John Romulus Brinkley made a fortune implanting goat glands in men who wanted their youth back. The operation cured nothing and killed people: by 1930 he had signed death certificates for dozens of patients, many of whom had arrived healthy, and he faced a run of wrongful death suits. That year Kansas revoked his medical licence and the federal radio commission refused to renew his station, so he moved to Del Rio and put a transmitter where American law could not reach it. Mexican officials granted him the authority in 1931, and XER signed on that October from Villa Acuna, on the far bank of the Rio Grande. It started at fifty thousand watts, which was exactly the United States ceiling, and Mexico kept raising it. By 1938, rebuilt as XERA, it ran something over half a million watts aimed north, and was heard in every state and fifteen other countries. Brinkley moved his clinic into the Roswell Hotel in Del Rio in 1933 and sold listeners ampules of coloured water, six for a hundred dollars. What outlasted the medicine was the radio. The hours between his broadcasts were filled with hillbilly acts, gospel quartets and fortune tellers, and in 1938 and 1939 the Carter Family lived in Del Rio and sang from the studio there, put on air by a patent medicine sponsor, reaching an audience no Nashville station could touch. Brinkley died penniless in 1942. A later border station made Wolfman Jack famous. Two buildings survive: his house on Qualia Drive, and the hotel downtown that held the clinic and the studios.
Getting there
29.3405, -100.9021
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