This is the origin story of the goat gland procedure, as told by Brinkley and repeated ever since. Portions of this story and photos of Stittsworth and his son Billy appeared in newspapers all over the country as early as 1920. The Stittsworths also “starred” in and often appeared in person with a promotional film made in 1922 or 1923. However, there are many reasons to not believe this version of the story.

Here are some of them:

(1) Bill Stittsworth’s son said that he and his father were on Brinkley’s payroll until 1942. This is strange, because Brinkley stopped doing the goat gland surgeries in 1933 and thus had no reason to pay someone to promote it after that point. Logic suggests they were being paid not to tell everyone that this was all made up. Perhaps the younger Stittsworth lied, or remembered wrong; but the Stittsworths appeared in many photographs from 1919-on, and in person in 1923 with the promotional film, so it makes sense that they would have been paid for this. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem that Stittsworth was mentioned by full name in the advertising or public relations efforts. We did find one article referring to him as “Uncle Billy, one of the village patriarchs.”

(2) This story, with photos of the world’s first “goat gland baby” (Billy Stittsworth) only began appearing in newspapers after Brinkley hired H.R. Mosnat, an ad man. Mosnat’s efforts (better classified as pioneering public relations than advertising) included placing this “news item” in papers all over the country.

(3) The story was highly inconsistent; Brinkley sometimes claimed that he had been doing experiments with “xenotransplantation” for many years by this point and was eager to try it out on a human; sometimes it was Stittsworth’s idea and he tried to say no, etc.

(4) The story is ridiculous.

Images taken from a fake science film called “Rejuvenation Through Gland Transplanting” which Brinkley almost certainly paid for and then distributed to movie theaters all over the U.S. Stittsworth and son toured with the film in person as “proof” of the operation’s efficacy.

Images taken from a fake science film called “Rejuvenation Through Gland Transplanting” which Brinkley almost certainly paid for and then distributed to movie theaters all over the U.S. Stittsworth and son toured with the film in person as “proof” of the operation’s efficacy.

It seems more likely that Billy was named after his father, whose name (Bill) isn’t mentioned in this promotional film.

Images taken from a fake science film called “Rejuvenation Through Gland Transplanting” which Brinkley almost certainly paid for and then distributed to movie theaters all over the U.S. Stittsworth and son toured with the film in person as “proof” of the operation’s efficacy.

We put a halftone pattern on this photo to make it look like it was reproduced in papers. It might have been, but we never saw it. Headline is borrowed from some other news item in 1920.

This photo of the world’s first “goat gland baby” (Billy Stittsworth) only began appearing in newspapers after Brinkley hired H.R. Mosnat, an ad man. Mosnat’s efforts (better classified as pioneering public relations than advertising) included placing this “news item” in papers all over the country. (See also: note 11.)

This is a real book, and sure, it’s a biography. However, there are many reasons to doubt its veracity. It was a work-for-hire: Brinkley paid the author, Clement Wood to write it. It appears that Brinkley basically dictated its contents. Wood was a well-known hack said to “churn out manuscripts nearly on demand” and to write “at the pace of 80,000 words in 30 days” (not the best pace for careful research and fact-checking). Brinkley used it as a promotional tool, giving it away for free to fans and supporters. Finally, it contains many verifiably false statements.

Is NUTS! really “based on” this book? Not exactly. Some of it is taken directly from its pages, but it’s perhaps more honest to say that we are using The Life of a Man like Brinkley himself used it: as a source of apparent authority. Like Brinkley, we will also use other sources of apparent authority (patient testimonials, “expert interviews”, newspaper articles, etc.) not found in the pages of The Life of A Man.

Clement Wood wrote some other biographies-for-hire, including one for Brinkley’s contemporary in quackery and questionable practices in radio broadcasting Norman Baker with the awesome title Throttle: A Fact Story About Norman Baker (how did Brinkley get stuck with The Life of a Man?). Wood’s list of published works is astonishingly diverse and poor in quality. One of his books, Flesh And Other Stories, published in 1929, was the subject of an important obscenity trial. Wood was a one-time lawyer turned teacher turned Greenwich Village hipster who supposedly hosted orgies as a means of satisfying the sexual needs of his beautiful wife Gloria Goddard; he himself was said to be impotent. He is a fascinating person that we did a lot of unnecessary research on, and his Wikipedia page deserves much more attention.

The book is real, but we hand-copied the fonts from Wood’s book, designed the chapter titles in Photoshop, printed them on vintage book paper, and glued them into its pages to film these chapter breaks. We went to all this trouble because it’s important that we establish this book as a real, physical book that carries with it an apparent credibility, and because we are establishing that we are “adapting” this book and using large portions of its text as our own narration (which is only partly true). Some of the chapter titles are repurposed from Wood’s book. “Something New Under the Sun” is Wood’s title for his Chapter V, which covers the same period I’m covering in the next few scenes.

Images taken from a fake science film called “Rejuvenation Through Gland Transplanting” which Brinkley almost certainly paid for and then distributed to movie theaters all over the U.S. Stittsworth and son toured with the film in person as “proof” of the operation’s efficacy.

Images taken from a fake science film called “Rejuvenation Through Gland Transplanting,” which Brinkley almost certainly paid for and then distributed to movie theaters all over the U.S. Stittsworth and son toured with the film in person as “proof” of the operation’s efficacy. However, we have no reason to believe that’s not a goat testicle, so… seems legit.

Brinkley’s status as perpetual benefactor to his community is a big part of the image he cultivated, for obvious reasons. There are loads of period newspaper references to how much Brinkley “built up” Milford (“the Milford [Little League baseball] team wears uniforms furnished by Dr. Brinkley” said The Junction City Daily Union in 1922, and “[Brinkley] gave the town a $25,000 Methodist church in memory of his mother” claimd The San Bernardino County Sun in 1933) but they’re all pretty hard to substantiate. He certainly made many improvements to his own property, and spared no expense (“Brinkley built electrical, water and sewage systems for his hospital, and soon his power plant supplied Milford businesses, then the Methodist church, then residences. He expanded the water and sewer systems also, and sidewalks were built,” wrote Lee). And there’s little doubt that Milford benefitted from its new status as rejuvenation destination (“trains stop regularly at Milford and electric lights and asphalt streets have supplanted kerosene lamps and mud roads” said the Wilmington News-Journal in 1923, and “the town is planning a new hotel” said The San Bernardino County Sun in 1923).

But remember that he’s got a paid staff of PR people working for him to place stories just like these in newspapers!

“The Sunshine Station in the Heart of the Nation” was the real slogan of KFKB (which he would repurpose for his later Mexican radio station as “The Sunshine Station Between the Nations”). Sometimes Brinkley said KFKB stood for “Kansas First, Kansas Best” and other times “Kansas Folks Know Best.” (See also: note 185 on XERA slogan.)

We only had fragments of this album scanned from different sources, so we Photoshopped all of them together to reproduce what we think the album might have looked like.

This is the origin story of the goat gland procedure, as told by Brinkley and repeated ever since. Portions of this story and photos of Stittsworth and his son Billy appeared in newspapers all over the country as early as 1920. The Stittsworths also “starred” in and often appeared in person with a promotional film made in 1922 or 1923. However, there are many reasons to not believe this version of the story. Here are some of them:

(1) Bill Stittsworth’s son said that he and his father were on Brinkley’s payroll until 1942. This is strange, because Brinkley stopped doing the goat gland surgeries in 1933 and thus had no reason to pay someone to promote it after that point. Logic suggests they were being paid not to tell everyone that this was all made up. Perhaps the younger Stittsworth lied, or remembered wrong; but the Stittsworths appeared in many photographs from 1919-on, and in person in 1923 with the promotional film, so it makes sense that they would have been paid for this. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem that Stittsworth was mentioned by full name in the advertising or public relations efforts. We did find one article referring to him as “Uncle Billy, one of the village patriarchs.”

(2) This story, with photos of the world’s first “goat gland baby” (Billy Stittsworth) only began appearing in newspapers after Brinkley hired H.R. Mosnat, an ad man. Mosnat’s efforts (better classified as pioneering public relations than advertising) included placing this “news item” in papers all over the country.

(3) The story was highly inconsistent; Brinkley sometimes claimed that he had been doing experiments with “xenotransplantation” for many years by this point and was eager to try it out on a human; sometimes it was Stittsworth’s idea and he tried to say no, etc.

(4) The story is ridiculous.

This testimony is taken verbatim from a book called Shadows and Sunshine (published by Brinkley) purporting to be a compilation of statements by actual patients. The patient testimony quoted here is from the section titled, “Suffered Tortures of the Damned” (page 19). We don’t know if Brinkley just made all these patient testimonials up or not; it seems likely he did.

The sound truck was actually used in Brinkley’s 1932 campaign (not in 1930), and it is documented that Huey Long was using sound trucks, to great advantage, as early as 1930. So no: Brinkley didn’t invent the sound truck. But he may have invented the idea that the sound truck would play pre-recorded speeches and not just warm-up music. We spent a long, long time on this note before deciding to move on. The point is, he either invented it, or he was a very early adopter/pioneer.

True. Brinkley really did lead crowds in spelling out his name correctly. He even handed out pencils imprinted with the correct spelling.

“The Sunshine Station Between The Nations” was a reworking of his earlier KFKB slogan, “The Sunshine Station in the Heart of the Nation” (see note 67).

I don’t know that Brinkley really invented this format, an early version of both infomercials and simple corporate sponsorship, but he was certainly an early adopter/pioneer. Previous to his Border Radio days, he only ran ads for his own hospitals, but during this period realized that companies would pay a lot (he apparently charged $1700 an hour) to advertise products on his powerful station that U.S. stations wouldn’t advertise.

This ad is for a line of products by a charlatan named Rose Dawn who looked a lot like Mae West.

“Border performers were rated by how much mail they could ‘pull.’ Rose Dawn, Brinkley’s personal astrologer, became ‘one of the most successful mail pullers in border radio history.’ Rose would read listeners’ horoscopes, pray for a radio fan, or give lovelorn advice for $1 per service – with no discounted rates for a combination thereof. Rose also offered a book that would make a personality ‘blossom like a flower’ or vials of perfume that would affect one’s own and other people’s behavior in an extraordinary manner, for $1 each. Some wags began referring to [Del Rio] as Dollar Rio. Rose was married to Koran, a missionary for an occult society called the Mayan Order, and the couple was ‘an ethereal sight on the streets of Del Rio as the glided past gawking onlookers in their pink Chrysler trimmed in green with orchid wheels” (Lee, 161).

Fowler is giving examples throughout this sequence of the kinds of things that Brinkley and other “Border Radio” pioneers might have sold on their stations. These products may not be exactly the products that XERA was offering up. Also, unless otherwise indicated, the snippets of radio ads you hear in this sequence are scripted reenactments, not real archival broadcasts.

The Kolor-Bak radio ad is from a real XERA broadcast, c. 1937-9; the voice is one of the members of the Pickard Family. The image is also from a real Kolor-Bak ad we found online.

In 1922, the American Medical Association analyzed KolorBak and found it to be made primarily of lead (with some sulphur, salt and alcohol), warning that the product could cause lead poisoning.

The Kolor-Bak radio ad is from a real XERA broadcast, c. 1937-9; the voice is one of the members of the Pickard Family. The image is also from a real Kolor-Bak ad we found online.

This map was in at least one edition of Brinkley’s Doctor Book – one of his tried and true methods of junk mail advertising – and shows his customers and fans in the American Midwest how to get to Del Rio from his previous location in Milford.

Real circulars from Brinkley’s many ventures. We have not, until now, given you a real sense of just how much junk mail this man produced! Watch the letterheads and slogans change; he changes the name of his hospital, operation, etc. even more often than he changes their locations.

This speech by Brinkley, in which he announces his wonderful new breakthrough, is an amalgamation of many different moments. We’re condensing a lot of things together here for flow and simplification.

He stopped offering the goat gland surgery in 1933 (not in 1937 as suggested here), and offered instead “glandular preparations” or “commercial preparations” (whatever that means) instead. But we’re making it seem as if these “preparations” were known as Formula 1020, which they weren’t; Formula 1020 was a different treatment. Basically, Formula 1020 was colored water given to all post-operative patients and was meant to increase a patient’s white blood cell count. Really, it was just one of many quack remedies sold by Brinkley; we only bring up Formula 1020 because it becomes important in the libel trial later.

Also, notice that now all of the sudden the goat glands aren’t just for impotence? We’re finally sharing the information that the goat gland surgery was acually a miracle cure-all good for almost anything that ails you! A good sample of the conditions Brinkley claimed to cure with goat glands can be found in Shadows and Sunshine, John R. Brinkley, published by John R. Brinkley, Milford Kansas, 1923 (or later in the film, at the end of the first day of the libel trial).

We created this article in Photoshop; we’re certain Formula 1020 was advertised in some similar manner, but we didn’t find anything good to show. Brinkley and his PR team were early adopters of what we’d now call “advertorials,” or paid advertisements designed to look as much like articles as possible.

Brinkley called this one “The World’s Most Beautiful Hospital” or the “Country Club Hospital.”

Yes, this is an actual thing Brinkley said.

Real circulars from Brinkley’s many ventures. We have not, until now, given you a real sense of just how much junk mail this man produced!

What we have Brinkley saying here is really only a slight exaggeration of how he really cast himself (he did, after all, compare himself to Jesus and Moses sort of frequently).

An advertisement from one of his Doctor Books.

We created this article in Photoshop; we’re certain Formula 1020 was advertised in some similar manner, but we didn’t find anything good to show. Brinkley and his PR team were early adopters of what we’d now call “advertorials,” or paid advertisements designed to look as much like articles as possible.