John R. Brinkley was born in 1885 in the North Carolina mountains and trained at diploma mills, among them Bennett Medical College of Chicago. Arkansas licensed him anyway. In Milford, Kansas, from 1918 he sold a $750 operation that claimed to restore male virility with implanted goat glands, and in 1923 he built KFKB, a radio station where he diagnosed ailments and promoted his own medicines. Morris Fishbein of the American Medical Association attacked him in 1928. In 1930 the Kansas State Medical Board revoked his licence and the Federal Radio Commission refused to renew his broadcast licence.
A transmitter across the river
In 1931 Mexican officials authorized Brinkley to build a transmitter at Villa Acuña, across the Rio Grande from Del Rio. Mexico had barred him from entering the country, so Mexican friends held the stock on his behalf. Accounts date the first broadcast from the fall of 1931 to August 1932, at 50,000 to 100,000 watts, and within two years the station was said to reach 500,000. He ran it by telephone from Del Rio, and in 1933 moved his clinic into the Roswell Hotel. On the air he sold ampules of colored water, six for $100. In Texas he rarely implanted goat glands, using commercial glandular preparations, and he promoted prostate operations. He is estimated to have taken in $12 million from 1933 to 1938.
Carters, towers and a pink house
The station was called XER and, by 1935, XERA. From 1938 to 1941 it carried the Carter Family, and June Carter Cash, who sang there as a child, remembered the music turning up along every barbed-wire fence in Texas. In 1934 Brinkley and his wife Minnie bought a house at the edge of town and enlarged it. The grounds held a menagerie, flashing colored lights and loudspeakers wired to a pipe organ, and townspeople came to dance. In 1938 he moved his medical practice to Little Rock, reportedly after another Del Rio doctor offered the same operation for less. He lost a libel suit against Fishbein, in which a judge called him a charlatan and a quack, and fought malpractice suits and the Internal Revenue Service over back taxes.
The wavelength and the towers
Mexico had already forced XER off the air once, in 1933 or 1934 by different accounts, and new rules required Mexican owners, Spanish-language programs and mostly Mexican staff. The larger blow was a treaty. The North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement, negotiated from 1937 to 1941, outlawed bootleg stations, and it took effect on March 29, 1941. Under American pressure Mexico denied XERA a wavelength and sent the army to pull down its towers; one history dates the confiscation to 1941. Brinkley declared bankruptcy that January. A federal grand jury indicted him for mail fraud that September, and he died in San Antonio on May 26, 1942, before any trial.
After the war XERF took the Acuña frequency, Webb Pierce and Jim Reeves sang on it with Paul Kallinger, and in the early 1960s Bob Smith became Wolfman Jack there. Mexico seized XERF in 1986.
The mansion is a private home, but the border-radio exhibit is open at the Whitehead Memorial Museum in Del Rio, and the Carter Family marker stands in town.