On a recent trip to Kansas I was reminded of how powerful the persuasion of radio once was, especially when it came to sex.
Kansas State University in Manhattan was hosting a radio history seminar, and every time I’m out in Kansas near the tiny town of Milford, the call letters KFKB come to mind. They were assigned in 1923 to the Milford radio station owned and operated by John R. Brinkley.
He told everyone he was doctor, although his degree came from a diploma mill known as the Eclectic Medical University of Kansas City. But it was his radio station that literally brought him world wide fame.
KFKB (“Kansas First, Kansas Best”) became his promotion medium, and although he promoted lot of patent medicines, his most renowned product was a surgical operation for men who wanted to regain their sexual prowess.
Brinkley would take to the airwaves between the standard radio shows of the day and read letters purportedly sent by listeners to “help all of my many, troubled friends out there in radio land.” He would then tell him which of his so-called “medicines” were right for their ailments.
For those men whose problems were of the unmentionable sexual nature, Brinkley prescribed a trip to his hospital adjacent to the radio studio in Milford. There, for a fee of $750, he would perform the surgery that would restore their manhood. That surgery consisted of implanting material from goat glands onto the patients’ testicles.
Let that soak in for a minute and you’ll understand what I’m getting at here. This man used the power of his radio station to persuade men to go to some godforsaken town in the middle of Kansas in the 1920s and then allow him to cut on their sack of jewels and put parts of a goat onto their jewels.
His sales pitch: “Note the difference between the stallion and the gelding. The stallion stands erect, neck arched, mane flowing, champing the bit, stamping the ground, seeking the female, while the gelding stands around half asleep, going into action when goaded, cowardly, listless, with no interest in anything.”
Talk about the power of radio! The $750 they paid him for the surgery is the equivalent of over $9,000 today.
Of course, his scam didn’t last. The American Medical Association and Federal Radio Commission pretty much shut down his radio station in 1930. He ran for governor several times and then faded into the background, but his ads on the radio had brought him untold wealth.
At his peak, the good doctor owned three yachts (one of which was 150 feet long), real estate, a radio station that could be heard all over the continent and a huge collection of valuable diamonds.
That, my friends, shows you how powerful radio’s persuasiveness was in its early days. That’s when people actually listened to what was said.
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