The Owl Drug Company

The Owl Drug Company was an American drugstore retailer with its headquarters based in San Francisco. It was a subsidiary of Rexall stores at its peak in the 1920s through 1940s. The founder of the Owl Drug Company was Richard Elgin Miller, R.E. Miller. The company sold medicines and pills, and later ventured into cosmetics, perfumes, and other goods. The firm organized "Beauty Weeks", which included a range of fashion-related entertainment such as beauty contests judged by Elinor Glyn, in which winners received a Hollywood screen test.

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".

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