Generations and Other True Stories (28 page)

There was no scientific evidence that the chemicals most commonly found in the water—calcium, magnesium, and sulfates in the form of Glauber's and Epsom salts—were capable of working such wonders. But there's no denying that the Crazy Water, as it came to be called, and its competitor brands from other wells worked powerfully well as diuretics and laxatives.

An early ad for the Crazy Water Pavilion hawks various strengths of the stuff ranging from No. 1, the mildest, to No. 4, the most potent. Near the pavilion where the waters were served up to the puny stood a staircase of some one thousand wooden steps leading to the top of a hill. Many of the patients, after drinking a few glasses, would climb the stairs for their exercise.

The locals still swear that spectators could tell whether a patient had indulged in No. 1, 2, 3, or 4 water by noting how far up the stairway he got before having to turn around and run back down.

The pavilions—gazebo-like affairs built around the wells—became centers of social life as well as treatment centers. Chairs and tables were provided, so the patients could drink and visit in comfort. Sometimes they played dominoes or checkers or cards. The fancier pavilions even offered orchestra music and dancing. Bath houses, hotels, and rooming houses grew up around them.

By the 1910s and ‘20s, the socializing had become almost as important as the therapeutics, and folks were making a good living figuring out things for the patients to do between their drinking and bathing and restroom sessions. When a rich widower rancher wanted to meet a lonely widow, he was likely to come to Mineral Wells, for it was easy to meet people and strike up courtships there.

Widows knew this, too.

Those couples who were only moderately sickly could rent donkeys and ride them about the Palo Pinto hills and loll in romantic nooks among the rocks and trees. The less hearty or more sedate could ride a streetcar to Lake Pinto or Elmhurst Park for boating and picnicking. The little town of some 4,000 or 5,000 people was attracting 100,000 to 150,000 visitors a year, and most of them were staying a few weeks or several months at a time.

In 1925 a fire destroyed the Crazy Hotel, Mineral Wells' most famous landmark, dealing the town a discouraging blow. But a year later, Dallas financier Carr P. Collins—a fervent believer in Crazy Water's curative powers—and his brother Hal bought the well and the burned-out hotel and began construction of a new, million-dollar, two hundred-room, fireproof Crazy with a beautiful roof garden for dancing, a huge bath house and massage parlor in the basement, and a drinking pavilion featuring a row of doctors' offices and a long, elaborate, Moorish-looking bar at which patients could order a tall glass of No. 1, 2, 3, or 4.

“The doctors would prescribe the water,” says Ron Walker. “They'd say, ‘Take twelve twelve-ounce glasses of No. 3 a day' It was a helluva deal. They were all in on selling the hype—the doctors, the Collins brothers, everybody.”

For sufferers who were too far away to seek relief at the Crazy Hotel, or couldn't afford the trip, the Collins brothers had a factory that evaporated Crazy Water and packaged the mineral residue. Crazy Water Crystals were purveyed over drugstore counters throughout the country and several foreign realms, so that the puny could mix a spoonful of the crystals into a glass of ordinary water at home and enjoy the same blessed result as those who were bellying up to the Crazy's water bar.

“I heard that even back during the Depression the Collins Brothers were doing eleven million dollars in business a year from the hotel, the bath house and selling the water and the crystals,” Mr. Walker says. “Eleven million dollars a year during the Depression!”

By the time the new Crazy opened in 1927, another, even larger hotel was under construction only a couple of blocks away. And it would be T.B. Baker, owner of the Baker Hotel in Dallas, the Gunter and the St. Anthony in San Antonio, and several other of Texas' finest hostelries, who would usher little Mineral Wells into its truly Golden Age.

Charles Pool is sitting on a counter stool at Murray's Grill, which he owns, looking through the plate-glass window at the Baker Hotel across the street. “People came from all over the world,” he says. “Some of them would stay six, eight months, a year at a time, drinking that mineral water, taking those baths and massages. They said it really got them back on their feet. They said they would limp in and walk out.”

Mr. Pool went to work at the Baker in 1949, when he was fifteen. He started as a hall boy, or janitor, then was promoted to bus boy, then waiter, then bartender, then cook. When he quit in 1970 he was manager of the hotel's food department.

“It has 450 rooms,” he says, “but you'd have to make reservations six weeks ahead of time to get in. Once you were in there, you never had to leave. Anything you wanted was right there in that hotel.”

The Baker, fourteen stories and almost as wide as it is high, looms over Mineral Wells like a cathedral over a European village. Even now that the population has grown to some fifteen thousand, it's still the town's dominant landmark, and in its heyday was the center of the way of life that gave Mineral Wells its origin and reason for being.

The hotel opened in 1929, two weeks after the Black Friday crash of the stock market drove the country into the Great Depression. But while most of the country was suffering, Mineral Wells was enjoying not only prosperity, but glamour.

The Collins brothers set up a radio station in the lobby of the Crazy and broadcast live music and comedy daily over the Texas Quality Network and weekly over the nationwide NBC hookup, hawking their Crazy Water Crystals and making the whole nation aware of Mineral Wells and its amazing water.

“The Baker packaged its own brand of water crystals, called Pronto-Lax. It was powerful stuff,” says Vernon Daniels, who worked at the Baker from 1935 until 1962 and was its general manager for the last ten years of his stay. “But we didn't get into shipping it all over the United States as the Crazy did. We didn't want to sell the water to people in other places. We wanted them to come to the Baker and drink it.”

Well, come they did. The Baker quickly became an “in” spot for the rich and famous to see and be seen in. “The leading doctors were all in the Baker Hotel,” Mr. Daniels says, “and they had a great clientele from all over the United States. People would come to the Baker, mostly on the recommendation of their doctors back home, and they all would stay at least a week—some for several weeks at a time—and would drink the water. We had it flowing through a fountain in the lobby, and they could have all they wanted, and they would go up to the bath department on the second floor every day for their baths and massages.”

Will Rogers was a frequent visitor to the Baker. Tom Mix signed its register, too, and Clark Gable, Marlene Dietrich, Jack Dempsey, Helen Keller, Roy Rogers, Ronald Reagan, Gen. John J. Pershing, Pres. Franklin Roosevelt's son Elliot, Pres. Harry Truman's vice president, Alben Barkley, Sam Goldwyn, Lyndon Johnson, Sam Rayburn, Minnie Pearl, Judy Garland, Joan Blondell, Harpo Marx,
Our Gang's
Spanky McFarland, and even the Three Stooges. Charles Pool remembers serving breakfast to Wild Bill Elliott, the cowboy star, every morning. “He had a ranch out west of town here,” Mr. Pool says, “but he lived at the hotel.”

Most of the celebrities came by train from Hollywood and New York. “We picked them up at Millsap, nine miles from here,” says Mr. Daniels. “That was our railroad station. We would send a car and drive them to the hotel. They were very ordinary people. So down-to-earth. They liked to sit around and talk, and they just mingled with the other guests.”

The Baker had a social hostess who greeted them as they arrived. She would ask if they liked to play bridge or other card games, and would arrange for like-minded people to get together. There was bingo every night on the West Terrace, dancing in the ballroom, sunbathing in the garden and swimming in the large outdoor pool. The locals say the Baker was the second hotel in the United States to have a swimming pool.

“But people stayed for long periods of time,” says Ninfa Daniels, Vernon's wife. “In a little town like Mineral Wells, where there's really nothing going on—we had one movie theater and that was it—what in the world did they do with themselves? But they never complained. And of course a lot of their time was taken up with their massages, their baths, their facials. And they loved sitting on the veranda. I can still see them, in their rocking chairs.”

For twenty-five years, Jack Amlung and his Orchestra—which had been hired away from the Crazy—played in the lobby and ballroom and, later, in the hotel's swanky Brazos Club. Sometimes entertainers would be hired from outside as well. Some, like Paul Whiteman's orchestra, already were famous. Others soon would be. A young accordion player named Lawrence Welk, “whose English was really atrocious,” says Mrs. Daniels, played the Baker when he was starting out. So did a young North Texas State College student named Pat Boone and a young dancer from Weatherford named Mary Martin.

For the less-affluent guests, the Baker offered a weekly package plan that included a room, three meals a day, a daily bath and massage, and all the mineral water the guest could drink. “The baths consisted of steam heat or dry heat, either one you wanted or both, the tub bath, a massage and shower,” says Mr. Daniels. “Other things, like facials, were optional. In the late '30s, the package plan was thirty-five dollars a week.”

From the time it opened, the opulent Baker, built in the Spanish Colonial Commercial style so popular in the '20s, was the hub of the town's social life as well. “Everything revolved around the hotel,” Mrs. Daniels says. “I was so surprised that so many, many people—I mean all the ones that were invited—would not miss the big eggnog party that the hotel management gave every year on Christmas morning. You'd think they would want to stay at home with their families on Christmas of all mornings, but, listen, they all came. It was by invitation only, and they wanted everyone to know that they were in the ‘in' crowd. If you weren't there, people might think you hadn't gotten an invitation. And they were all decked out to the hilt with furs and hats and gloves. The whole shebang.”

“But the baths were what the Baker was all about,” says Mr. Daniels. “They really did seem to help the health of the people who came. I've often wondered if it wasn't the rest and relaxation that helped them more than anything else. You take it easy and get a massage every day, you're bound to feel better. But they just
knew
the water did it.”

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Daniels says. “They were so positive. They would say, ‘I could hardly walk when I got here. Now look at me!' ”

“The water didn't taste very good,” Mr. Daniels says. “But everybody loved it. I guess if it had tasted real good, it wouldn't have had the medicinal value.”

As early as 1933, the federal Food and Drug Administration had been hounding the Collins brothers about the medical claims they made in their advertising of Crazy Water Crystals. And as Franklin Roosevelt's administration stepped up its efforts to reform and regulate the over-the-counter medicine business, the promises that the Collinses made on their packages became more and more modest.

“The crystals were simply a mild laxative,” says A.F. Weaver, Jr., whose father had been the auditor and purchasing agent for the Collins brothers and later bought the Crazy Water Crystals side of their business.

The younger Weaver peddled the crystals in the Houston and New Orleans markets for his father, pulling up to the drugstores in a Mercury with a big Crazy Water Crystals box on its roof. When Mr. Weaver, Sr. died in 1949, his widow and son sold their stock and got out of the business.

“A lot of people came here to drink their way to health, and I think a lot of them did,” Mr. Weaver says. “I've seen people brought in on stretchers from ambulances. I've seen them come in on crutches, and later you'd see them walking around just fine. They'd drink the water with the mild laxative and take the baths and get the rubdowns and work their bodies and walk—things we should do in this day and time—and they'd get cured. Then the war came along, and there went the mineral water.”

World War II would change Mineral Wells more than it realized at the time. In 1941 the Army opened Camp Wolters—which later was renamed Fort Wolters—as an infantry replacement training center, outside the town. When, after Pearl Harbor, the rationing of gasoline made travel for pleasure or even for health impossible for most Americans, the Crazy and the Baker became dependent on the GIs and their families to keep their doors open. But the new customers had neither the money nor the leisure to indulge in mineral baths and massages. And most of the celebrities who visited Mineral Wells during the war years came to entertain the troops. They didn't stay long.

What really ended the town's Golden Age, however, were the medical advances made during the war. “Suddenly you had sulfa drugs and penicillin and other antibiotics, and you didn't see the doctors recommending that their patients go to health resorts,” Mr. Daniels says. “They kept them home and gave them shots. So for ten bucks or whatever, the patient could get well without coming and spending a week at the Baker.”

After the magic of the waters faded, the Crazy, and especially the Baker, looked to small conventions and non-medicinal vacation packages for their survival. “The Democratic State Convention was held at the Baker several times,” Mr. Daniels says, “and so was the Republican State Convention of 1952, where the groundswell to nominate Eisenhower is said to have begun. And we would promote such packages as the Indian Summer Vacation between Labor Day and Thanksgiving. We would have as many as one hundred rooms every week on that package. It was very popular, mostly with prominent Dallas and Fort Worth people—the Murchisons, the Hunt family, the Bass family from Fort Worth, Sid Richardson, their uncle. They all came for baths and massages. The bath department always remained busy. The mineral water was the thing that dropped off in demand. People didn't drink it as much anymore. They switched to scotch and soda.”