Now, Doctor could get right in behind that line of reasoning. Here was a man, like Brinkley, who had had to overcome great obstacles and face down countless small-minded persecutors. And when Long was shot dead in 1936 in the marbled lobby of the grand Louisiana statehouse he built, Doctor must have been ever more confirmed in the wisdom of having commissioned a bulletproof vest, and in his decision to keep Pinkerton guards on the payroll at upward of two thousand dollars a month—for protection and other, more creative services. No, men whose rise engendered so much jealous rage among the ruling class—a class of people Brinkley likened to the Philistines—could not be too careful.
The rise of John Romulus Brinkley from dirt-poor farm boy to the lofty heights of professional attainment was almost too fantastic to be believed and would likely have been impossible, except that Doctor’s path to fame and fortune was mercifully free from the bothersome snags of human conscience. In 1918 Brinkley was a country doctor living in Milford, Kansas, and it was beginning to look like the $150 and the six weeks of grueling study under the watchful but untrained eyes of the faculty of Kansas City’s Eclectic School of Medicine was not such a great investment after all. Even with the medical degree from that storied institution, a passable understanding of human anatomy, and an impressive facility for tossing Latin terms into casual conversation, the thirty-two-year-old Dr. Brinkley was foundering. Until, as he always told the story, a local farmer came in to see him about having lost “the pep” in his marriage. Together, the two men cooked up the idea of grafting goat glands onto the farmer’s own testicles. A year later, the farmer’s wife delivered a healthy baby boy, whom the couple christened “Billy.”
At first, the medical success was a local phenomenon, with nearby farmers quietly looking for the “kick” the Brinkley operation promised. But Doctor had big eyes even then. He trotted out young Billy in a publicity campaign and caught the eye of Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler, himself in need of a little tune-up. In 1923 Chandler invited Brinkley to California and was so thrilled with his post-op revivification that he began suggesting the surgery to his prominent friends. When Doctor left California (with the state medical board fast on his heels), he took with him forty thousand dollars in fees and an idea that would prove even more profitable. While Brinkley was in Los Angeles, Chandler had shown him around his new radio station, and the Kansan decided that this radio business was another ripe idea.
Back home in Milford, Doctor erected a sturdy brick studio on the grounds of his hospital, and next to that studio a one-hundred-foot-high steel antenna. In September of 1923, after receiving a broadcast license from the Federal Radio Commission, Dr. Brinkley’s KFKB (“Kansas First, Kansas Best”) went on the air. With a ready mike just a few short steps from his office, Doctor could tout his newly christened Kansas General Research Hospital, with its splendid operating theater; its seven-thousand-dollar, electrically operated, high pressure–steam sterilizing machine; and its highly advanced Victor X-ray equipment, whose cleverly designed “Bucky Diaphragm” eliminated shadows from the photographs. But much of the programming was Doctor’s frank talks about the ravaging physical and psychological consequences of male impotence: “Observe the rooster and the capon. The rooster will fight and work for his flock. He stands guard over them, protects them, but the capon eats the food the hens scratch up. He will even set on their eggs.”
The radio-doctor business was a cinch, and Brinkley was soon fetching patients from all over Kansas—Lenexa, Cherryvale, Wakeeny, Parsons. Grant Eden, of Osawatamie, took a week off from his caretaker duties at the John Brown State Park to get fixed up. Pretty soon it wasn’t just Kansans. Men were coming from as far away as Cherokee, Oklahoma; Columbus, Nebraska; Corsicana, Texas; Denver, Colorado. They’d arrive on the Union Pacific spur line from Junction City, met by the Brinkley hospital bus—“the machine”—which sped them to the front door of the hospital. There they were met by Doctor’s wife, Minnie, who would say in a reassuring voice, “Here come my men.” Besides acting as official greeter, Minnie was also a handy assistant in the operating room, where she worked as anesthetist, side by side with recent Eclectic graduates Brinkley had hired to keep up with the stream of patients his radio program produced.
Behind the hospital was a pen full of four- to six-week-old goats, for each week Doctor received a new shipment of Toggenburgs from a goat and bee man down in Gilbert, Arkansas. Doctor preferred Toggenburg glands because his early experiments with those of Angoras had left a couple of men with an odor that gave pause to even the most ardent and intrepid lady friends. If a Brinkley patient so desired, he could go out back and pick his match from the herd. Occasionally a patient alighted from the train in Junction City, cradling his own goat in his arms. No matter, the cost was the same: $750 per operation. Payable in advance. Doctor did not suffer deadbeats. He was a man of the people, after all, and he wasn’t going to let his other patients incur the costs of those who skipped out on a bill.
As performed by Brinkley and his staff, the operation was breathtakingly simple. It could be done under local anesthesia, in just fifteen minutes. “I took and cut a hole in the man’s testicle,” Doctor once explained, “and took a chunk out and filled the hole up in the testicle with the goat gland.” Despite specific promises in the hospital’s literature, Doctor and his doctors didn’t waste time connecting arteries and nerves. But how hearts must have leapt when patients were wheeled into the operating forum and saw the agents of their rejuvenation, the tiny dried pellets resting on beds of soft cotton on a gleaming stainless steel tray. For seventy-seven-year-old Nebraskan A. B. Pierce, the surgery was something of a mystery, but he claimed results nonetheless. “I suppose a goat gland is a good deal like a potato,” Pierce once said. “You can cut a potato all in pieces and plant it and every eye will grow. I suppose it’s the same with goat glands. Just so you get a little piece in you, it will give you a kick, all right.”
Doctor was constantly wowed by the results; he was sure he was making real scientific breakthroughs in that knotty thicket of medicine, urology, and most especially in the treatment of the male prostate, that “troublesome cuckle-burr . . . that robber gland,” he called it. “I began to take out half to an inch of the vas deferens,” he wrote. “It seems to me the more of the vas I removed, the better results I obtained so later I resected the vas to the globus minor to the epididymis and ligated there with linen. Also injected the vas with 5 to 10 cc of a 2-percent mercurochrome solution, lavaging the vesicle.” After the “compound operation,” proper hormone balance was restored, Brinkley said, and the patient was the immediate recipient of any number of unexpected side benefits. Reports of unforeseen benefits always increased at prize time, as when Doctor offered a free Oldsmobile for the post-op patient who wrote the most stirring essay completing this thought: “I consider Dr. Brinkley the world’s foremost prostate specialist because. . . .” Brinkley patients claimed the fifteen-minute surgery had cured them of back pain, chest pain, hydrocele, diabetes, Bright’s disease, and varicose veins. Doctor also claimed he had successfully treated dementia praecox. “My second case of insanity was a young bank clerk brought to me from a State Institution,” he wrote in one paper. “Following gland transplantation, his mind cleared completely and he is now head of a large banking institution.”
With KFKB (the “Sunshine Station in the Heart of the Nation”) running full steam fifteen and a half hours a day, news of these myriad successes didn’t have to be hidden away from the people, limited to the stuffy journals of medicine. With a microphone right at the hospital, Doctor Brinkley could sandwich his talks in between Bob Larkan and His Music Makers, agricultural commodities price reports, French-language instruction, the Shut-In Program for Invalids, and Roy Faulkner “the Lonesome Cowboy.” He’d spend an entire half hour reading letters from his reinvigorated patients. Not only could Brinkley trumpet the great—and always greater—benefits of his gland operation, he could also give fair warning to the consequences of delayin
g treatment: “Many untimely graves have been filled with people who put off until tomorrow what they should have done today.”
Doctor plied the airwaves with the honey-voiced concern of a healer and the canny nerve of an entrepreneur. In 1928 he instituted the fabulously popular half-hour segment Medical Question Box. Listeners would write Doctor, detailing their various and vague ailments, and Doctor would answer with stunningly specific instructions, to wit: “Here’s one from Tillie. . . . My advice to you is to use Women’s Tonic Number Fifty, Sixty-seven, and Sixty-one. This combination will do for you what you desire if any combination will, after three months’ persistent use.” And it wasn’t only Tillie but other women listening in who, by gosh, were suffering the same symptoms. They’d need the same tonics, which could be purchased at the nearest druggist’s carrying Brinkley medicine, which was shipped to the pharmacy directly from Milford. For drugstore owners in reach of the Sunshine Station, a quandary ensued: Doctor’s pricey medicines were little more than castor oil or diluted syrup of pepsin, bottled, corked, colored, and numbered. But Brinkley traffic meant as much as a hundred dollars a day in new drug business, and few businessmen were willing to forgo the markup on that much product.
So by 1930 Brinkley was more successful than ever, his hospital bigger, his Milford Goats baseball team more stylishly uniformed, his bank accounts bulging. He’d bought his first airplane, his first limousine, his first yacht. He’d even managed to trump his Eclectic degree with a writ of diploma from Italy’s Royal University of Pavia; he received the sheepskin after a lavish banquet in honor of the faculty. Doctor paid for the entire affair—the consommé frappé à l’Imperatrice, the Vol au Vent à la Toulousaine, Flaus de legumes à la Financière, the Glacé à la Napolitaine, the bottles of silky Italian Bardolinos and Barolos, the Piper Heidsiek champagne. He also paid a handsome fee to a local chamber orchestra, which augmented these gustatory delights with the soft strains of Mendelssohn, Puccini, and Irving Berlin. And all this was as pennies compared to the generous donation Doctor visited upon the Royal University’s College of Medicine.
But 1930 is also when Brinkley started to draw real fire, on multiple fronts. The Federal Radio Commission began an investigation into just how exactly KFKB served the “public interest,” angling hard to rescind the station’s broadcast privileges. The Kansas City Star ran an investigative series on Doctor Brinkley’s background, education, moral fitness, and surgical methods. The Star reporter found him wanting on all counts. The American Medical Association’s Journal of American Medicine began a campaign against Doctor’s “blatant quackery,” and in April of 1930, the Kansas Medical Society made an impassioned plea to the State Board of Medical Registration and Examination to revoke Brinkley’s license to practice.
At the medical board hearing that July, Dr. Brinkley produced a parade of satisfied customers so long that the presiding judge called a halt to oral testimony, finally agreeing to receive into the record written statements from five hundred other healthy affiants. Unfortunately, by then, Doctor Brinkley’s character and reputation had been badly wounded. Leading urologists in the field testified that the operation Brinkley performed was, at best, worthless. “Where Brinkley said he borrowed a nerve and hitched into the new gland to give it kick, [Kansas University School of Medicine professor] Dr. [T. G.] Orr said that was absolutely impossible because the nerve he described was not there at all,” reported the Star, “and even if it was it could not be diverted to that use.” Brinkley’s defense was not much helped by his own expert witness, a former Eclectic instructor who had no formal medical training, signed his own diploma, and touted a cancer remedy that turned out to be a concoction of alcohol, sugar, glycerine, licorice, burdock root, senna, and water. A slew of anti-Brinkley witnesses told grisly tales of being sent home with nasty open scrotal or abdominal incisions, which led to painful, oozing local infections, and sometimes to blood poisoning. One decidedly unsatisfied customer testified that a Brinkley doctor instructed him to affix a rubber boot heel to the festering incision to act as a drain. This was all damaging enough, but the evidentiary capper was a stack of death certificates numbering forty-two. Each of the departed men had expired as a direct result of their short stay at Brinkley’s hospital, though Doctor pointed out in his own defense that it wasn’t the surgery that killed these men but infection. That September, the medical board revoked Brinkley’s license to practice in the state of Kansas, finding Doctor guilty of “gross immorality and unprofessional conduct.”
A man of less sturdy constitution might have folded up his tents and left the state altogether. Brinkley decided to run for governor. Just seven weeks before the 1930 election, he threw his hat in the ring. Candidate J. R. Brinkley took to the airwaves daily, promising free textbooks, free medical clinics, a lake in every county, a tax cut, and, for the poor Kansas dirt farmers, increased rainfall. Flying his private airplane from campaign stop to campaign stop, Doctor offered political succor to the forgotten rural masses. Through the beginning of October, political pros in both major parties ignored Brinkley’s “sideshow.” The political neophyte had entered after the ballots were already printed, so he’d be a write-in candidate, they pointed out. Maybe he’d poll thirty thousand, not bad for a man without an organization.
But Brinkley didn’t need organization; he had radio. He was on it six or seven hours a day, playing to the sympathy of all those forgotten people who didn’t think much of big-city newspapers such as the Kansas City Star and “that Topeka crowd.” Among his supporters, Brinkley’s best-loved campaign slogan was “Let’s pasture the goats on the statehouse lawn.” As November neared, party pros began to take notice of the profusion of Brinkley bumper stickers, of the thousands of pencils inscribed with “J. R. Brinkley,” of the question most heard on Main Street: “Votin’ for Brinkley?” The election pros revised their predictions for the Brinkley vote up to seventy-five thousand but said it was still no threat.
Just days before the election, Brinkley’s plane appeared in the sky over a Wichita wheat field, circling the biggest crowd ever assembled for a Kansas political rally. Once on the ground, Brinkley told the gathering he wasn’t there for politicking at all. It was Sunday, and he told the Easter story instead, reminding them of this: “The men in power wanted to do away with Jesus before the common people woke up,” Brinkley said. “Are you awake?” On election day, Democratic candidate Harry Woodring polled 217,171 to squeak by Republican Frank Haucke by 257 votes. Best estimates are that John Romulus Brinkley got about 230,000 votes, but with so many write-ins disqualified for improper spellings, his officially recorded total was 183,278. By the power of write-ins, Brinkley had also carried three counties in Oklahoma, proving what Doctor knew better than anybody: Radio knows no borders.
Just three months later, KFKB signed off the air for good, stripped of its license by the Federal Radio Commission, citing the station’s lack of “public interest.” But that’s where the radio commissioners had it all wrong, Brinkley knew. The public was nothing if not interested. Radio Digest’s audience poll of 1930 overwhelmingly voted KFKB the most popular station in the country. The Brinkley’s station outpolled the Kansas City Star’s own WDAF 357,000 to 10,000 votes. Alas, popularity could not save Brinkley’s license. And when he shut down KFKB, Doctor climbed immediately onto the cross. “Persecution!” he liked to say. “Even as Jesus of Nazareth.”
Doctor never wanted for zeal of mission, and he wasn’t about to quit his service to the common man. Playing on the Mexican government’s anger at the United States government’s refusal to share any of its 550–1,500 kilocycle radio broadcast band, Brinkley won the right to set up a new station in Mexico. As folklorist Ed Kahn succinctly put it in American Music, “Here was someone who would invest in the necessary broadcasting equipment and at the same time really irritate the U.S. Government.” Basically, Mexican officials gave Brinkley license to do anything he wanted, and there was a moribund little Texas border town of wool and mohair producers then
lamenting the Depression-era price drops in greasy shorn domestic wools on the Boston market, and in dire need of a little bump in the local economy. “My dear Doctor Brinkley,” wrote Del Rio chamber of commerce secretary, A. B. Easterling. “We certainly hope that you will at least pay us a visit. . . . The Mayor of Villa Acuña [across the Rio Grande from Del Rio] has already assured the Mexican consul that their city will furnish, free, adequate land for the purpose of erecting your station thereon. However, they will welcome a visit from you and will be pleased to go over any proposition you might have to offer. Del Rio has a splendid flying field, located about one mile northwest of the city. The six-story Roswell Hotel has the name Del Rio painted on its roof and an arrow pointing to the field.”
When Doctor arrived in town to stay, the Del Rio Evening News gushed, “When a man comes along who can hold his dream of helping mankind in front of him consistently and constantly until he makes it come true, he is a man who stands out and dominates his generation. Such a man is John R. Brinkley, M.D.”
Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? Page 23
