[Granville-Hough] 2 Apr 2009 -

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Thu, 02 Apr 2009 06:29:43 -0800
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: Blue Language And the Jakewalk Blues - 2 April 2009

Harold Hopkins and I were schoolmates in Mize Grade School, Mize, 
MS.  As he was almost a year older than I, he was in the grade ahead of 
mine.  He became a journalist and worked for several government agencies 
in Washington, DC, in public relations.  He prepared this article for 
the Food and Drug Administration about 1980.  It seems most fitting that 
someone with personal experience with a victim of this Jakeleg malady 
got an opportunity to study it and see how it developed.  I hope you can 
follow through the next two installments of this history.

----------------------------------------

Prohibition, that noble experiment, is a chapter in America's 
history that will forever be studied and interpreted.  For one thing, 
the era encouraged lawbreaking -- often on a widespread scale and 
sometimes with tragic results.  Here's the story of one such tragedy and 
FDA's role in stemming it.

    By Harold Hopkins

    Fifty years ago when I was 8 and my dad was 34 (c 1930), we did some 
horse swapping.  I taught him to walk.  He taught me to cuss.
    He had developed a strange paralysis in his lower legs and feet, and 
the doctor had told him he's never walk again, and he said he'd be 
swizzzled if that was so, and that's how I entered the picture as his 
eldest -- and at that time only -- son.  In that summer of 1930 a part 
of the house was cleared of family clutter to make room for the business 
of walking.  Dad would get up from his chair, holding onto me for 
support.  As we started across the room he's let go, wave me away, and 
start out on his own.  in a step or two his legs would crumple under him 
and he'd sprawl headlong, full length across the floor, unable to drop 
to his knees to break the fall.  Then he'd empurple the air with 
profanity signifying his pain and frustration.  I'd help him up, and 
he'd try again across the room, hour upon hour, day after day.
    Every time he fell there came a string of oaths, with some 
imaginative variations.  I had heard him swear before at what he called 
his 'Gimp" hand when it, at times, refused to do whe he expected of it 
because it had stopped a piece of shrapnel years before I was born or 
even thought of (WW I).  Now he had a pair of gimp legs, and the 
epithets he heaped upon them were eloquent with authority.
    Although my end of the bargain was the easier one, I did get him 
walking again -- a grotesque, floundering mockery of a man headed 
somewhere.  It wasn't the finest of walks but it did get him to most of 
the places he wanted to go, though not again to the woods, fields, and 
streams that he loved to roam with gun or pole.
    In those silent distant summer days, as he sprawled helplessly on 
the floor, I learned to cuss too, and I had reason.  Not long prior to 
the onset of paralysis he had, one morning, given in to my childish 
wheedling and had taken me with him on a hunt through the woods -- my 
first.  I had to run to keep up.  We saw no game, but he showed me how 
to aim and shoot the Winchester 20 gage at a piece of  newspaper 
fastened to a tree.  It was the first time I ever fired a real gun and 
its roar told me of time to come then the piece of paper would be a 
quail, a rabbit, or something bigger.
    So in our later walking sessions in that hot southern summer of 
1930, as he lay on the floor gathering up his resolve, I swore silently 
and methodically at the immpersonal, unknown forces that had deprived me 
of my hunting partner and made me -- before my two brothers came along 
-- the only able bodied male in the house.
    There was never any mystery about how he got his paralysis, but only 
as I grew older did I come to realize the events leading to it were 
neither impersonal nor unknown.  My father had become one of thousands 
of victims of a part tragedy, part cruel joke known as the Jakeleg, a 
numbness and permanent paralysis of the lower legs and feet from 
drinking a toxic substance called triorthocresyl phosphate.  That 
chemical had been illegally used to adulterate a popular 
over-the-counter drug product, fluid extract of Jamaica ginger.  The 
label on Jamaica ginger  extract, which its users often called :jake" 
recommended it use to relieve several common symptoms, and the usual 
dose was a few drops in a glass of sweetened water.  But its real 
marketability was in its us as an alcoholic beverage by people 
frustrated at the 18th amendment's nonsense proscribing the sale of 
alcoholic beverages.
    Thus, jake was a legal product used illegally.  In our State 
(Mississippi) it was sold covertly and sometimes openly, depending on 
the temperance of the times and place, in drugstores and corner 
groceries, by the bottle or by the case.  one of the flat 2-oz bottles 
fit easily into a shirtpocket.
    The Great Jakewalk of 1930 was a mass poisoning that, in number of 
lives blighted, made the sulfanilamide tragety of 1937 and the 
thalidomide disaster of the late 1950s very small potatoes.  Yet, 
despite the numbers it affected -- estimates have ranged from 35,000 to 
50,000 -- and dispite the flurry of popular songs about jakewalking 
blues and jakewalking daddies and the sly jokes about little old ladies 
and pious parsons laid low by an affliction they could but refuse to 
acknowledge, this wide epidemic went relatively unnoticed in the press 
and has been largely bypassed in the annals of the Depression years.