What it’s actually like
Ask someone who grew up in Scottsdale in the 1950s about the drugstore and they will not talk about the prescriptions. They will talk about the fountain, and about pie. Lute’s Pharmacy was the drugstore that Lute Wasbotten, a pharmacist born in Milwaukee, opened on the west side of Scottsdale Road in 1948, the year he moved his family to a farm town that was about to become something else, and for the postwar generation it was one of the places downtown that a childhood was made of. The soda fountain served the standard sundaes and sodas, and it served Ora’s pies and blueberry muffins, which is the detail every account preserves.
The pattern was the classic American one: an independent pharmacist, a counter along one wall, a druggist who was also a civic leader in a town small enough that the man who filled your prescription might also be helping decide what the town would become. Scottsdale in 1948 had a few thousand people, a main street that was Scottsdale Road, and no idea yet that it would incorporate, call itself the West’s Most Western Town and fill with galleries and resorts within a decade. Lute’s opened at the start of that story and served through the 1950s as the town changed around it.
It is long gone. The closing date is not documented, and the record does not say what became of the building; the honest summary is that it belongs to the postwar decades and was gone by the end of the century, like most independent drugstores with fountains everywhere in America. Its rival and its survivor is the Sugar Bowl, which opened up the road in 1958 and is still serving.
What it sold
Prescriptions and the drugstore shelf: patent medicines, toiletries, film, greeting cards, magazines, the small necessities of a town without a department store. And the fountain: fountain sodas, ice cream, sandwiches, coffee, and Ora’s baking, which turned a drugstore into a gathering place and is the reason anyone still says the name.
Where it stood and what’s there now
Somewhere on the west side of Scottsdale Road in what is now Old Town, when Scottsdale Road was a small town’s main street rather than a six-lane arterial. The exact building is not documented here and nothing on the street marks it; the blocks between Indian School Road and Main Street have been rebuilt more than once since. The Old Town on foot note covers the stretch, and the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard is the place to leave the car.
What is there now is the modern downtown, and, at Scottsdale Road and First Avenue, the pink storefront of the Sugar Bowl, open since 1958. A block south, the corner of Scottsdale Road and Main Street was Earl’s Market until 1959 and Woolworth’s, with its own fountain, from 1959 to 1965; for a few years downtown Scottsdale had three counters within a couple of blocks.
The successors worth a visit
The Sugar Bowl is the whole answer for the fountain: same era, same road, still pink, still making the sundaes. For the rest of the postwar downtown, Los Olivos on Second Street has fed the town since 1947 and the Pink Pony, the Scottsdale Road steakhouse that opened the same year and closed in 2016, was where the fountain crowd went once they were old enough. Lulu Belle, the Main Street saloon that opened in 1953, belongs to the same lost downtown. And for the other lost Scottsdale drugstore story, Hi-Health, the vitamin chain founded here in 1972 and gone in 2020, shows how the town’s independent pharmacy tradition ended a second time.
How it got here
The 1940s brought Scottsdale its first real wave of newcomers. The wartime airfields, the postwar arrivals of artists and health-seekers and the growing resort trade turned a farm village of a few hundred into a town of a few thousand, and a town of that size needed the things towns need: a bank, a school that was more than one room, and a proper drugstore. Lute Wasbotten supplied the last. Born in Milwaukee, a pharmacist by training, he moved his family to Scottsdale in 1948 and opened a drugstore on the west side of Scottsdale Road, the town’s main street, with a soda fountain along the counter in the manner of every Main Street pharmacy in America.
The decade that followed made the town. Scottsdale incorporated in 1951, chose a Western theme for its downtown, laid out Fifth Avenue for shops and watched its population multiply, and Wasbotten, the druggist, became one of the civic leaders who steered it. That was how small-town pharmacists worked: the store was a public place, everyone passed through it, and the man behind the prescription counter knew the town’s business better than most. Meanwhile the fountain did what fountains did. Ora’s pies and blueberry muffins became a Scottsdale memory, the kind of thing people mention sixty years later when a place they knew as children comes up.
By the late 1950s the fountain had competition. The Sugar Bowl opened on Scottsdale Road in 1958, all pink and ice cream, and Woolworth’s arrived at the corner of Main Street in 1959 with the chain’s standard counter. Then the 1960s turned downtown from a farm-town main street into an arts and tourist district, the chain drugstores followed the supermarkets to the new centers, and the independent pharmacy with a fountain became a vanishing kind of American business.
Lute’s went with it at some point the record does not fix. It belongs to the postwar decades of Scottsdale, and by the end of the century it was gone, remembered by the people who ate there and by almost nothing else. The Sugar Bowl, by outlasting it, inherited the role; the pie is the part of Lute’s that no successor can supply.