If you’ve ever driven between LA and Vegas, you might have wondered about an exit near Baker called Zzyzx. Well, as you suspected, there’s a story behind that.
The Con Artist
Curtis Howard Springer was a con man who sold miracle cures in the midwest in the 1930s. To expand his operation, he bought “mining” rights on public lands in the Mojave Desert in California. With the help of destitute laborers from Los Angeles, he built an oasis at a Native American spring on the edge of Soda Lake, the white mineral flats in the background above. He named his desert retreat Zzyzx: the ‘last word’ in healthcare. Styling himself both a medical doctor and a minister—despite his 9th grade education—he started a radio program to sell his cure-alls.
- Antediluvian Herb Tea
- Hollywood Pep Cocktail
- Nerve Cell Food
The Con
His 15 minute radio infomercial pitch sounded soothing and wholesome, with choral background music perfect for rural Christian radio programs. Many complex ailments resulted from lack of simple nutrients. On his “20,000 acre healthcare resort”, his staff prepared all-natural remedies in powder form as a delicious dietary supplement that could be added to any kind of food or drink. He invited folks to send a small ‘donation’ for a two month supply and to visit Zzyzx, his remote desert oasis, to soak in a mineral bath or seek further treatment.
While an ex-employee later admitted that the main formula was 10% crust from Soda Lake and 90% epsom salt—a bath additive & laxative—, soon the small desert rail stop near Baker California was bustling with mailed requests and shipments of cheap salty powder. The radio infomercials aired across the country for decades, and many folks drove out into the desert, some staying for weeks, placing their faith in the Reverend Dr Springer, PhD.
The Collapse
While extremely popular through the 1940s and 1950s, there was a slow decline in the 1960s as hippies started popularizing bean sprouts, brown rice, carrot juice, organic vegetables, seaweed, skim milk and tofu, as actually healthy dietary alternatives to the high sugar, highly processed food sold by major corporations.
Then the IRS investigated Mr Springer for tax evasion. And then the FDA charged him with false advertising. And, despite letting Springer occupy and falsely claim to own 20,000 acres of our public land for over 30 years, the Bureau of Land Management eventually disputed Mr Springer’s “mining claim”. After serving a too brief stint in jail, Springer retired to Las Vegas.
The Victims
While traveling through the Mojave Desert recently, I stopped to charge at a casino in 29 Palms, near Joshua Tree. Inside for a sandwich and a freshly squeezed orange juice, as a retired analyst I categorized all the customers at the slot machines. The most obvious difference between them and the general public was how many folks had health problems. I saw more canes, hearing aids, nebulizers, oxygen compressors, scooters and walkers than you would in an average hospital hallway. Unlike the flashily dressed smiling young folk in casino commercials, the customer here moved very slowly and looked quite sad. The staff members invariably asked their customers how they were feeling and wished them luck. If they were feeling poorly, they could continue playing at the bar or visit the pot store in the parking lot.
While I don’t know much about Springer’s victims, I suppose being fearful of imminent mortality makes folks desperate for a miracle.
The Commonalities of Cons
Springer’s radio show was similar to Father Coughlin before him and James Dobson after him. Coughlin had a widespread following through the 1930s among Catholics, and his show had a strong undercurrent of antisemitism and pro-Nazism, until the FBI shut him down in 1942. I first heard Dobson’s radio show on Armed Forces radio in Japan in the late 1980s. While much of the program was benign palaver, you could hear the homophobic undertones and hateful ultraconservative views, disguised as homey homilies.
First, right wing actors have long been better at both leveraging low-cost media and targeting rural religious folk for both cons and conservative causes. Simple, gullible, less-educated folk are more susceptible to a sugar-coated scam than cynical college-educated city-dwellers.
Second, the most popular conmen are not real experts. They position themselves as closely to their listeners as possible, just having ‘a few friendly messages’ to share on topics they agree on. Rather than sounding any smarter than their listeners, the goal is to sound the same—to be your friend or your bro—, so they don’t need much expertise for that.
Third, con artists dress up their deception or hate in righteousness, appealing to religious beliefs or ‘moral’ indignation to hide their manipulative message from their target audience. They lie. But they sound just like your neighbor, repeating commonly held mistaken beliefs, except they do it intentionally, from a careful script.
Fourth, our government lets these liars stay on the air for decades, despite demonstrating corrosive behavior daily, allowing the damage to accumulate until long after it is undeniable.
Of Broken Dreams and Ghost Towns
“Round the decay/ Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare/ The lone and level sands stretch far away.” —Shelley
The Mojave Desert is strewn with ghost towns, and each has a story. There’s something seductive about the desert that offers the freedom to achieve your dream, at a very low cost. And after the dream inevitably breaks into dust, their efforts leave nostalgic roadside monuments to warn passers by of their folly.
A southern California chicken restaurant magnate bought the whole whistle stop town of Amboy on Ebay, and his Japanese American son dutifully keeps Roy’s Cafe open, despite his lack of licenses to sell cigarettes, liquor or lottery tickets.
A deserted, tumbleweed-choked, I-15 overpass market still promotes “Ron Paul’s RevoLution”—with “evoL” signifying “Love”—an echo of Senator Rand Paul’s father’s oft repeated campaign promise that if only we abolished the Federal Reserve the economy would be grand!
Of Fables
Some of the stories are more fables than fact. Calico’s ‘ghost town’ replays gunfights at noon, an ersatz Tombstone.
My favorite Mojave ghost town is entirely fictional. A German director was driving by and saw an old café on Route 66. He wrote and directed an English language film there loosely based on Carson McCullers’ Ballad of a Sad Cafe. His twist on the story was to update it with the story of Aladdin, with a gold colored coffee pot as the lamp and a stout German lady named Jasmin as the genie, who grants the wishes of an artist, an innkeeper and her pianist son.
The director temporarily renamed the cafe for his film, but an entrepreneur later bought the cafe and restored it as a tourist attraction. Since the film Bagdad Cafe was popular in Europe, busloads of French tourists still visit on their way to Vegas. More of a cult classic film in the US, Jean Stapleton and Whoopi Goldberg starred in an ill-fated TV version in the late 1980s. But the TV adaptation missed the atmospheric desert emptiness, the loneliness and sad miscommunication of the film and stopped after only a few episodes. You may remember Jevetta Steele’s theme song for the film below.
The 1987 film Bagdad Cafe was filmed here in the desert on historic Route 66.
Searching for the Moral on Route 66
The centennial of Route 66 is coming this November. Sadly, the lady who bought the Bagdad Cafe over 25 years ago died last month. She didn’t make much money, but her funeral was well attended. The cafe is still open, although, as in the beginning of the film, they were serving neither coffee nor food. Since the movie is almost 30 years old now, I’m not sure if the cafe will make it to the centennial.
But that’s the funny thing about dreams. Sometimes there’s an unrealistic hope that some folks just refuse to let die. Route 66 is a nostalgic boulevard of broken dreams and Americana, as “it winds from Chicago to LA/ over 2,000 miles all the way”.
Con artists love using nostalgia: “Make America Great Again”. Marks often pine for their youth and misremember the facts. ‘Oh, if you just follow this one weird trick, you’ll recapture your mythical youth’.
But artists and dreamers love nostalgia too. There are lessons among our regrets and losses. The film Bagdad Cafe explores our inability to understand each other, especially across racial and cultural boundaries, and the film is sympathetic to people who’ve loved and lost. But the moral, obviously, is to make an effort to communicate, to understand each other, to have empathy, and to make the best of our situations, even when all we have is each other.
Realizing our mistakes, even too late, still helps. Zzyzx is focused on education now, especially solar energy and the Mohave tui chub, a small fish which was inadvertently saved from extinction in Mr Springer’s oasis. Our public lands are set aside to protect nature and share it with future generations, not for the enrichment of selfish, entitled and greedy conmen.
Whither Now?
Con artists have come a long way in the past 50 years, but all cons crash eventually. When I see all the ruin that Trump is leaving in his wake, I wonder what will be left behind. Some more ghost towns for sure.
- Will the red-hatted rubes regret their votes?
- Will the political pendulum swing back towards sanity?
- Will any dishonest media outlets be held accountable for their lies and hate?
- Will healthcare be saved from quacks?
- Will truth and justice once again be the American way?
- Will the tired, poor and huddled masses, yearning to be free, be welcome once again?
- Will there be time to save more of America and our world from turning into desert or being submerged into the sea?
I don’t know, so let me know what you think in the comments. Thanks for reading.
