Goat glands equal vitality

[Rob E Dangerously 0]

I found this stuff tonight while looking up Mexican Radio (XERF) origins.

 

Here's the XERF article: http://www.ominous-valve.com/xerf.html

 

The Doctor was named John R. Brinkley. He operated out of Kansas, and then Texas. His claim was that inserting goat glands into your scrotum would cure impotency.

 

He started his own radio station to promote this, and other cures of his.

 

and..

 

http://pw2.netcom.com/~mikalm/brinkley.htm

 

As for his medical status, Dr. Brinkley decided that his state-issued license could best be regained if he controlled the state itself. So on September 23, 1930, he announced that he was running for Governor of Kansas.

 

Well-known and liked in Kansas, a deft manipulator of the Midwestern citizen's emotional buttons, and familiar with the state's long history of volatile populist uprisings, Brinkley sensed that he had a good shot at the governor's chair. His rallies, featuring warm-ups by preachers and country musicians, were wild affairs where Brinkley would arrive in his private plane, the Romancer, thread through the cheering throng to the accompaniment of a brass band, and hold the podium with fiery invectives and then-outrageous promises to Kansans: free schoolbooks, free clinics, medical aid, pensions for the elderly. But he was too late to appear on the ballot, and had to lead the crowds in a cheer spelling out his name for the write-in column: "J.-R.-B-R-I-N-K-L-E-Y!"

 

On election day 1930, Brinkley took 183,278 valid write-in votes, ending up in third place, about 34,000 votes behind victorious Democrat Harry Woodring. Tens of thousands of Brinkley votes were voided because of technicalities, and Republican and Democratic politicians privately conceded that the man they had figured wasn't good for a few thousand write-ins probably would have been elected had his name appeared on the ballot. The goat-gland politico even picked up 20,000 write-in votes and carried three counties in Oklahoma!

 

Dr. Brinkley's name did appear on the Kansas ballot two years later. This time he ran for governor in a more organized and lower-key fashion, albeit as an independent with the same Depression-generated, rabble-rousing platform. Again, he came in third, losing by the same 34,000-odd vote margin to Republican Alf Landon.

 

Basically.. this guy almost became governor of Kansas.

 

Around this time, he started his station in Mexico. And it all fell apart after the station was shut down and he had three heart attacks.

 

Goat Glands.. ooooh yeah..