Yep, he croaked! But in his heyday, the product he “invented” was probably the best know product in the entire southwest—especially in Louisiana and Texas.
In 1943, Senator LeBlanc had pains. His Dr. gave him an elixir of B-vitamins. It fixed him right up. The story goes that he went back one day and while the nurse was busy with other patients, he stole a bottle of the stuff, had it analyzed and decided to change the formula a tad and sell it. He was neither a doctor nor even a registered pharmacist but at the time, he owned The Happy Days Company, makers of Happy Days Headache Powder and Dixie Dew Cough Syrup. (The headache powder had been seized by the FDA for impurities, so he was down to his last half million dollars or so.). And he was one HECK of a promoter. Time magazine once described him as "a stem-winding salesman who knows every razzle-dazzle switch in the pitchman's trade".
The major change in his new formula was his addition of enough alcohol (as a “preservative”, of course) that it became 12% of the contents. Although the label plainly stated “…4 tablespoons full, 4 times a day (after meals and before bedtime) in a half glass of water”…, you could only fool ALL the people SOME of the time so…in some places, the mixture could only be sold in liquor stores and in some places, bartenders sold it by the shot glass. LeBlanc’s new formula also included “Diluted Acid Hydrochloric” which allows the body's quicker absorption of the other ingredients, including the 12 % alcohol "preservative". Shortly after a snort of this concoction, you REALLY didn’t care about the vitamins. And whatever pain you THOUGHT you had was GONE!
LeBlanc named this wonderful concoction Hadacol. HA (from Happy) DA(from Days) CO (from Company) and L (for LeBlanc) although, once when asked why the name, he’d usually say, “Well, we hadda call it SOMEthin’.” He initially pedaled this elixir on the radio in LA with mixed results. But in 1951, a two-page advertisement for Hadacol appeared in the centerfold of Grier's Almanac, an annual publication marketed to farmers in the Southern USA. The ad's headline read (in very large type):
LeBlanc promoted it as a “tonic” or “dietary supplement” not a medicine but Time Magazine described it as "a murky brown liquid that tastes something like bilge water, and smells worse." In spite of the negative publicity, LeBlanc flooded the air waves with ads and testimonials and sales took off like a rocket. Of course, it DID look and smell bad. But the alcohol content saved the day for LeBlanc.
Even so, the AMA suggested that “No Doctor will be uncritical enough to join in the promotion of Hadacol. It is difficult to imagine how one could do himself or his profession greater harm from the standpoint of the abuse of the trust of a patient suffering from any condition. Hadacol is not a specific medication. It is not even a specific preventive measure.” They neglected to state it was basically nothing more than vitaminized BOOZE!
“Hadacol Boogie”, the jingle used in the radio ads, became a popular song. They gave away or sold promotional items such as: various fliers, signs and clocks, a "Captain Hadacol" comic book, t-shirts, lipstick, an almanac, plastic thimbles printed with the Hadacol logo
These items, along with the Hadacol bottles and the boxes in which they were packaged, are now much sought-after items, and fetch high prices among collectors of Southern memorabilia and medical quackery.
LeBlanc advertised for a parrot that, once properly trained, would chirp out “Polly wants Hadacol” He promised to keep the bird its own gold cage, bird and owner would travel in a limo with the bird’s name in gold on the door and stay at the best hotels, only to be exhibited at promotions, such as the “Hadacol Caravan.”
Ah yes, the Hadacol Goodtime Caravan—the last of the old-time medicine shows. LeBlanc brought in BIG stars-- Roy Acuff, Milton Berle, Lucille Ball, Minnie Pearl, Connee Boswell, Mickey Rooney, Bob Hope, Cesar Romero, Dorothy Lamour, Carmen Miranda, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Judy Garland, Jack Dempsey, Chico Marx, Hank Williams and James Cagney to help him market the product. And they traveled all over Texas and Louisiana. If you were ANYBODY, you were in the Hadicol show! He also sponsored a separate touring show featuring notable Jazz and Blues musicians to attract black customers.
Admission to the Hadacol gala was two Hadacol boxtops for adults, one for children. Considering that the 8 ounce bottle cost $1.25 and the "family size" 24 ounce bottle cost $3.50 each during the late 1940s, this was not cheap (Adjusted for inflation, the prices would be around $10 and $30 in 2007). Of course, you could just buy it at the show but then you had to carry it all nite—(unless you got plastered on it.) Even so, sales of the tonic at the shows were brisk.
According to musician Weldon "Big Bill" Lister, who performed in the Hadacol Caravan, "The only way you could get into that show was with a Hadacol boxtop, And believe me, we played to crowds of ten, twelve thousand people a night. Back in those days there wasn't many auditoriums that would hold that many people. We played ball parks, race tracks - you know anywhere where they had enough big bleachers to handle those kind of crowds." The final show was on 17 September 1951.
But by March of that year, the Senator was ready to sell the Company. Profits on sales had been $3.6M for the past 15 months and buyers were chomping at the bit to buy. He sold to a comglomerate of investors for $8.2M But he knew something the others didn’t.
The investors discovered, all too late, that LeBlanc was spending more for advertising by that point than he was taking in as receipts (turning its $3.6M profit into a $1.8M second-quarter loss), he had also concealed both $2.M in unpaid bills and a $656,151 tax debt, and another $2.M, listed in the ledgers as "Accounts Receivable", were cases of the tonic out on consignment, much of which was being shipped back. Finally in September, the Hadacol Goodtime Caravan ground to a halt.
Then the FTC got into the act. In an official court statement, the Federal Trade Commission stated that the publicity behind the tonic was "false, misleading and deceptive" in representing the nostrum as "an effective treatment and cure for scores of ailments and diseases." The ensuing bad publicity played a contributing factor to LeBlanc losing a gubernatorial election in 1952 and effectively halting his future statewide electoral chances.
That year, while being interviewed on Groucho Marx's radio program, Groucho asked the entrepreneur, “What is Hadacol REALLY good for?” LeBlanc gave an answer of startling honesty. "It was good," the senator said, "for five and a half million for me last year."
In 1954, after the Hadacol fiasco, LeBlanc tried to re-enter the patent medicine market with a lemon flavored non-alcoholic vitamin tonic named "Kary-On". Unlike Hadacol, it quickly vanished from production.
As I said initially, most people my age in Texas/Louisiana know Hadacol, although most in other parts of the US do not.
I’ll leave you with one tidbit. There were many jokes about the mixture, most in the form of the type of testimonials LeBlanc used, such as:
“Before I started taking Hadacol, I could hardly spit over my chin. After taking only 10 bottles, now I can spit ALL over it!"
Or how about: “I had athlete’s foot SOOO bad, I had tried everything to stop it. I finally tried Hadacal. After using only 9 bottles, I still have the athlete’s food but I also have 4 more toes!”
John
PS In the above, my memory was jogged a bit by Wikipedia. And here is another tid-bit I found AFTER I'd written the orginal: http://www.quackwatch.org/search/web...&query=hadacol
In 1943, Senator LeBlanc had pains. His Dr. gave him an elixir of B-vitamins. It fixed him right up. The story goes that he went back one day and while the nurse was busy with other patients, he stole a bottle of the stuff, had it analyzed and decided to change the formula a tad and sell it. He was neither a doctor nor even a registered pharmacist but at the time, he owned The Happy Days Company, makers of Happy Days Headache Powder and Dixie Dew Cough Syrup. (The headache powder had been seized by the FDA for impurities, so he was down to his last half million dollars or so.). And he was one HECK of a promoter. Time magazine once described him as "a stem-winding salesman who knows every razzle-dazzle switch in the pitchman's trade".
The major change in his new formula was his addition of enough alcohol (as a “preservative”, of course) that it became 12% of the contents. Although the label plainly stated “…4 tablespoons full, 4 times a day (after meals and before bedtime) in a half glass of water”…, you could only fool ALL the people SOME of the time so…in some places, the mixture could only be sold in liquor stores and in some places, bartenders sold it by the shot glass. LeBlanc’s new formula also included “Diluted Acid Hydrochloric” which allows the body's quicker absorption of the other ingredients, including the 12 % alcohol "preservative". Shortly after a snort of this concoction, you REALLY didn’t care about the vitamins. And whatever pain you THOUGHT you had was GONE!
LeBlanc named this wonderful concoction Hadacol. HA (from Happy) DA(from Days) CO (from Company) and L (for LeBlanc) although, once when asked why the name, he’d usually say, “Well, we hadda call it SOMEthin’.” He initially pedaled this elixir on the radio in LA with mixed results. But in 1951, a two-page advertisement for Hadacol appeared in the centerfold of Grier's Almanac, an annual publication marketed to farmers in the Southern USA. The ad's headline read (in very large type):
- Don't Be Satisfied With Symptomatic Relief! It's Possible to RELIEVE THE CAUSE OF YOUR AILMENTS When Lack Of Vitamins B1, B2, Iron and Niacin Cause Stomach Disturbances, Gas, Heartburn, Indigestion, Nagging Aches and Pains, and Certain Nervous Disorders.
LeBlanc promoted it as a “tonic” or “dietary supplement” not a medicine but Time Magazine described it as "a murky brown liquid that tastes something like bilge water, and smells worse." In spite of the negative publicity, LeBlanc flooded the air waves with ads and testimonials and sales took off like a rocket. Of course, it DID look and smell bad. But the alcohol content saved the day for LeBlanc.
Even so, the AMA suggested that “No Doctor will be uncritical enough to join in the promotion of Hadacol. It is difficult to imagine how one could do himself or his profession greater harm from the standpoint of the abuse of the trust of a patient suffering from any condition. Hadacol is not a specific medication. It is not even a specific preventive measure.” They neglected to state it was basically nothing more than vitaminized BOOZE!
“Hadacol Boogie”, the jingle used in the radio ads, became a popular song. They gave away or sold promotional items such as: various fliers, signs and clocks, a "Captain Hadacol" comic book, t-shirts, lipstick, an almanac, plastic thimbles printed with the Hadacol logo
These items, along with the Hadacol bottles and the boxes in which they were packaged, are now much sought-after items, and fetch high prices among collectors of Southern memorabilia and medical quackery.
LeBlanc advertised for a parrot that, once properly trained, would chirp out “Polly wants Hadacol” He promised to keep the bird its own gold cage, bird and owner would travel in a limo with the bird’s name in gold on the door and stay at the best hotels, only to be exhibited at promotions, such as the “Hadacol Caravan.”
Ah yes, the Hadacol Goodtime Caravan—the last of the old-time medicine shows. LeBlanc brought in BIG stars-- Roy Acuff, Milton Berle, Lucille Ball, Minnie Pearl, Connee Boswell, Mickey Rooney, Bob Hope, Cesar Romero, Dorothy Lamour, Carmen Miranda, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Judy Garland, Jack Dempsey, Chico Marx, Hank Williams and James Cagney to help him market the product. And they traveled all over Texas and Louisiana. If you were ANYBODY, you were in the Hadicol show! He also sponsored a separate touring show featuring notable Jazz and Blues musicians to attract black customers.
Admission to the Hadacol gala was two Hadacol boxtops for adults, one for children. Considering that the 8 ounce bottle cost $1.25 and the "family size" 24 ounce bottle cost $3.50 each during the late 1940s, this was not cheap (Adjusted for inflation, the prices would be around $10 and $30 in 2007). Of course, you could just buy it at the show but then you had to carry it all nite—(unless you got plastered on it.) Even so, sales of the tonic at the shows were brisk.
According to musician Weldon "Big Bill" Lister, who performed in the Hadacol Caravan, "The only way you could get into that show was with a Hadacol boxtop, And believe me, we played to crowds of ten, twelve thousand people a night. Back in those days there wasn't many auditoriums that would hold that many people. We played ball parks, race tracks - you know anywhere where they had enough big bleachers to handle those kind of crowds." The final show was on 17 September 1951.
But by March of that year, the Senator was ready to sell the Company. Profits on sales had been $3.6M for the past 15 months and buyers were chomping at the bit to buy. He sold to a comglomerate of investors for $8.2M But he knew something the others didn’t.
The investors discovered, all too late, that LeBlanc was spending more for advertising by that point than he was taking in as receipts (turning its $3.6M profit into a $1.8M second-quarter loss), he had also concealed both $2.M in unpaid bills and a $656,151 tax debt, and another $2.M, listed in the ledgers as "Accounts Receivable", were cases of the tonic out on consignment, much of which was being shipped back. Finally in September, the Hadacol Goodtime Caravan ground to a halt.
Then the FTC got into the act. In an official court statement, the Federal Trade Commission stated that the publicity behind the tonic was "false, misleading and deceptive" in representing the nostrum as "an effective treatment and cure for scores of ailments and diseases." The ensuing bad publicity played a contributing factor to LeBlanc losing a gubernatorial election in 1952 and effectively halting his future statewide electoral chances.
That year, while being interviewed on Groucho Marx's radio program, Groucho asked the entrepreneur, “What is Hadacol REALLY good for?” LeBlanc gave an answer of startling honesty. "It was good," the senator said, "for five and a half million for me last year."
In 1954, after the Hadacol fiasco, LeBlanc tried to re-enter the patent medicine market with a lemon flavored non-alcoholic vitamin tonic named "Kary-On". Unlike Hadacol, it quickly vanished from production.
As I said initially, most people my age in Texas/Louisiana know Hadacol, although most in other parts of the US do not.
I’ll leave you with one tidbit. There were many jokes about the mixture, most in the form of the type of testimonials LeBlanc used, such as:
“Before I started taking Hadacol, I could hardly spit over my chin. After taking only 10 bottles, now I can spit ALL over it!"
Or how about: “I had athlete’s foot SOOO bad, I had tried everything to stop it. I finally tried Hadacal. After using only 9 bottles, I still have the athlete’s food but I also have 4 more toes!”
John
PS In the above, my memory was jogged a bit by Wikipedia. And here is another tid-bit I found AFTER I'd written the orginal: http://www.quackwatch.org/search/web...&query=hadacol
'63 Avanti R-1384. sold 12/10.
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