Bill Slaughter and City Drug Store

Bill Slaughter and City Drug Store

A look at a pair of West Memphis mainstays

ATimes Staff Feature W. F. “Bill” Slaughter was around 14 years old when he started hanging out at City Drug Store in West Memphis sweeping floors.

The store at that time was owned by Jim Luttrell. In 1957 when he was 17 years old, Bill went to pharmacy school and has owned City Drug Store now for many years. The store was then located at South 12th Street and Broadway. Bill would help me get across Broadway (I lived on north 12th) when I was a child so I could go the drugstore.

“You didn’t wait on me to help you and were scared and out in the street,” says Bill. He also loves to say to people when I visit the store, “I should have left her on the street.” Bill really is a kindhearted man and would never have left a little girl on the street, I hope.

Bill Slaughter is a better doctor than most doctors because he has to know more about the medicines and their interactions. He has helped guide ‘sick folks’ to the right medicine or doctor many times. Also over the years people have brought ‘foreign objects’ that have come out of themselves or their children for identification. Bill would hold the jar up and proclaim, “I think it’s a worm,” or whatever he deemed it to be.

What people probably don’t know about Bill is that he trained and showed horses. Bill’s favorites were racking horses.

“When they started burning the walking horses feet, we helped start the racking horse association.” Racking horses are naturally fast gaited horses. Bill rode in the Arkansas State Show in men’s gaited pleasure two separate years and won the class both times. Bill also shod his own horses and some for other people. His good friend Lem Couch helped to forward Bill’s shoeing efforts. Lem was the owner and teacher of a farrier school at Briarwood Saddle Club and later moved it to Mississippi.

Bill also learned a lot from the ‘wizard,’ an older gentleman who also was a farrier. If a horse had a problem with the way he

Flood

traveled, Bill would do all he could to figure out the problem and find the right angle to use on his feet to correct the problem.

Bill is a family orientated man and the father of three children and two stepchildren. And now seven grandchildren, not counting the numerous other kids (not his own) that have always hung out with him at the barn or at his house or worked for him in the store. You never knew which one was his. He is married to Kitty, who also helps at the drug store, and they live outside West Memphis in a house that Bill mostly built himself.

Almost everyone in West Memphis and Marion knows Bill and has asked his advice at one time or another. He can tell you how to cure the common cold and doctor your horse. His advice is usually on the money.

City Drug that is now located on Broadway and 17th Street. It moved in 1970 to that location but then burned in 1981. “I lost all my pictures of my kids baseball and football games and videos of the horses and horse shows.” Bill built the store back and still works there today. He has no plans for retirement and says he’ll probably ‘die behind the counter with his unlit cigar in his mouth or be found dead in his barn.’ When asked what he wanted people to do for him, he just said, ‘pray for me.’

By Joy Hall