Here at the North Carolina Collection we love talking and writing about North Carolina superlatives. Yesterday I noticed one that hit close to home–real close to home. The town in which I live, Apex, North Carolina, was named by Money Magazine as the 14th best place to live in the United States, garnering the highest rating for any North Carolina town.
The compilers of the Best Places to Live: Top 100 state that this year’s list “focused on smaller places that offered the best combination of economic opportunity, good schools, safe streets, things to do and a real sense of community.” As a way of quantifying how much “Leisure and Culture” Apex has, the magazine figured out that there were 1,598 restaurants and 122 bars within 15 miles of the town. Wow, I really need to get out more.
The other North Carolina towns that made the list are Holly Springs (Wake County) at No. 22 and Mooresville (Iredell County) at No. 65.
Many of us look back on our college years through rose-colored glasses. College yearbooks have encouraged this nostalgia with beautiful images of campus scenes and buildings and formal portraits of us and our friends looking happy and exceptionally well groomed. The 1932 edition of The White Heather, by the seniors of Flora Macdonald College, takes this model to a higher level. Even in my fondest memories, college was not as idyllic as it is pictured here.
Three North Carolina towns have made it into the top 100 “Harry-est” towns in the country. This promotion run by Amazon.com tracks the towns that, on a per-capita basis, are pre-ordering the most copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Morrisville comes in at number 59, Hillsborough is 66, and Hendersonville is number 85.
If you ask me, it’s an easy choice as to which is the “Harry-est” town in North Carolina: Potterstown, of course. This small community is near the town of Tamarack in Watauga County. Some act of wizardry has kept it off of the most recent state transportation map, but the North Carolina Gazetteer assures me it’s there.
I found this picture in a late 1940s publication of The Dairy Foundation of North Carolina. The caption reads, “Streamline Production, Distribution, Consumption.”
In the 1920s and 1930s, Biltmore Industries in Asheville was well-known around the country for its traditional “homespun” wool cloth, which was woven by hand and known to have been worn by Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt. I’m sure the natural cloth was comfortable and stylish, but apparently it was healthy, too. I take this from no less an authority than Dr. John Harvey Kellogg of the Battle Creek Sanitarium.
Convinced that natural light was a “life stimulant,” Kellogg encouraged his patients to wear white clothes and porous fibers that allowed light to reach the skin. He was so impressed with the Biltmore Hand-Woven Homespun that he drove from Battle Creek to Asheville to inspect the operation first-hand. He declared the Biltmore cloth “The most remarkable discovery in Health Clothing that ever has been made.”
I found this impressive claim in a pamphlet in the North Carolina Collection, which was accompanied by several samples of the Biltmore Homespun. I’ve included a scan of one here. Unfortunately there aren’t enough scraps to make a suit out of, or else I would put Dr. Kellogg’s theory to the test.
Long before there was Viagra and Cialis there was Dr. Brinkley. John Romulus Brinkely was born 122 years ago this month in Beta, North Carolina. He was not the first and certainly won’t be the last to make a fortune by promising to restore virility in men, but he might have been the most colorful. Read more about Dr. Brinkley in July’s This Month in North Carolina History.
Dr. Brinkley’s Doctor Book. North Carolina Collection, VCpB B858b.
Two torn and fading paperbacks in the vault of the North Carolina Collection describing his medical practice are relics of the life and times of John R. Brinkley who left his birthplace in the hills of North Carolina and, as the famous or infamous “Goat Gland Doctor,” rose from poverty to great wealth and was well on his way back to poverty again when he died in 1942.
Brinkley was born 8 July 1885, the illegitimate son of John Richard Brinkley and Sarah Candace (Sally) Burnett in Beta, Jackson County, North Carolina. His mother gave him the middle name Romulus, but he later changed it to Richard. Brinkley’s father, a so-called “mountain doctor,” had no formal training but had “read” medicine in the office of another physician before setting up on his own.
Brinkley did well in the local schools, demonstrating a quick mind and a prodigious memory. He left school at 16 and became a telegrapher, first for the railroad and then for Western Union. Although his job paid relatively well, Brinkley wanted to become a physician and in 1907 enrolled in Bennett Medical College in Chicago, which he attended for three years. Ultimately he graduated from the Eclectic Medical University of Kansas City in 1915.
Forced to drop out of medical school several times to support his family, Brinkley obtained student medical licenses and often operated on the wild side of medicine. In an episode in Greenville, South Carolina, Brinkley and his partner injected patients with colored water, claiming that it was a miraculous cure for venereal disease. Finally, with his degree from the Eclectic Medical University in hand, Dr. Brinkley set up practice in Milford, Kansas.
It was in Milford that Brinkley hit the mother lode. According to Brinkley, a local farmer, suffering from failing virility asked the doctor to implant in him a portion of the “sex gland” of a male goat. Brinkley obliged and the farmer claimed that his life was transformed. Brinkley publicized the operation and testimonials to its beneficial results widely, and soon patients were lining up for the goat gland transplant.
Brinkley realized the potential of radio to advertise his practice, and in 1923 he began operating station KFKB in Milford, broadcasting all over the midwest. Brinkley did regular programs of medical advice and, through arrangements with pharmacies in the region, began prescribing medicine over the radio.
By the end of the 1920s Brinkley had become famous and wealthy. He had also made enemies. The American Medical Association was investigating him for malpractice. The Kansas City Star had published a series of articles accusing him of fraud, and the newly formed Federal Radio Commission was looking into his broadcasting practices. As a result of all this Brinkley lost his license to practice medicine in Kansas in 1929 and the FRC closed down his radio station in 1930.
During his involuntary retirement from medicine Brinkley turned to politics, and between 1930 and 1934 he ran three times for the governorship of Kansas. In his best showing he polled 30.6 percent of the total vote.
In 1934 Brinkley returned to medicine. He obtained a medical license in Texas and set up a practice and ultimately a hospital in Del Rio on the Rio Grande. Again he was a phenomenal success, making more than twelve million dollars between 1934 and 1938 on his goat gland surgery alone. He also opened a radio station just over the river in Mexico which broadcast all the way to Canada. The doctor enjoyed his wealth, whether relaxing in his mansion in Del Rio or traveling extensively with his family, often in his luxuriously appointed private airplane or on his ocean-going yacht, the Dr. Brinkley III.
Brinkley’s success, however, attracted the attention of his old enemies the American Medical Association and the Federal Communications Commission (successor to the FRC) and brought him a new opponent in the form of the Internal Revenue Service. In 1938 Brinkley lost a splashy libel suit against the AMA which left him branded as a quack. The FCC closed down his Mexican radio station, and Brinkley found himself being investigated by the IRS for non-payment of taxes and by the Post Office for mail fraud. In failing health, Brinkley declared bankruptcy in 1941 and died of cancer in May 1942.
The accompanying illustration, taken from a pamphlet advertising the doctor’s procedures and services, shows the Brinkley hospital in Del Rio. The building is actually the Roswell Hotel. The pamphlet says that the “Brinkley operation is so mild that our patients are guests in the hotel, mixing and mingling with traveling public…”
Postcard summer continues at the North Carolina Collection. We’re pleased to announce the launch of a new digital collection: North Carolina Postcards. Drawing from the extensive holdings of the North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, the new online project contains around 800 images (with many more to come), browsable by subject and location.
You can spot a newcomer to North Carolina when they use the word “barbecue” as a verb. All Tar Heels know that barbecue is not something you do, it’s something you eat. See the caption below for an example of proper usage. The photo, from the Lee Wallace WPA photo album in the North Carolina Collection, was taken ca. 1936-1942 and shows a man hard at work at a pit in Ayden, N.C., home of the world-renowned Skylight Inn.
I’ve just added a generous number of titles to our What’s New in the North Carolina Collection page. This list is updated four times a year with our latest selections. Full citations can be found in the University Library catalog and these items are all available for use in the North Carolina Collection Reading Room. Check out the list under Pages in the right column.
