Why this historic Placer County ice cream parlor is inside an Ace hardware store

It opened in 2024 at the former site of Main Drug, which had been on that corner for 63 years.

Published on September 8, 2026

by Cassidy Myers-Sims

Customers at Doc & Rose Ice Cream Bar inside Loomis Ace Backyard on Aug. 26, 2026.

Tyler Bastine

The Abridged version:

Doc & Rose Ice Cream Bar opened in 2024 inside an Ace hardware store at the corner of Taylor Road and Walnut Street in Loomis.
It’s a tribute to Doc Takemoto and Rose Dairiki, who ran Main Drug in that space for decades after returning from World War II internment camps.
Doc & Rose serves Gunther’s Ice Cream, with sizes named after Takemoto and Dairiki’s children, along with non-dairy fruit freezes.

The red-and-white building at the corner of Taylor Road and Walnut Street in Loomis has sold its fair share of prescriptions, egg salad sandwiches, barbecue grills and Gunther’s Ice Cream scoops.

For 63 years — from 1955 to 2018 — it was Main Drug, a pharmacy with a soda fountain in the back that became a fixture of the Placer County community. After sitting vacant for a few years, it reopened in 2021 as Loomis Ace Backyard — and picked up right where its predecessor left off.

The same soda fountain still anchors the historic space. Ditto for that signature community-centric feel. And so, in its own way, does the name behind the scoops: Doc & Rose Ice Cream Bar.

If you wandered into the hardware store looking for backyard appliances or grilling accessories, you’d probably be very confused to discover an ice cream counter tucked in the back, sandwiched between a wall full of colorful Yeti coolers and an impressive display of barbecue seasoning blends.

Locals don’t seem to mind the mash-up. Or that it attracts visitors from around the Sacramento area. On a recent Friday afternoon, the counter was nearly at capacity, filled with regulars, as well as a family from Roseville who’d made the drive to get a scoop at the historic counter.

It does not take long to get the sense that this town runs on something closer to family than commerce. It’s the kind of place where regulars greet the staff by name before they have even reached the counter.

“Loomis is like our very own version of Mayberry,” said Sandy Richards, operations manager at Loomis Ace Backyard.

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Sacramento-area residents sent to internment camps

For the uninitiated, everything about Doc and Rose’s Ice Cream Bar — from its name to its menu — is a tribute hiding in plain sight. Order a single scoop and you’re getting the “Irene.” A double is the “Jean.” A triple, the “Gordy.” What seems like namesakes for the storied counter’s most loyal customers is actually a family tree. The ice cream bar itself, a memorial disguised as a hardware store menu board.

The scoops are named after the three children of Hiroshi “Doc” Takemoto and Tsugie “Rose” Dairiki, a couple whose own story took root in Loomis long before anyone was scooping ice cream in their honor. Much of that story survives today thanks to Standing Guard, an oral history project out of Sierra College that spent years documenting the World War II incarceration experience of Placer County’s Japanese American community.

They were born in Northern California (he in Sacramento, she in Penryn), got married in 1940 and had their first child, Jean, in 1941. Then Pearl Harbor was attacked. And by the spring of 1942, Doc and Rose were told they had one week to pack their entire life into a suitcase.

Executive Order 9066. It’s the one responsible for the roundup and internment of roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants across the United States following the attack on Pearl Harbor. In Placer County alone, an estimated 1,800 Japanese Americans and resident Japanese immigrants were forced from their homes — including Doc, Rose and baby Jean, who were first sent to Tule Lake Relocation Center in Northern California, then to Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas, where Gordon (the “Gordy” triple scoop namesake) was born in 1944.

The family endured two more stops: Jerome Relocation Center in Arkansas, then Amache Relocation Center in Colorado. In total, the Takemotos were interned in four camps across three states spanning three years before returning to Placer County in 1945, where they opened Main Drug and took the first steps toward rebuilding their lives.

A second act for a longtime Loomis treasure

That rebuilding looked like a storefront in Loomis, then a tight-knit agricultural hub known for its fruit packing and shipping. In 1945, Doc and Rose opened the first Main Drug location at the corner of Pine Street and old Highway 40, where Doc, a licensed pharmacist, filled prescriptions while Rose ran the soda fountain, serving root beer floats and her famous egg salad sandwiches.

“It was just like a local hangout,” Richards said.

Main Drug stayed there until 1955, when it moved down the street to the corner of Taylor Road and Walnut Street. It would remain there for the next 63 years — eventually passed down to Gordy, a second-generation pharmacist following in his father’s footsteps — until finally closing its doors in 2018.

Even as the historic space sat vacant for a few years, Gordy knew it deserved a second act. He kept encouraging Greg Brening, whose Loomis Ace Hardware shop sat right across the street, to expand and take over the old Main Drug storefront.

Gordy got his wish in 2021, when Loomis Ace Backyard officially moved in. Among the aisles of grills, coolers, dry rubs and outdoor entertaining essentials, the old soda fountain sat quietly at the back of the shop, a reminder of the history and family story contained within the store’s walls.

Preserving the soda fountain’s fixtures upon moving in was a deliberate choice for Brening and his team. “We didn’t want to, obviously, take it down, because it’s historical,” Richards said.

They looked into reopening it as a full soda fountain, but the building’s early-1900s bones meant a costly sewer overhaul just to get up to code. So they scaled back the ambition a bit in order to let the counter (and the ice cream) shine on its own without added bells and whistles.

They brought in flavors such as birthday cake, lemon custard and mint chocolate chip along with fruit freezes from Sacramento’s legendary Gunther’s Ice Cream, and kept the original counter and seats intact. The new space opened in 2024 as Doc & Rose Ice Cream Bar, in honor of the couple who first put a soda fountain in that exact spot.

Gordy, Jean and Irene still live in the area, and Gordy still owns the building his parents made famous — along with the one next door. “He still has paperwork upstairs for the pharmacy,” Richards said, “and they come in every once in a while and purge things, and they’ll come over here and hang out at the bar and just visit.”

Drop by for a scoop and you might find one of them at the counter, or heading upstairs for a quick meeting. “They’re absolutely still a fixture of the community,” Richards said. From the names on the menu board to the weight “Takemoto” still carries around Loomis, family has always been the through line.

The red-and-white building has new tenants now, and the business occupying it has a new name. But eight decades later, people are still lining up at that same counter for a scoop named after the family that built it. And some afternoons, if you’re lucky, you might even be sitting at the counter right next to them.