Book: Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man
Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam
Author: Pope Brock
Published: 2008 (Crown Publishers)
Pages: 281
Guys, letting a dude cut open your nut sack and stuff it
full of goat, uh, “glands” will not restore your vitality.
That seems pretty obvious, but apparently the early 20th
century had some really good con artists and some really stupid, desperate
patients, so many that John Brinkley was able to start a nation-wide(ish)
empire and several dozen copycats from one Kansas clinic on the claims that
goat bits were the key to restoring sex drive.
Let me re-iterate for those of you with ideas: IT DIDN’T
WORK.
What did work, of course, was Dr. Brinkley’s endless oily
charm, creative writing ability applied to full-page ads and testimonials, and
– the most interesting part to your former college dee jay and general
soundboard nerd – his skirting of the earliest FCC airwaves laws.
See, Brinkley grabbed up a Mexican radio station that was just
south of the US boarder and had none of our sissy signal strength limitation
laws, so dude could broadcast his goat-flavored snake oil, wild-ass sermons,
and all the good country music he could coax down there up to like Iowa. It
worked so well he inadvertently turned into a tastemaker who launched the
careers of people like the Carter family, in which June Carter was a tiny
little star, and other folks I can’t remember because country is a genre I
haven’t studied up on. But they were big, Jerry, big!
That was the most interesting part. The rest of the story
was variations on new ways to convince people the goat thing worked, battling
people who said it didn’t and could prove it, and moving around and making
money before he could be shut down. The sections were short and don’t ask me to
name his competitors/mentors/copycats because they seriously all ran together
and paled against the fact of what they were all doing.
One aspect that didn’t get nearly enough explanation was
that ladies were getting this operation too, with the matching goat bits. As in
getting their uteruses replaced with goat ones. That’s mentioned in passing a
couple times, but not in nearly enough detail to answer my horrified how in the
fucking fuck did that even WHAT? I don’t know, although I know exactly how they
replaced testicles. This seems a bit unfair.
There wasn’t any chase from the law unless you count the
trial at the end, which was sort of anti-climatic or anything else truly,
plot-drivingly exciting, but the sheer (pun ahoy) balls of what Dr. Brinkley
got away with was really fun to read. Bookshelf!
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