In South Dakota: Buffalo Burgers at Wall Drug

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Travelers pulling off I-90 at the Wall exit (the one with the 80-ft. dinosaur next to the Highway) thread through station wagons and campers jamming Main Street. Once inside Wall Drug, road-weary visitors are faced with a bewildering pastiche of class and kitsch. The store sells $200 Tony Lama boots—as well as $2.19 models of Mount Rushmore and corncob toilet paper for $1.19. Left-handed calf ropers can buy lariats twisted especially for southpaws. The Rock Hound Shop offers fossils and crystals. Campers buy heavy iron skillets, lightweight canteens and water-purifying tablets; ranchers buy lousefly killer, sheep-branding liquid and cow vaccine. God knows who buys hundreds upon hundreds of Wall Drug gimcracks, from spoon holders to ashtrays. "People want a little something they can take back to Grandma," says Bill Hustead, 54, Ted's son. A Madison, Wis., woman on her way to Wyoming is agape, like most newcomers: "This blows me away. Who'd think there would be something like this, ten miles from a herd of bison?"

Customers usually gravitate past the wooden Annie Oakley on the bench, the walls laden with Western and Hustead-family memorabilia, to one of the four scattered rooms of the café (seating for 550; breakfast starts at 6 a.m.). The special is a hot beef sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy ($2.98), but the menu also offers more exotic fare: a buffalo burger—yep, ground bison—for $1.55 and a selection of California wines. This last was Bill Hustead's idea: "I thought it would give the place a little class. I thought people chewing on a fishwich or a buffalo burger might get a kick out of having a nice wine at the table."

Bill, an affable but serious businessman, says this with a smile and a slight West River twang. He brims with pride over his family's $4.5 million enterprise.

"What is more beautiful, really, than a business?" he asks rhetorically. A registered pharmacist, he runs the operation now, although Ted, officially retired for a couple of years, still puts in several hours a day during the busy summer season. Bill's son Rick, 31, a former high school guidance counselor in Iroquois, S. Dak., who returned to Wall in March, may some day take over the reins.

Bill Hustead likes to point out that customers return, not just the big-spending families from the cities but also the four locals over at the corner table, all elderly ranchers wearing string ties and straw hats, who have been sipping nickel coffee and talking weather all afternoon. Despite its chintzy tourist baubles, Wall Drug has a homeliness that makes customers spend with a smile. Perhaps a young Connecticut man, heading west with his new bride (but passing up the FREE COFFEE AND DONUTS TO HONEYMOONERS), puts it best: "They don't try to make a lot of money off a few people, just a little money off a lot of people." —By Jay Branegan