The Brinkley monument in Forest Hill, then and now. Notice anything missing?
I admit that the Lauderdale family has skirted the law on rare occasions. We once operated a sno-cone parlor without a permit. One year we failed to renew the tags on our Daimler-Benz. And of course, there have been numerous, and well-documented, events when I have wielded my sword-cane in public, to fend off assassins and kidnappers.
But no members of our family have stooped to the level of grave robbers. How anyone can dig open a grave to steal jewelry and other precious items from the remains of loved ones is beyond human understanding. And quite frankly, just one notch above that in the Chart of Evil are the gravestone robbers — thieves who plunder markers and monuments in cemeteries, to resell the statuary as garden art, or to melt the monuments down into scrap metal.
Cemetery officials and managers don't like to talk about these crimes, because they don't want to give thieves any ideas, and also because they don't want people to know how vulnerable they can be to this type of activity. So I won't go into many details here, but mainly wanted to point out two of the most egregious offenses in recent years, with the lovely Forest Hill Cemetery in Midtown being the unfortunate victim.
In March, I wrote about Elk's Rest, the burial grounds of members of the Elks lodge in Memphis. For a century, their graves were guarded by a magnificent bronze sculpture of an elk, perched on a stone pedestal. I even included an old postcard view, showing the elk at his post. But when I recently visited Forest Hill, I found no trace of that noble creature. One evening in 2010, it seems, thieves came into the cemetery, dismembered the statue by slicing off its feet, and carted it off. Since they took no pains to preserve the statue, mostly likely it went directly to a scrapyard. What a shame.
After this story came out, I received a message from my pal Vincent Astor, a well-known local historian and the author of a fine book on the history of movie theaters in Memphis. If I was shocked by the condition of the Elk's Rest monument, he told me, just see what (presumably) the same thieves did to the Forest Hill grave of Dr. Brinkley.
I've written before about Dr. John Romulus Brinkley (1885-1941), who unfortunately holds a reputation as one of the great charlatans of modern medicine. Known as the "Goat Gland Doctor," he came up with the idea of implanting goat testicles ("glands" as he called them) into the bodies — okay, let's just say "scrotums" here (or is it "scrota"?) — of men who were suffering from what today would be called erectile dysfunction. Did this procedure work? Of course not. Did patients sicken and die from the operation, and the resulting complications and infections? Yes, indeed. But did Dr. Brinkley still make a fortune from his "goat gland" treatments? Well, of course — that's how desperate his patients were for a cure, flocking to the clinic he owned in Kansas.
Finally run out of Kansas by the medical authorities, Brinkley set up shop in the little town of Del Rio, Texas, where he continued his goat gland treatments and — a master of self-promotion — erected a radio station where he broadcast music in between lectures and testimonials extolling the benefits of his treatment. He was, by any definition, a scam artist.
Somewhere along the way in his complicated career, he ended up in Memphis, where he met Minnie Talitha Jones, the daughter of a local physician. They were married here in 1914, and then Brinkley was on his way again, eventually building a wonderful mansion in Texas (still standing, I believe), where his front garden was graced by a giant bronze statue of "Winged Victory."
Can you see where I'm going with this?
When Brinkley died in 1941, his will stipulated that he be laid to rest in Memphis, and so he was buried in Forest Hill, beneath an impressive marble shaft, topped by a stone ball, on which perched that very same bronze statue of "Winged Victory" that came from his home in Texas. When his son, John R. "Johnny Boy" Brinkley died in 1976, followed by the doctor's wife in 1980, they too were buried at Forest Hill, beneath the same monument.
BrinkleyMonument-foot
Only the amputated toes remain from the "Winged Victory" statue that once stood here.
For years — decades — the Brinkley monument was a graceful attraction in Forest Hill, hard to miss so close to the sprawling Abbey Mausoleum there. But here's how it looks today, shorn of the statue. Just like the Elk's Rest bronze, "Winged Victory" was sliced off — I want to say with surgical precision — at the foot, leaving only a cluster of amputated toes still mounted to the granite ball.
Dr. Brinkley's career ended in disgrace, but treating his monument like this is just as disgraceful, if you ask me.
