Ruralite Cafe: Published 07/25/02

By Lynn Hotaling - Associate Editor

Reminders of Brinkley persist

Not only that, Larry said, this guy Brinkley invented radio advertising and sold snake oil remedies over the airwaves. He revolutionized political campaigning by introducing radio advertising, sound trucks and airplane travel when he mounted a write-in campaign for governor of Kansas.

There was only one explanation: Larry was making it all up.

After all, that was during my first few seasons in Cullowhee, and I didn't get out much. Lacking both transportation and spending money, I was pretty much confined to Western Carolina University's campus.

But one hot day that spring, when a bunch of us headed out N.C. 107 toward Canada community and a waterfall, I saw the light. We rounded a big curve in Linda Hardy's old Datsun, and I spied a granite marker that appeared to have fled its cemetery and landed by the roadside.

"What's that?" I asked my companions.

"Haven't you ever seen Aunt Sally's Curve before?" they chorused.

Opting for education rather than safety, Linda stopped the car so I could get a look and read the monument erected by Dr. John Brinkley in memory of his Aunt Sally, who raised him on her farm across the Tuckaseigee River.

About then I began to think maybe there was some truth to what Larry had told me, especially when we came to a tree farm a mile or so later.

When I pointed out that Dr. John R. Brinkley, just like the name on the monument, was spelled out by lighter stones within the rock wall, my companions told me it was the Brinkley Farm - where "that guy Larry Whiteside's always talking about" used to live.

"You mean those wild stories about a doctor transplanting goat glands into impotent men are true?" I asked.

The next time I saw Larry, I pressed him for more details, but he had already told me most of what he knew about the "Goat-gland King."

After I settled in Jackson County and started working for the newspaper, more and more fascinating tidbits emerged.

Once when I stopped to inquire about an old house I thought I might be able to rent, I met Claude Wike, now deceased, who told me how his family once owned the Brinkley farm but was forced to sell it during the Depression.

Some 20 years after I talked to Wike, Bill Smith, who died in 1998, told me the Wikes had asked his father to contact Brinkley about buying their farm.

While gathering material for The Herald's 1989 Centennial edition, I interviewed Harry Cagle, who had played on Brinkley's radio show with his banjo and fiddle teacher, the legendary Samantha Bumgarner of Lovesfield.

Cagle, who died several years ago, remembered how Dr. Brinkley took him and Bumgarner out to Texas in a big Cadillac with gold hubcaps.

But the best information came from Smith, whose father, Will Smith, had managed the Tuckasegee farm after Brinkley bought it.

During that time letters arrived regularly from Del Rio, Texas, where Brinkley built his mansion across the Rio Grande from his powerful radio station.

"He'd write like he was talking to you," said Bill Smith, who saved most of the letters. "He'd write my daddy a whole page, telling him what to do. Then two or three days later he'd write again, changing his mind about everything and blessing my daddy out."

Despite his fortune, Brinkley was determined to make the farm profitable and tried various schemes to make money, Bill Smith said. First he built two silos (still visible from N.C. 107) to try his hand at the cattle business.

Brinkley directed Will Smith to buy steers, then had him sell the steers a few months later and purchase purebred Herefords. When they didn't produce, Brinkley decided to try Texas longhorn cattle, which he had shipped to Sylva on a train.

"Daddy backed the truck up to the boxcar so the cattle could go straight from the train car into the truck," Bill Smith said. "Those cattle went out of the boxcar and into the truck all right, but then they tore right out of the truck. There were cattle scattered all the way to Balsam."

Hogs were Brinkley's next experiment, Bill Smith said, and when that effort was also unsuccessful, Brinkley decided Will Smith didn't really understand what Brinkley wanted to accomplish, so Brinkley sent in another fellow to manage the farm.

"This is what runs me plain 'nuts,'" Brinkley wrote the new manager in March 1937. "It seems Will (Smith) could never understand that I am a businessman and want things run in a business way. In other words, Will is content to do like they have been doing over there since Adam and Eve, and wouldn't join with me on my 'New Deal' System of doing business.

"I think that Will has full confidence and faith in everybody. If Will ever saw some fellow sleeping with his wife, Will wouldn't believe it of his friend. He would walk off and go fishing, thinking that he probably had imagined it," Brinkley wrote a day later.

But Brinkley never fired Will Smith, who had been a boyhood schoolmate of Brinkley's at Tuckasegee Baptist Church School. He soon increased Will Smith's pay from $50 to $60 per month, bought him a car - a two-door Chevrolet coupe - and sent him to oversee timber cutting on a huge tract of land Brinkley bought near Soco, Bill Smith said.

The recent publication of Alton Lee's Brinkley biography, "The Bizarre Careers of John R. Brinkley," by the University Press of Kentucky, has rekindled my Brinkley fascination. Lee will be at Sylva's City Lights Bookstore Saturday, Aug. 3, to discuss his book, and City Lights and the Jackson County Historical Society have planned a tour and program in conjunction with the author's visit.

Next week's column will focus more on Brinkley's exploits after he left Sylva and the colorful life he led in Kansas and Texas. For now, we'll conclude with Bill Smith's summation of a remarkable Jackson County native son.

"In the eyes of a lot of people, Brinkley was a quack, but I can't help admiring him," Smith said in 1994. "He had a brain that wouldn't quit - he had to be intelligent. He was just 50 years ahead of his time."

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