I don’t know what caused me to start thinking about Hadacol recently unless it was Donald Trump’s apparent reneging on some of his campaign promises.
For the record, I think the president-elect was correct in backing away from his earlier rhetoric promising a special prosecutor to put Hillary Clinton in jail.
Not all of Trump’s supporters agree, but to keep on pursuing the “crooked Hillary” line will do nothing to heal some of the divisiveness in this country or “make American great again.”
Losing the election was punishment enough. The Clintons are done politically, and they don’t need to go to jail.
I didn’t vote for Trump or Clinton because I didn’t think either had the character to be president.
I knew my vote didn’t matter — Trump was going to carry Mississippi however I voted — and I decided I didn’t want to be responsible for voting for either of the potential winners with all the baggage they were packing.
I considered writing in a candidate, but that’s too much trouble with today’s electronic voting contraptions, so I cast my vote for Darrell Castle of the Constitution Party, knowing he had no chance of winning.
I had considered voting for Jim Hedges since I know a Jim Hedges, the one from McComb who works for Entergy. But then I saw the Jim Hedges I know at a football game before the election, joked I was planning to vote for him, and he implored me not to. He noted the other Jim Hedges was running on the Prohibition Party ticket.
Constitution sounds better than prohibition which brings me to Hadacol.
You probably have to be as old as I am to recall the Hadacol craze which peaked around 1950.
Created by colorful Louisiana State Sen. Dudley J. LeBlanc, Hadacol was marketed as a vitamin supplement that would cure just about any ailment.
It did contain vitamins, but it also was spiked with 12 percent alcohol disguised as “preservative” on the bottle’s label. Many a Baptist who wouldn’t dare touch beer, wine or whiskey started imbibing in Hadacol toddies after meals and at bedtime.
They say it tasted bad but made you feel good. I never tried it, being just a kid at the time, and my parents didn’t buy into the craze so there wasn’t any around the house.
LeBlanc was not a doctor, or a pharmacist, but he had a strong talent for self-promotion — sort of like Donald Trump.
LeBlanc conceived the idea that became Hadacol in New Orleans in 1943. He said that his research showed that multivitamins taken collectively would yield greater results than a single vitamin for a specific problem.
He used letters from his former business, the Happy Day Company, with an L for LeBlanc, to come up with the name Hadacol. Later when someone asked how he named the concoction, he said “Well, I hadda call it something.”
LeBlanc promoted Hadacol with caravans of entertainers and there were songs written about the product, including one called the “Hadacol Boogie.”
Wikipedia reports that in a 15-month period ending in March 1951, LeBlanc sold more than $3.6 million worth of the tonic. In another six months, after LeBlanc sold his interest of Hadacol’s parent company to investors for $8.2 million, the enterprise collapsed under the weight of debtors. It was discovered that LeBlanc was spending more for advertising by that point than he was taking in and had concealed millions in unpaid bills, a tax debt and bad accounts receivable. Also The Federal Trade Commission said 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.”
Admittedly, it’s a stretch to try to find a correlation between Hadacol and President-elect Trump, unless it is that both promised more than they could deliver and made some folks feel better in doing so.
But I hope it turns out that President Trump is at least a partial cure for what ails America.
