I only dreamed of actually going inside it.  The Brinkley Estate was the classic haunted house.  It was difficult to see much because the grounds were so overgrown.  The once famous Bermuda lawns were patches of dirt littered with dead branches and palm leaves piled where they had fallen. The rusted gates still emblazoned with arched placards reading “Doctor Brinkley”.  Enormous Iron lights on countless brick fence posts still had a few of the globes with “Brinkley” etched in the glass.  The mammoth fountains were as large as most swimming pools, twin monsters built by General Electric for the Chicago World’s Fair.

  They were dry and still now.  A large bronze of Romulus and Remus, suckling on the she wolf stood just inside the main gates in the middle of a fork in the drive, stood ominous atop a mammoth marble plinth.  Daily visitors and family turned left up to the front door, but party goers went right, but that was too many years ago for any would be visitor now to discern.  The idea that any visitors still passed through these gates seemed unlikely…but there were three main entrances just on the front of the estate alone.  Near the front door, you could see the base of a once enormous pedestal that had borne the statue of Winged Victory, Brinkley’s favorite.  It had been moved to his grave some thirty years before.


It would be the several years later, 1974, before I would first enter that mansion.  I had written a school paper on the Brinkleys.  My grandfather excited me with his accounts of the Doctor.  My grandfather was a second generation rancher who would sit in the lobby or coffee shop of the Roswell Hotel to tell tales with the other local ranchers.  Brinkley’s hospital had been located on the 6th floor of the hotel, his offices on the mezzanine, and x-ray work was done in the basement.  My grandfather was impressed with Brinkley and spoke well of him.  His stories left me with an image of a rugged but magic era, now long passed.  I was so moved that I wanted to meet Brinkley’s widow.  I thought that a reception should be held in her honor and to honor such an amazing life.  A friend of mine agreed to help coordinate the event.  Since we were only school children, the party proved too great a challenge for kids with little ready cash and no transportation.  I had called Mrs. Brinkley to tell her how great I thought she was and of our plans.  She treated me as if I were an adult and was delighted by the intention.  We had several conversations and she invited me to come and see her.  This was only a block from my grandparent’s home, so I was able to go by myself. 


It was all magic, like the secret garden.  It was the kind of magic lacking in things that are new and even disappears in conservation and restoration.  It is that strange harmony between the things created by man and those sculpted by Mother Nature, with wind and rain and sun.  I saw this in the colors of the house, now with a perfect patina, of a once well laid landscape, left to go wild.  Every element was interesting and inspired curiosity.  The interior matched the exterior perfectly.  It was perfect for a haunted house, yet so inviting.  It was extraordinarily impressive, but the age had removed its pretense and replaced it with wonder.  Minnie Telitha Brinkley, the celebrity of the 1930’s was also without pretense.  She had been beautiful, with furs and diamonds and money beyond even my imagination.  Now, she received me warmly, a strangely tiny thing, with fogged glasses.  Most noticeable was a ball of cotton, not discretely placed in her left nostril.  A portion of her nose had proved cancerous and was cut away, the cotton was a strange aesthetic prostheses. 


The money had run out some years before and the desperation of this reality intensified with each several months that passed.  But all of this did not diminish her in any way.  They were layers, now peeled away, that revealed what was inside.  She was a strangely practical and strong person.  She liked people.  We spoke comfortably as if she was my grandmother and I had dropped by for a visit.  She told me stories about Doctor…too many to recount here.  She held court in the dining room, a room of immense volume just to the right as I entered the house.  She must have passed countless hours sitting at this table with her visitors.  She loved to converse, not just to talk.  Her stories had life in them, recounted with sincerity and they were interesting stories, as if recent events.  She allowed me entrance into the most impressive space in that vast house. 


The music room was only one room beyond the dining room.  She opened one of the pair of nine foot cathedral doors each made up of countless glass panes.  The door hinted the room…every surface was black walnut.  The room was disserving of the dropped jaw of every honest entrant.  It is an awesome room.  At one end, the mighty Brinkley pipe organ, having 1063 pipes, some the size of a cigarette, others 16 feet in length constituted the heart of the house.  The pipes were hidden in pipe rooms behind a walnut partition curtained in priceless drapes and iron work and flanked by turned columns of carved walnut with gilt Corinthian capitals supporting giant coffers of ceiling that spanned the 40 foot room.  Three chandeliers defined the ceiling, the sixteen arms of each were hand blown cut crystal set in silver mounts and numbered at their base in sequence throughout the room. 
At the other end of the room, the master’s staircase failed at its attempt to be modest as it ascended several landings before arriving at the Brinkley’s private suite which was larger than the entire home of most families.   The details could not be appreciated, even in several visits.  Mrs. Brinkley mentioned her night lights.  One was over seven feet high, a carved marble statue of Daphne and Apollo, topped with a carved globe of alabaster, lit from inside, that provided a warm glow when lit.  The other was an enormous clam, also of stone.  It was open with carved cherubs inside that played with a pearl, lit from inside to create another light source.  A large table sat in the room’s center where Doctor had sat on a red velvet chair and spoke remotely over XER the world most powerful radio station.  His left hand, possibly weary from his 13 carat diamond solitaire ring, rested on the carved head of a falcon that formed each arm of the chair. 


Brinkley had placed a bed from his hospital in this very room.  He had recuperated after the amputation of his leg following a blood clot in 1941.  He ran his empire from this room while Mr. Otoole played for him on the mighty Brinkley Organ.  Bronze placards on the organ bench and stairs attested to his ownership…Brinkley’s name could be found emblazoned everywhere…on china and crystal, it even glowed in neon through the splashing water of the fountains at night, seventeen places that I could recount from the architecture inside and out, on this visit alone.   And in the middle of all this, Mrs. Brinkley had endured, more than thirty years since his death.  Everything had stood in quiet tribute to its creator.  But time had been collecting its due for nothing lasts forever.  I could not have known then how much and how quickly that world would change. 

I had the great fortune to grow up with interesting people who dramatically influenced my childhood.  I preferred adults to children my age and among the more interesting of these was Iliana.  She was part American Indian, and this enhanced her greatly with a certain connection to the world around her.  Her husband, Walter, was an architect, choosing to build Pizza Huts over the less dependable income of residential design projects.   I would spend hours with Iliana.  We would sit in her living room and drink herbal teas.  Her home was on stilts over a rugged bluff.  We were surrounded by windows on all sides, inches from virtually untouched nature.  We talked about everything imaginable and she had a great impact on my way of thinking that must certainly be a part of my life still. 
On some days, my visit would go longer than intended and Walter would return from work.  Osito, Spanish for “little bear”, would bark to announce his arrival.  Walter was a tall man with a youthful leanness.  He wore designer jeans and long gray hair with a mustache that made him look like Arizona’s version of Samuel Longhorn Clements.  His large and showy turquoise and silver jewelry stood out in a conservative town, but his consummate and warm ability to communicate made him a welcome addition even in a sometimes small town mentality. 
On this day, he seemed particularly inspired.  He was designing a subdivision that would utilize an historic estate.  He would create sites for thirty plus homes utilizing the grounds.  The original mansion of the estate would be a community club complete with its original tennis court and pool.  They would even restore the pools beautiful tile work, thousands of tiny one inch pieces that comprised its Olympic proportions and spelled out the name of its owner…”Doctor Brinkley”. 
Few excitements in my youth are more memorable than these.  Walter promised to take us to the estate any time and as much as we wanted.  We would have free access to every closet and every inch of grounds.  It was this boy’s dream come true.   Previous dreams of hosting a reception for Mrs. Brinkley seemed small compared to the scope of my current aspirations.  I had already opened a library.  It was still a small project, occupying half of my bedroom’s closet, but it swelled with a growing collection, meticulously catalogued on 3 X 5 index cards in a metal file box that my grandfather donated.  In addition to at least a dozen books, some with hard covers, the library also featured my personal vertical files, papers from my personal writings and an unparalleled collection of natural history objects…stones, dried insects and several objects that had, as yet, defied identification and thereby represented the highlights of the display. 
But now I would visit the Brinkley Mansion.  I never dared take a camera before.  My mother would gladly surrender her little instamatic as she had done for my library service club field trip to San Antonio the year before—this was bigger than that.  The pictures and notes of the coming visits would constitute, to date, the most important part of my new library’s collections. 
We would make several trips to see the house.  There was the red tape: permission from my mother to go somewhere with adults required formal request and calls between adults to confirm information that I had already clearly provided.  Our first trip required that I was silent and well mannered.  I was my mother’s pride at this task.  Our dinners at home had always evidenced this fact.  My brother and I would stand behind our chairs and wait for my mother to be seated.  My father would hold her chair for her.  After she took her seat, he would seemingly help her to move the chair back in place.  He would then kiss her right cheek.  She always caught his right hand with her finger tips to say “thank you sweetheart”.  We were then free to take our seats with our father and have our napkins across our laps before our chairs were long settled in place.  Don’t get the wrong picture as we were quite middle class, but ceremony created a reverence that shaped my life and how I view the world.
And so I was quiet and well mannered as Walter and Iliana spoke in quietly respectful sentences with Mrs. Brinkley.  Angela, who I learned about from my conversations with Iliana, was Mrs. Brinkley’s granddaughter.  Mrs. Brinkley had raised her while her father moved to Manhattan after the brief and the single marriage of his life.  Walter would later comment, in the privacy of the car, that he seemed queer and that men of this type should be taken out behind a barn and shot.  This description of Johnny Boy made him sound at once interesting and unique; so, I never forgot how quietly odd I felt at this judgment that completed his thought, this, from a man I had so respected until this statement.
Mrs. Brinkley apologized that Angela was not downstairs, but promised that she would be down in a moment.  The conversation was so polite and measured, though slightly awkward.  The two women were the home’s sole occupants with the exception of a couple that lived over the garage a short distance from the main house.   Everything was as I remembered from my previous visit with the absence of some of the famous pieces.  Statues and rugs had started to disappear, signs of coming change. 
One change was noticeable in Angela who now descended the stairs.  She was suddenly a woman, strikingly attractive.  She seemed to be a ghost from the past.  The influence of and isolation with her elderly guardian were given away by her appearance, like something from the past.  She looked like some glamorous young starlit of yesteryear.  Her hair fell about her shoulders in big waves and curls, her makeup was almost white which set off her bright red lipstick.  She wore a wool pantsuit that seemed like some vintage classic from her grandmother’s closet, too sophisticated to be typical fashion for a local girl of sixteen.  I would learn later that she had managed to be quite a normal and popular girl at school.  This was in such contrast to her father’s childhood in the same town.  He had bodyguards and his own limousine and was discouraged from interacting with other children. 
But Angela was even more comfortable here, in her family’s home of three generations now.  She was polite and charming.  Details of their departure from the home were discussed.  She and her grandmother would live together in a condominium.  Things were being sold off.  Many treasures, too sentimental to sell, would be placed in several local storage units.  I wandered around the grounds while the adults finished talking. 
There were a couple of other visits, mostly driving by or walking around the property and these  did not necessitate disturbing the family.  I only heard whispers about it, but I found out that Johnny Boy had killed himself.  He had called his mother one day, demanding money.  He was a boy who had never known where money comes from.  His parents had always provided for him and now his mother had nothing left to give him.  He ended the conversation and his life with a Luger pistol.  The certainty of the sale of the estate had come too late to offer him hope.  But a year after his death, in 1978, the sale was final and the ground was broken for the new subdivision.  The small sum ultimately paid at the end would have probably done little to materially change his financial state.
The dream of Brinkley Estates began to tarnish long before it ever shined.  The need for profit demanded that the pool and tennis courts be destroyed to create more lots.  The house would be segregated for sale and part of this would be chiseled a little more to desperately create yet two more home sites.  A mistake in the survey would mean that the mansions new boundary would move the fence over the top of the end of one of those famous fountains…part of its pool left on the other side of the fence in a final insult to the former glory of the estate. 
Ground was broken for the subdivision in 1978, months after Johnny Boy’s death.  The press would photograph Mrs. Brinkley and her granddaughter turning the first shovel of dirt.  It was Mrs. Brinkley’s last appearance as a celebrity.  She blew kisses to the small crowd and thanked them as casually as she’d done half a century before. 

A Typical Thursday Night at the Brinkley Estate, Avenue of Palms, Hudson Gardens


Doctor Brinkley sat and made corrections to the latest edition of the “Doctor Book” which had always been his core marketing tool.  He was returning home from a week at his hospitals in Arkansas at an altitude of 4500 feet and airspeed of 188 mph.  Within an hour, the shiny aluminum Lockheed Electra touched down at the airstrip in Del Rio.  Mr. Otoole met the Doctor and drove him home.  Within several minutes, the sixteen cylinder, custom built Cadillac limousine had delivered them to the Avenue of Palms, Hudson Gardens.  As they made the right turn down the palm lined street, no one could have guessed that the towering palms marking that path, had only been there for three years and had replaced the previously barren expanses of ceniza, with nothing growing more than two feet high.  As they approached the mansion, Brinkley waved in his jovial fashion to the tourists that had already gathered in the 4 acre park that he had built across the street from the mansion.  The car slipped narrowly through the center of three pair of gates, each bearing placards with Doctor Brinkley across them.  The car turned to the left towards the house, through the porte-cochere to park in the rear motor court.  Brinkley slipped into the house as staff walked animals from the rear of the estate to the front for the evening’s show. 
It wasn’t a uniquely special night, but every night at the Brinkley estate was special.   All around the city, men were returning home, just as the Doctor, from their day of work.  Each man entered his home and performed the rituals of arrival that included switching on a light outside to welcome friends.  And so entered the Doctor, as he had done at least a thousand times, he greeted staff and climbed the stairs to the master suite making his way to a small landing over the stairs.  He stood at the control panel.  Often the task would be delegated, but no one could ever tire of the applause and cheers as the buttons were depressed “Fountain #1”, “Fountain #2” “Fence lights” and so on.
At about this time, Mr. Otoole would begin to play the organ.  Not the soothing daily favorites of the Doctor, but loud showy pieces like the Nutcracker suite, which was an evening standard.  Every stop would be open.  The entire structure of the house resonated as the music swelled from each of 1063 pipes in the rooms behind the console of the mighty Brinkley pipe organ.  The two fountains blew water 40 feet in the air, falling back into the great urns that seemed almost to spin as the color of the water changed color magically and danced to the organ music.  As the water spilled from the immense bowls,  “BRINKLEY” glowed in red neon from within the cascades of these spectacular twin fountains.  Boys sat on the roof operating the movie spotlights whose beams danced across the clouds.  Neon along the fences and endless giant fence lights pronounced BRINKLEY etched across their frosted globes. 
Children hung on the fence, faces squeezed twixt the bars to glimpse exotic animals that wandered or were paraded across the lawns.  Llamas, flamingos and giant Galapagos tortoises delighted the fans.  Mrs. Brinkley would inevitably climb the stairs to their rooms and stop to wave out the tall arched window that stood open to let the sound of crashing water and happy sounds enter.  It was always a hardy wave, proof that she had known hard work and the lives of simple people in spite of her great fortune.  Her son, when he wasn’t racing around the estate in his small replica car, was at his mother’s side, standing on the sill and hanging out to wave to the cars that had waited in line for more than an hour, just for a chance to drive by. 
The “light shows” were every night in 1938, but Thursdays were special because they celebrated Brinkley’s weekly return from his four day work week at his hospitals in Arkansas.  It was one of the happiest years that this family or any could ever know.  Within the next three years, Brinkley’s mammoth radio station and hospital would be closed.  He would declare bankruptcy.  He would be sued and charged with a host of offenses from malpractice to mail fraud.  He would lose his leg after a blood clot and his health would rapidly decline until his death on May 26, 1942, at the prime age of 56.

A Last Visit, for a Time


What a beautiful Saturday, not rare in “Del Rio, Texas, where the summer comes to spend the winter.” That had been one of Mrs. Brinkley’s favorite lines over the world’s largest radio station, XER.  Her personal radio address referred to it as the “sunshine station between the nations” because of its position on the US and Mexico border.  She would invite you to come and visit her in Del Rio, “come by and see our beautiful home”.  That public invitation had been delivered more than 40 years ago, long before my birth.  But here I was, in her home on this sunny Saturday, April 29, 1978.  I had been here several times before over these past few years.  The first time, when I was only 10, I had suggested a reception in her honor.  Today came close to seeing that happen.  She sat in the grandest room of her mansion, surrounded by hundreds who milled through anxious to see a bit of history.  I had come here today with Walter and Iliana LaBorde for a tour of the house hosted by the local Morning Glory Garden Club. 
Walter had closed the deal to purchase the home just a few weeks before.  He allowed the garden club to hold the tour as a fundraiser and to fulfill a sense of responsibility to the community to let them have a look inside.  Each one who entered the room was awestruck, one man cried.  His name was Juan Rodriguez.  Juan had grown up in Mexico.  As a small boy, he played in an empty field next to the mammoth radio station, just two miles away.  He remembered the excitement and ceremony when Brinkley’s limo would drive up.  One day he walked over to watch the boys play.  Their crude ball, made from rags, fell at his feet.  He laughed as he threw it back to the boys.  A few months later, at Christmas, Brinkley showed up with wrapped gifts for all the boys.  They were delighted when they opened the bats, balls and gloves.  “He had remembered”. 
Juan and his mother would come to Del Rio on occasion.  They were too poor to ride the bus, so they had to walk across the border and down loop road.  They would always stop in front of the mansion and he would peer through the fence at a life style that was beyond his imagination.  Today he cried and said “I never dreamt that I would ever live to see the inside.”
There were many emotional people that day, in that room, reliving memories.  Another woman might have been sad that day, but not Minnie Brinkley.  She had lost everything, her husband, her money, her son and now her grand home, but she was all smiles.  It had all been quite amazing to her:  “I would not trade one minute of those days for a year of tomorrows. I was a princess”.  She was always strong and practical, without regret, and on this day she greeted everyone with the warmth that she was famous for.  Angela stood at her grandmother’s side, a striking tribute to her grandmother’s legacy. 
But there was some regret in that room, at least for me.  As I stood and looked about I remembered how it had been before.  The crowd disguised the reality that the house was so empty now.  The material treasures were gone.  There was a faded area on the floor, leaving a hexagonal outline where the seven foot marble statue of Daphne and Apollo had stood next to the fireplace.  Brinkley’s library table was gone.  Mrs. Brinkley had refused to sell it and it was stored, which was some comfort.  His grandfather clock that stood behind the grand piano was no longer there to mark the passing of time and history.  Where was the piano now?
It would take 12 years to answer that question.  The last person to play it, as the room was emptied and sold off, was the son of a couple who came to purchase antiques.  No one can remember now what he was playing.  He was only five years old after all.  But he sat at the old grand piano in that opulent ballroom and played for a beautiful young Angela who watched him while her grandmother discussed the sale of priceless furnishings to his parents in the next room.  He sat in the shadow of Dr. Brinkley’s mammoth gothic grandfather clock and played that same piano that had been played for so many years from this spot, over XER…the most powerful radio station that has ever broadcast on the earth.  In a last moment of spontaneity, his father would purchase that piano, and Kevin would spend his childhood playing it.
But I did not yet know the story of this little boy, or that one day I would grow to know him and to love him and to spend the rest of my life with him.  On that day, when I was only fourteen, I could not have known that one day I would also rescue this house.  Kevin and I would restore it and haunt it, ever in occupancy respectful to its only rightful owner and in constant deference to his legacy.  We would own it for almost ten years, but it will always be our home.
We would eventually leave Del Rio, but the heart of that house will always be inside us both.  The story of Brinkley would live on through us.  As the American Medical Association teamed with the Federal Radio Commission and used every resource of government to shut him down, Brinkley promised that “you will never silence me”.  It looks like he was right. Because, back in the big city that we call home, I sit at Dr. Brinkley’s library table and write the script for the musical that will perpetuate his fame for another generation and let his voice be heard again.
The famous marble statue of Daphne and Apollo, as well as the Grandfather clock, has all come home now.  After more than thirty years, Kevin sits again in the shadow of that grandfather clock as he composes the music that finally tells the story of a life that might seem to others more like a dream, the story of Roads Courageous.  In a small way, it’s our story too.  We are happy to share it with millions in the Brinkley tradition.  Millions of listeners and fans were a daily part of his life.  And now that many can hear his voice again and know his story.