Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  “When we came to Del Rio it was pitiful,” Minnie Brinkley told a local reporter decades later. “One of the banks had closed, but we deposited money in two of the banks and kept them open.” The Brinkleys circulated money all over Val Verde County. Even in the Depression, the local economy boomed. Brinkley’s generous patronage of the Del Rio Steam Laundry funded a complete modernization of a business that was failing badly before his arrival. Local printers, rooming houses, department stores, and eateries flourished. Unemployment dropped precipitously. By 1935 Doctor had spent half a million dollars erecting a five-hundred-thousand-watt transmission tower in Villa Acuña. With its directional dish, station XERA (“The Sunshine Station Between the Nations”) was twenty times more powerful than any station on U.S. soil. There was no place in North America so cut off that its citizens couldn’t dial in to XERA at 735 kilocycles, smack in the middle of the U.S. government’s broadcast band. This was the high-water mark for Doctor. In Texas, he was licensed to practice medicine, which he did with renewed gusto. The Brinkley Hospital, operating out of Del Rio’s Roswell Hotel, was in full swing, with increased services to men and women. “Don’t forget the estrogens we are now able to give you for loss of sexual strength,” Doctor would tell his radio audience. “They are a God-send and God-blessings to men and women who had despaired of ever having any sexual strength anymore. They even produce wonderful results for women who have lost their ovaries, to men who have lost their glands. For men and women who still have their glands, if they’ll come to us and let us clear the infection out of their bodies before the estrogens are administered, wonderful sexual strength may be returned. . . . It’s a blessing to those of you who are prepared to receive it. Many are called, but few are chosen. And I hope you’ll keep that thought in mind. . . . This is all so clear and so obvious that it needs no explanation. I’m looking for you in the Brinkley Hospital immediately. And this is Dr. Brinkley inviting you to come at once.”

  Doctor also founded a second hospital in San Juan, Texas. Now, the two facilities were not to be confused, but Brinkley’s instructions were straightforward and very nearly unforgettable. “Remember,” he would tell his audience, “Del Rio for the prostate, San Juan for the rectum.” In his nightly radio talks, Doctor Brinkley could troll for patients at either of his facilities in the same sluicing stream of thought. “If you know anybody that’s suffering from a rupture, tell them that we correct ruptures without cutting and without putting a patient to bed,” Doctor said. “If they have piles, tell them that we don’t cut on their piles, or cut them out. We don’t even put them to bed for their piles. And the job is guaranteed for as long as they live. We feel like that a guarantee to you for as long as you live is long enough. I wouldn’t see any use of guaranteeing it after you have died. I think during your lifetime is sufficient length for a guarantee to be made. . . . If your prostate’s involved, infected, enlarged, and some doctor tells you to have it cut out, don’t listen to him. Removing your prostate gland is removing one of your important sex glands. You’re no longer a man after that gland is out. You’re an old has-been. Yes, you are the equivalent of a capon. Do you want to be a capon? Most red-blooded American men do not. . . . I invite you to get on that road to good health, as so many thousands have done. This is Dr. Brinkley personally urging you to begin that journey right now, to our hospital.”

  Doctor’s silky drawl summoned as many as 226 new patients a month to the warm climes of Del Rio, and nearly half that many to San Juan. In 1936 the Del Rio hospital grossed $676,587. In 1937, $838,163, and Doctor controlled cash flow as he would a spigot. When he was strapped, Brinkley overwhelmed Del Rio’s postal workers with pamphlets, flyers, and fire-sale offers (“Guaranteed Prostate Treatment for June, July and August, for only $250”) and took extra time making the hard sell during his radio talks: “Sensible men [who] came to me have their prostates. They’re all man. They’re whole man. They’re not a half-man or a has-been. . . . You hear me read letters from men who have come to me years ago and continue to be well and healthy and happy. Other men who have not come to me have had their prostate glands removed and many of them are dead. It’s results that count, ladies and gentlemen.” Doctor’s hype got results. In February of 1937, for instance, the hospital took in a meager $66,861, but after a promotional push, his March receipts jumped to $190,218.

  By the time the Carters arrived in Del Rio for the winter of 1938–1939, John R. Brinkley’s remarkable successes and lavish lifestyle were again drawing fire, and not just from his old foe the AMA (“American Meatcutters’ Association,” he called the organization). The IRS was killing Doctor for back taxes. In 1939 he parted with almost seventy thousand dollars every three months, settling tax debts going back to 1933. He was also paying a battery of attorneys and accountants to keep him ahead of the law. His monthly payments to the Pinkertons regularly exceeded two thousand dollars, because besides providing protection for the Brinkleys and their son, Johnny Boy, detectives also had to seek out the growing number of dissatisfied former patients and convince them to cease and desist from their disparaging remarks about Doctor, if they knew what was good for them. Still, Brinkley could show compassion. There were a few times when the Brinkley Hospital even refunded payments to the widows of patients who had died of post-op peritonitis.

  Most disheartening to Doctor was that his adopted hometown of Del Rio had allowed a mountebank to move in on Doctor’s prostate-surgery business. J. R. Middlebrook, M.D., set up shop right down the street from Brinkley, undercut his prices, and sent an army of drummers to snatch patients bound for the Roswell Hotel. West Garfield Street in Del Rio started to look like the Texas of Judge Roy Bean’s day. One passionate Brinkley supporter stepped in when he saw a Middlebrook agent at work outside the Roswell. “He was trying to rob Dr. Brinkley of his patients,” said Henry “Coonie” Crawford, “and I just floored him. He slid halfway up under the car.”

  The besieged Doctor Brinkley tried valiantly to keep his good humor. He still illuminated his fountains every night for the delight of the passing townsfolk. At Christmas, he still trucked in loads of bananas, apples, oranges, candies, walnuts, filberts, and Brazil nuts, which were sorted, bagged, and passed out to the children of Del Rio. But by 1939 a pall had descended on the Brinkley mansion. Sitting in peaceful luxury in his private barber chair, with “Eggs” Coffield giving him his daily trim and shave, fifty-two-year-old Doctor felt like a hunted man. The siege weighed even on his ten-year-old son, Johnny Boy. “The doctor worshiped Johnny and denied him nothing,” remembered a boyhood playmate. “But Johnny was the unhappiest person I’ve ever known.”

  Within three years, Doctor would be crushed under the weight of IRS demands, legal bills, and a flood of medical-malpractice judgments against him. He died a broken man in May 1942, a year after the Mexican government forced the closure of XERA in accordance with the recently ratified Havana Treaty, which allotted to Mexico specific radio frequencies throughout the United States in exchange for its shutting down the most egregious megawatt border stations. But Doctor John Romulus Brinkley had unleashed a powerful force in the world, and he had shined a light on the miracle and possibility of broadcasting. Even after XERA shut down, smaller copycat stations remained: XELO Ciudad Juárez; XEG, Monterrey; XERB, Rosarito Beach; XEPN, Piedras Negras. And from 1938 to 1943, the Carter Family was on them all, riding the airwaves as far out as Edson, Alberta, Canada, 250 miles north of Spokane.

  In a tiny cabin in a coal camp in Alberta, Ed and Elsie Romaniuk, ages nine and thirteen respectively, sat hunched over their new radio every night, ready to copy out every song the Carters did. The next day they would pull out their notebooks and try to perform the songs themselves. That music made bearable the dull aching days of life as coal miner’s children; hearing the Carters on border radio changed the Romaniuks’ lives. But in that damp cabin in the gray sloping foothills, those children never could have dreamed what effect border radio would have on the Carter Family.

  It wa
s the promise of a steady income that lured Sara to Texas. She hated to leave her home, but the radio job was the first bit of solid certainty she’d had in her life in a long while. All she had to do was go into the station twice a day, make music, and collect her seventy-five-dollar-a-week check. No Mr. Peer to deal with, and none of his complicated royalty statements to double-check for accuracy, no more entertainments, no more live audience for her to please. But the deal was not without cost. Janette and Joe were still in school, so they were left behind to live with Ma Carter. Gladys was now married to her sweetheart, Milan Millard. On August 30, 1938, just ten days before the Carters left for Texas, Gladys had made A.P. and Sara grandparents. But they had to say good-bye to their first grandbaby, little Flo. By the time they returned in the spring, Sara would have already missed the first seven months of her granddaughter’s life.

  For Sara, it was another leave-taking in a long, sad series of them, and she was not a happy woman. Sixty years later, tucked away in Flo’s upright filing cabinet at her house in Maces Springs, is a set of unrecorded lyrics Sara had written around this time:

  When shadows fall I’m lonely

  For dear you are far away

  Though miles between us are endless

  I love you is all I can say.

  (Chorus)

  I’m alone in this world and so lonely

  I miss you wherever I roam

  It seems, my dear, you’ve forgotten

  I’m alone in this world, I’m alone.

  You’ve broken your vows and your promise

  I’ve waited so long and in tears

  Please say you mean to return, dear

  The days now have turned into years.

  As always, though, Sara bore separation with a stoic composure. She had not shed a single tear as they drove up the Valley Road on their way to Texas. There would have been enough hysteria for them all at Maybelle’s house anyway, where June and Helen were distraught at their mother’s departure. A half a year was like forever, and how it broke those little girls’ hearts when Christmastime came and went and there was no package from their mother. It arrived late, probably held up at the Del Rio post office by the deluge of Brinkley mail. “I felt very lonely at times about them being away,” says June. “The contact we had with them was mostly trying to listen to them on the radio.” Maybelle’s daughters did have the unique privilege of being able to dial in to XERA and hear their own mother’s voice, every morning and every night. One night, they even heard their baby sister squeaking through. “When Anita was out there the first time, I never will forget it, she sung harmony with Mother on ‘Little Buckaroo,’ ” Helen remembered. “Oh, we were so thrilled. ‘Close your sleepy eyes, you little buckaroo.’ ”

  Anita’s first half year in Texas was quite a ride. She lived happily enough in a Del Rio boardinghouse with her mother and Aunt Sara, and on balmy winter evenings, Maybelle would take her across the border for promenades around Villa Acuña’s town square. Anita would stare wide-eyed at the color-splashed ponchos and giant sombreros. She even talked Maybelle into buying a sombrero to bring back to Grandma Addington. But so much of the time was spent at work, or going to work, that it could wear out a little girl.

  The Carters were now a part of America’s lively “and-now-a-word-from-our-sponsor” industry. XERA’s audience was decidedly rural, so hillbilly acts had elbowed every other musical form off the station’s daily program. When the Carters arrived in Texas in 1938, they were joined by Cowboy Slim Rinehart, the Pickard Family out of the mountains of Tennessee, Lou Childre, and Essie and Kay—the Prairie Sweethearts. Together, these performers heralded the Good Neighbor Get-Together, airing live every night from six to ten (and again the next morning), sponsored by Consolidated Royal Chemical Corporation. Morning and evening, the Carters drove over the Rio Grande on the new steel-trussed International Bridge, headed for the little mission-style studio building. In the studio, if Anita was truly tired, she’d crawl into her mother’s guitar case for a nap while A.P., Sara, and Maybelle were being introduced by announcer Harry Steele. They’d lead off with “Keep on the Sunny Side,” do a few more numbers introduced by A.P., then give way again to Steele for a word from Consolidated Royal Chemical Corporation: “Now, friends, if you’re one of those folks who’s always bothered with bad colds during the winter months, . . . why don’t you do as thousands of others in the same boat have done? . . . Take the new Peruna to help build up your cold-fighting, cold-chasing ability. . . . If you want to try Peruna right away, all drugstores have it, and you get it under the maker’s guarantee—you must be satisfied, or your money back for the asking. Is that fair enough?”

  Peruna was a healing tonic that soothed whatever ailed a body. It was effective, too, but only in the short term, owing to the fact that it was 25 percent alcohol. Long-term effects were nil, but at least Peruna was harmless. The other product Consolidated Royal advertised was less benign: “Don’t let gray hair cheat you out of your job and cause you a lot of worry. No, sirree, that isn’t necessary anymore. And here is all you have to do. Get a bottle of Kolorbak from your nearest drug or department store. . . . under the maker’s positive guarantee, it must remove every trace of grayness and make you look five to ten years younger and far more attractive, or your money back.” The dye in Kolorbak did produce results, but used too enthusiastically, it also caused lead poisoning.

  The beauty of the whole Texas arrangement was that the Carters didn’t have to do the hard sell. They just made their music and let the announcers make the pitch. But they were still the draw. In fact, they were the biggest draw. Harry O’Neill, Consolidated’s adman, had devised a way to track the selling effect of their Good Neighbor Get-Together. On the air, Steele would make this offer: Any customer who sent in a Peruna or Kolorbak box top to the station, care of the Carter Family, got a Bible in return. O’Neill figured each letter was worth about fifty cents to the company. The Carters were soon pulling in as many as twenty-five thousand letters in a single week, and Consolidated began to tuck photographs of the family into the Bibles before they sent them out.

  It wasn’t long before listeners began to understand the miraculous powers of XERA, the way it could shrink a vast continent down to the size of a small village. And that gave hope to desperate people in desperate circumstances. In 1939 a woman from Sherwood, Oregon, sent this note, addressed “The Radio Station, Del Rio, Texas”: “Sirs, will you please send out a report on the air for my son . . . who is missing. He does not know where I am. Tell him if he will contact his Granddad, [in] Abilene, Texas, he will let him know where his mother is. He will have a home with me out here. He has been in a juvenile home in Bexar Co. but he has run away from there. He was put into this place without my knowing this. I have remarried again and would like to get my son.”

  None of this was lost on Sara, who was herself feeling some measure of desperation. One night in February of 1939, she decided to send a message out to someone long since lost to her. One night, in an act beyond her normal character, she bravely stepped to the mike in that cramped studio in dusty little Villa Acuña, Mexico, and announced she was dedicating the next song to Coy Bays, in California. Whether A.P. joined in, nobody remembered, but Sara let loose.

  ’Twould been better for us both had we’d never

  In this wide wicked world had never met.

  For the pleasures we both seen together

  I am sure, love, I’ll never forget.

  Oh, I’m thinking tonight of my blue eyes

  who is sailing far over the seas.

  Oh, I’m thinking tonight of him only

  and I wonder if he ever thinks of me.

  Oh, you told me once, dear, that you love me

  and you said that we never would part.

  But a link in the chain has been broken

  leaving me with a sad aching heart.

  Oh, I’m thinking tonight of my blue eyes

  who is sailing far over the seas.

  Oh, I’m th
inking tonight of him only

  and I wonder if he ever thinks of me.

  When the cold, cold grave shall enclose me

  won’t you come here and shed just one tear?

  And say to the strangers around you

  a poor heart you have broken lies here.

  When the show was done, all Sara could do was wait and, like the distressed mother out in Sherwood, Oregon, hope that the message had found its mark.

  * * *

  In the six years since Coy Bays and his family headed west out of Poor Valley, Virginia, a lot had changed. Even in the chill February of 1933, the Bays family had begun as a huge and hopeful traveling party: Charlie and Mary, their healthy children (Coy, Alma, Elva, and Stella), their tubercular children (Stanley and Charmie), and Alma’s two-year-old daughter, Anita. The day they arrived in New Mexico, Alma had given birth to a son, Johnny, which the family took as a sign of rising fortune. Then there were Charmie’s goats, the family bulldog, Caesar, and Stella’s kitty. But along the way, the party had dwindled, and the hope, as well. The Bays family had worked its way across New Mexico, Arizona, and then up into California’s Sacramento Valley, picking cherries and peaches, packing lettuce, cooking and cleaning at ranches. They lived under tents in camping parks or in abandoned houses given them for little or no rent, making their way with hard work and tiny kindnesses from produce foremen who kept the family employed even when there wasn’t much work. (The Bays girls were lookers, and the bosses liked to keep them near.) Even so, Charlie had to swallow his pride and apply for state aid to keep little Johnny and Anita fed. That was how the Bays suffered their first loss, their name. “ ‘Bays’ became ‘Bayes’—with an e—by accident in California,” says Elva’s daughter Barbara Powell. “They were filling out some Social Security or state-aid papers, and some clerk wrote it wrong. It would have cost money to go back in and change it, so they just left it be.”