Nye’s Pharmacy sign, a Conway landmark, getting facelift

Skepticism crept over Tiffany Combs as she listened to the pitch.

A group of Conway businessmen wanted to take down the sign of her drugstore, Nye’s Pharmacy, and restore its luster.

The idea sounded nice, but Combs is protective of the landmark store, which has been a fixture on U.S. 501 since 1953. She grew up eating ice cream and grilled cheese sandwiches at Nye’s lunch counter. Her first job was working the grill there when she was 15 years old. Nye’s inspired her to go to pharmacy school, and six years ago she and her husband, Matt, bought the business.

“To me, it’s part of history,” she said. “There’s a lot of good memories for a lot of people.”

But the more Combs listened to the sign proposal, the more she liked it. She and her husband had wanted to spruce up the faded marker, which hadn’t been touched in more than 25 years, but other remodeling projects had taken priority. And no one was asking her family for anything other than permission to take down the sign to repaint and revive it.

So on Tuesday morning, a crane pulled into the front parking lot of the tiny box building, which still advertises “fountain service” and “tobaccos” across the top of its plate glass windows. A small crew of workers detached the sign, and the crane lowered it onto the back of a flatbed trailer.

“I’ve been here quite a few times, when I was younger,” said Jamie Melton of Melton Electric, which provided the crane and some of the labor. “It’s one of the oldest-looking signs around here, like a ‘50s, ‘60s-style sign, and I’ve always wanted to see it get redone.”

The idea for restoring the sign came from Jerry Stevens, who frequented the pharmacy growing up. As a preschooler, he remembers his parents telling him that if he behaved himself at the doctor’s office beside Nye’s, he could get ice cream there when the visit was over.

“That was the bribe to get you to go to the doctor,” he said.

When he was older, he rode his bike to the drugstore, parked it beneath an oak tree and went inside to read magazines in the windowsill. He remembers teenagers cruising the area around the pharmacy, occasionally throwing empty beer bottles on top of the roofs of nearby buildings.

“It’s just been here forever,” he said.

When Stevens moved back to the community in 2012, he resumed his trips to Nye’s. He liked the landscaping and the look of the building, but one thing bothered him.

“I walked out and said, ‘Look at that ugly sign.’”

Last fall, Stevens wrote a post about the Nye’s sign on a Facebook page called You’re Probably From Conway, SC if…. The blurb generated a strong response from other locals, including Dennis Stevens, president of the Conway Cultural Development Corp., a nonprofit dedicated to promoting arts and culture.

“This being an iconic piece of modernist architecture was something that really attracted me to it,” said Dennis Stevens, who is not related to Jerry Stevens.

He set up an online fundraising campaign to find money to restore the rusted sign. The effort generated more than $700, which was well short of the $6,000 Dennis Stevens thought they would need. However, the fundraiser caught the eye of business owners who began volunteering their services. Most of the work is being donated, meaning the price tag will be much lower than expected.

Mike Harrelson, the owner of Sign Pro, remembers getting a call from Melton asking if he’d be interested in joining the project.

“Of course I did,” Harrelson said. “I was born and raised here as well.”

He plans to disassemble the sign, add some aluminum, and repaint the red background and white letters.

Harrelson played baseball at the recreation department down the road and most games were followed by a trip to Nye’s for ice cream. Like the others involved, the work is personal.

“My dad’s been in the sign business for 30 years and I’ve been in it for about 16,” he said. “Every time I’d pass this sign since I was 10 years old, I said, ‘I want to redo that one day.’”

The group hopes the whole process will take about six to eight weeks.

As the crew packed up the sign Tuesday, Tiffany Combs took orders for turkey salad plates and ice cream. The smell of grilled hamburgers welcomed guests as they walked past the display of dolls, the rack of orange slices and peppermints, and the slick yellow counter top of the soda fountain.

Combs said her family has tried to improve the place, but not at the expense of the 1950s ambiance that is classic Nye’s.

The sign project, she said, fits that mold.

“It’s just great to just keep the nostalgia,” she said. “Just to keep it somewhat old school.”

This story was originally published January 12, 2016 at 7:36 PM with the headline "Nye’s Pharmacy sign, a Conway landmark, getting facelift."