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The tireless James Earl "Doc'' Webb opens Webb's City in 1925. By the'50s, his little drugstore becomes a 77-store complex.
By BETTY JEAN MILLER
© St. Petersburg Times, published June 25, 2000
ST. PETERSBURG -- If Pinellas County were to declare a "Doc Webb Week," this would be it. For a musical involving the late great entrepreneur opened Friday at Clearwater's Ruth Eckerd Hall, and will appear this weekend at St. Petersburg's Mahaffey Theater at Bayfront Center. If you lived here during the Webb's City years, you had to know about this dynamo of energy and ideas, this stupendous showman.
But perhaps you weren't here. Or perhaps you don't remember all of the hoopla.
Johnny Thornton and Bill McIntyre can tell you about it firsthand, for both were vice presidents and division managers during the height of it all.
The famed James Earl "Doc" Webb, owner of Webb's City, had such drive that he:
Got customer counts from each department by 3 p.m. daily, and immediately planned a promotion for those that showed diminishing returns.
Sent employees each day to Clearwater and Bradenton to buy the Clearwater Sun and the Bradenton Herald as soon as they came off the press and hustle back to Webb's in St. Petersburg. After he studied the advertisements in these newspapers, Webb would undercut the prices of everything offered in his next day's ads.
"We could actually make changes in our ads (in the St. Petersburg Times) until 5 p.m. The Times man would come every day," says Johnny Thornton, 87, who worked at Webb's City from 1949 until 1966.
"Wednesday was "chicken day.' We'd sell chickens, two to a bag for 17 cents to 19 cents a pound. Sometimes the lines would be a block long on that day. We'd even have chicken pot pie in the cafeteria and chicken salad at the fountainette."
Other promotions included "Topsy-turvy Day" when you might buy cigars at the meat counter and underwear in produce. Or "Dollar Day" when dollar bills would be sold for 99 cents.
"If Doc got an idea at 2 a.m., he was likely to call you," says Thornton, who began his tenure at Webb's as assistant produce manager. "He didn't sleep at night, and didn't come into the store until 1 or 2 in the afternoon. He had awfully good people working for him."
It paid off. The born showmanfrom Tennessee opened his little drugstore on the corner of Dr. M.L. King (Ninth) Street and Second Avenue S in 1925 and by the 1950s turned it into a 77-store complex covering 10 city blocks. It included a dry cleaners, women's ready-to-wear, a barber shop, a professional building, a penthouse with roof garden atop his "furniture city," (originally an icehouse to which Webb added several stories; it now contains a U-Haul business) and a nursery. And everyone knows about the talking mermaids, the dancing chicken, the baseball-playing duck and the kissing rabbit on the third floor where you could find a replica of "Doc's original drugstore."
"He even had his own post office, and you could cash checks there," Thornton says.
"I remember that Rudy Vallee came and stayed in the penthouse. He was a friend of Doc's."
Thornton cherishes a picture of Webb pouring punch for him (Thornton) at an employees' party at the penthouse. "This might be the only picture you'd ever see of him serving a cocktail," he says.
As for Thornton's part of the store, the supermarket, "It had three divisions, produce, grocery and meat. There were 19 cash registers at its peak. When I was assistant manager, I was in charge of cashiers, and there were about 50. They had to work two shifts, because we were open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day but Sunday."
If things were humming on chicken day, they were also wild when Doc would have a carload of pickling cucumbers, say, or canned peaches, or sugar to be sold for 10 cents per 5-lb. bag, and selling items at or below cost. "He would call all over the country to see who wanted to promote their merchandise," Thornton says.
When Thornton became vice president and division manager he and his wife, Georgia, could not go away for a weekend without lettinggeneral manager Fred Scott know his whereabouts in case Webb had an idea that needed him.
What does Thornton think was behind Doc Webb's drive?
"Well, he was a small man, and most small people have a lot of push behind them," he says, "and then, he loved that place."
If the circus atmosphere was fun and camaraderie great, the retirement benefits were not. "There was no such thing," Thornton says. "Doc tried to get some going, but we had so many older part-time employees along with the young ones that it was just not possible." The salaries were low, "but so were everybody's back then," and there were annual bonuses for top officials, plus a big Christmas party at the Coliseum for everybody.
"It was really interesting working there. Doc was a swell man, terrific to work for. You would go out of your way to do what he wanted done."
So what made it all come apart?
"When Central Plaza opened up, it (business) went down a little," Thornton said, "and then when Tyrone Mall opened it really went down. Then he opened a place in Pinellas Park and that never went anywhere. "I think if Jimmy (Doc's son) had taken an interest in it, it might have worked out. But I doubt it."
If there was a dynasty at Webb's City, it was not the Webb family but the Willis family. Attorney Bob Willis recalls that his dad, Harold Willis, his uncles Horace Willis, Carl Anderson and Bill McIntyre and cousin Jimmy Willis were all on Webb's board of directors at one time.
"I remember going to the Tampa produce market with Uncle Carl. That was my summer job in junior high," Bob Willis says.
Willis' uncle Bill McIntyre had had enough of winter weather in South Carolina when young and single, and vowed in 1940 he wouldcome to Florida before the next winter.
"I knew I could get a job at Webb's," he said. It was pretty much assured, because relatives Horace and Harold Willis and Carl Anderson were all working at the store, having been hired away from Cox Brothers Market catty-corner across King (Ninth) Street and Second Avenue.
Bill McIntyre has vivid memories of Doc Webb coming into the store in the afternoons and going up to the first floor balcony where he'd join his brother Bunie Webb, senior vice president in charge of public relations and watch the action in the store. Doc's office was right where he could view his domain.
When Johnny Thornton left Webb's to work for the state in 1966, McIntyre was given the job of supermarket division manager, and then director and vice president.
He remembers well that the crowds in the parking lots were playing havoc with the store's grocery carts, which were being smashed, and often were taken a mile or so from the store as customers wheeled their groceries home. He was able to convince Webb to set aside space in the parking lots for the carts, a hard-fought battle "because Doc didn't want to give up any parking spaces." It solved the former problem, but the "carting home of carts" dogged the store until its last days.
McIntyre's wife, Doris, knew something about crowds, too. She was hired in 1944 as Webb's first nurse. In her first aid station in aformer storeroom by the pharmacy on the first floor, she would typically get a call about someone getting faint, often in the cafeteria line on chicken pot pie day. "I'd have to go down and pass an ammonia stick under their nose," she says.
And what do the McIntyres believe was behind Webb's intensity and showmanship, his obsession with the store being the biggest and best?
"He was determined," she says, and he agrees. "And then he was a little man, and lots of times they have big egos."
Bill McIntyre was there for the waning years of the behemoth known as "The World's Most Unusual Drugstore," even staying on until the store was sold to Texas businessmen. He blames the store's demise both on competition from Tyrone Square Mall and on Webb's advancing age, and "maybe he was just worn down. But I know he practically gave it away, and the Texas people just bought it to sell the inventory and close it."
Of all the years and events he looks back on with chuckles and fondness, his most telling recollection is of the dynamic Doc Webb being shot out of a cannon.
"You remember those little traveling circuses he used to have set up in the parking lot? Well, one of them had a family that was shot out of a cannon. I was there the night Doc came out, all dressed and ready and I can still remember him being shot across the parking lot and landing in that net."
Now there was a showman.