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With Internet, stories reach wider audience
It used to be that once a newspaper story was written it was forgotten except by the occasional historian poring over the microfilm in the library.
The Internet has changed all that.
Now we routinely hear from people across the country who have read something we wrote online and call or e-mail seeking more information.
Mostly, it’s not a big deal.
But Tuesday’s caller did surprise me, because he wasn’t looking for more information; instead, he had news I could use, though he declined to give his name.
It turns out that my anonymous caller had lived in Del Rio, Texas, during the 1970s and he had met the widow of Jackson County’s most notorious native son, Dr. John R. Brinkley. Not only that, but he had been to an auction at the Brinkleys’ estate sometime around 1975.
Minnie Brinkley was in failing health at the time and was moving to San Antonio to be closer to her son, the caller said.
He arrived at the auction only because he happened to notice a lot of activity around the house where he usually didn’t see any. He had been intrigued by a couple of 1950s vintage Cadillacs in a garage – the cars hadn’t moved in so long their tires were flat, the caller said.
Once at the auction he bought some of the medical stamps Brinkley had used at his hospital in Kansas. And he stumbled across a July 25, 2002, column about the goat-gland doctor by doing a Google search on Brinkley.
The main reason he called The Herald was to see if I could put him in touch with Larry Whiteside, an old friend who first told me all the stories and legends associated with Brinkley and his colorful career.
Brinkley figured in the local news during the summer of 2002 because of a then-new book, “The Bizarre Careers of John R. Brinkley,” written by Alton Lee of Kansas.
The son of a country doctor, Brinkley was born at Beta, orphaned at age 10 and raised near East LaPorte by his step-mother (also his great-aunt), Sally Mingus Brinkley.
He supported himself as a teletype operator for Southern Railway before putting himself through medical school. He hit on the idea of treating male impotence by transplanting goat glands into aging men and performed hundreds of such surgeries at hospitals he founded at Del Rio, Milford, Kan., and Little Rock, Ark.
Brinkley is thought by many to have been elected governor of Kansas in 1930 through a write-in campaign. However, he lost the election because many of the votes in his favor were disallowed due to technicalities.
When Brinkley ran afoul of Kansas authorities, who stripped him of both his radio and medical licenses, he moved his operations to Del Rio and constructed his radio transmitter across the Rio Grande in Mexico to avoid Federal Radio Commission regulation.
One of the first to realize the advertising potential in the then-fledgling field of radio, Brinkley once owned the most powerful radio station in the world, XERA, and he used it to sell patent medicine and promote his rejuvenating surgeries.
Local musical legends Samantha Bumgarner and Harry Cagle played on Brinkley’s show. Cagle, who died several years ago, told me in 1989 about riding to Texas in a big Cadillac with gold hubcaps.
But it was Larry who first mesmerized me with the tales of a local man who left Sylva penniless only to find fame and fortune by implanting goat gonads into human males.
And it was Larry who inspired my anonymous caller to get in touch and share his recollection of an old lady with dark-rimmed glasses, selling off her famous husband’s stuff before vacating the mansion they had built with the proceeds of Brinkley’s unusual medical practice.
Reminders of Brinkley persist locally and can be seen by anyone who travels from Cullowhee to Tuckasegee along N.C. 107.
One is the striking marble monument in a curve near the Moody Bridge. Commissioned by Brinkley, the stone commemorates his “Aunt” Sally, whose house was across the Tuckaseigee River from its site. A little farther up the road is the “Brinkley Farm,” now Wolf Creek Tree Farm, with its rock entrance walls that spell out “Dr. John R. Brinkley.”
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