Mine was a spur of the moment picture taken while I was in Little Rock. Didn't have much time to look for a better subject. It's less than a mile from where my brother lived.
It's a place in East End Arkansas, a suburb of Little Rock. The building has a shady past. It has for quite a few decades now been known as Marylake Carmelite Friar's monastary, but the friars are not the source of it's darkness. Originally built in the 1920s by the Shriners as a country club, complete with the 2nd largest golf course in the state, and did well for awhile, but went bankrupt and the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine defaulted on their loan in the 30s and the property was sold to one Charles R. Brinkley (M.D.) for $50,000.
Some history on 'Dr' Brinkley:
Brinkley, had in fact attended medical school, but never completed it, but none the less, convinced the medical boards of several states to allow him to practice medicine as an eclectic, what we today might (kindly) call holistic or herbal medicine.
He promptly partnered with fellow huckster, James E. Crawford, to run a scam in Greenville, South Carolina. They called themselves the "Greenville Electro Medic Doctors" and injected colored distilled water into patients to increase their sexual vigor. After two months, Brinkley and Crawford skipped town, leaving their rent and bills unpaid.
He then moved to Kansas City and purchased a diploma. Because the Missouri Board of Health would not allow eclectics to take the licensing exam unless they paid $500 each, the graduates were bused to Little Rock, where they took the exams and received licenses to practice medicine. Brinkley also passed the Tennessee exam, and was licensed in Kansas through reciprocity. He later obtained licenses in Missouri, Texas, and Connecticut. Certain schools, known as "diploma mills," offered medical school diplomas for a price. And it was easy to get your license to practice, especially in Arkansas.
Brinkley had been toying around with the idea of transplanting animal glands into a human for a while, but he attempted it for the first time in 1917 in Milford. Supposedly, a farmer came to him complaining of impotence and prostate trouble. Brinkley suggested the surgery, and the farmer supplied the goat. The rest is history. Brinkley's second patient, William Stittsworth, would prove to be his poster child. Stittsworth had the goat gland operation, in which a portion of a goat testicle was grafted to one of his own, and then his wife had a goat ovary put into her body. A year later, the "rejuvenated" couple had a healthy baby boy. Word spread around town, and Brinkley completed several more successful operations. Then he started advertising in newspapers, using testimonials from his patients. In 1918 Brinkley built the Brinkley-Jones Hospital and Training School for Nurses in Milford. The 3-story building could accommodate 16 patients, and nurses lived on the top floor. There were pens in the back yard for the goats, which were shipped in from Arkansas (Horatio Dwight Osborn, MD, another doctor at the Brinkley-Jones Hospital, was from Harrison, AR).
He worked in several different hospitals, and did do 'regular surgeries like appendectomies, but his bread and butter was the goat gland thing and it really took off in the early 1920s, when many doctors in the U.S. and Europe were experimenting with glandular treatments and "rejuvenation" operations.
He built a radio station and started broadcasting as a medical advisor, sort of like some of the radio 'preachers' that you used to hear on radio, and of course used his 5000 watts of power to advertise his goat gland miracle work reaching out to the midwest and mid south.
It eventually all came apart, and he flew down to Mexico and opened a new radio station right across the border for Del Rio, Wolfman Jack style, and broadcast all over the country behind 50,000 watts of power.
Mexico, ad the bequest of the FCC eventually threw him out and dismantled the hi wattage transmitter.
His next stop, was the old Shriner's country club, which he bought and opened "The most beautiful hospital in the world". He continued to practice 'medicine' at the old country club turned hospital, but another shoe dropped for Brinkley in 1939, when he lost a libel suit against Morris Fishbein of the American Medical Association, exposing Brinkley's operation as little more than a partial vasectomy and his postoperative drug called Formula 1020 as colored water. A number of civil suits and judgments against Brinkley followed, and he declared bankruptcy on January 31, 1941. He sold the country club property to his associate, Dr. H. D. Osborn, and moved back to Del Rio. In September 1941, a federal grand jury indicted Brinkley, his wife, and six former employees on charges of using the United States Postal Service for fraud. Brinkley died of complications from a blood clot on May 26, 1942, before he could be brought to trial. He was buried in the Jones family plot (his wife's family) at Forest Hills cemetery in Memphis.
The building went thru several owners before the Carmelite friars bought it in 1951.
Now you know, 'the rest of the story'. It's quite nice inside and the rest of the grounds are well kept, but I hear the lake is only about 5' deep.
