilled that other people still share my fondness for those old Rexall signs.

Many of these signs lost their neon years ago, but I can tell that folks like me just aren’t ready to part with the memories of their hometown drugstore. I’ve compiled a short video to share some of the signs I’ve recently found in my travels across Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Indiana. Some are still lit, but sadly most are just holding on…

The soundtrack for this trip down memory lane is: “Water Droplets on the River” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/