No Cure for Death

TEN

The magazine was called the Periodical of Iowa History, was dated four years ago, and in an article called “Port City’s Millionaire Cancer Quack” had this to say:

Port City has had more than its quota of controversial citizens during its century-and-a-half history.

One local character spread his controversial nature nationwide: Simon Harrison Norman, “Doc Sy,” operator of a “cancer clinic” in Port City. Norman lives there to this day, in a seclusion markedly contrasting his days as a flamboyant con man, when he drove around the state of Iowa in his purple Cadillac and matching color shirt.

“Doc Sy” was not a doctor, of course… he didn’t even make it out of the eighth grade. But higher education was no barrier for Simon Harrison Norman.

Cancer is Cured

By a skillful if crude manipulation of mass media, Norman drew thousands of the despairing and desperate to Port City in the early thirties, with his slogan “Cancer is Cured” as a lure.

He printed his magazine TKO (Truth Kills Obstacles) and operated radio station KTKO, using Port City as his base. According to his magazine, “Doctor Norman has proven beyond any doubt that even the worst, so-called ‘terminal’ case of cancer can be cured.” Open air meetings, attended by as many as 40,000 persons (five times the size of Port City at the time), watched the showman Norman, an ex-stage hypnotist, perform his miracles.

His purple Cadillac and purple shirt became trademarks of Norman’s when he moved his rallies to towns all through Iowa, touching at times Illinois, Nebraska and Wisconsin.

Such activities brought money in by the barrelsful. The “clinic” reaped profits of $50,000 a month by 1932, and Norman boasted around that time that his “personal consultations” netted him $30,000 on an average week. That these profits were plucked from desolate, poverty-torn Depression families mattered not to Norman. Asked in 1934 by a Des Moines Register reporter how he (Norman) could live with himself after victimizing destitute families, Doc Sy said, “There are no ‘victims’ at the Norman Clinic-only cured, healthy patients, ready to embark on a new life-which my staff and I have given them.”

Norman “gave” nothing-one fifteen-year-old Waterloo boy in later years reported paying Norman’s $100-a-week fee for the “treatment” of his father; comparable rates in a reputable hospital of the era, staffed by physicians, would be around $30 a week. The father, of course, died, in spite of Norman’s treatments and injections. One man used by Norman in a radio broadcast as “living proof of our miraculous cures” died within a month. The man’s wife later said that they had paid $300 for the cure, against the advice of their family doctor, who told them the case was without hope.

A photo story in TKO called “Ten ‘New’ Men,” reporting on a number of “successful” Norman patients, included two who didn’t live long enough to see the article reach print.

Quack King

When an American Medical Association spokesman said, “Of all the heartless, vicious ghouls preying on the dead and those who are about to die, Simon Norman is quack king,” Norman took it as a compliment. Over the door of his clinic he hung a sign saying, “Docs quack-Quacks cure.”

Norman guarded the secret of his “cure” very carefully, once saying, “A well-known doctor devised it for me, before his death,” another time saying, “A traveler to the Himalayas passed it on to me before his untimely demise.” (Norman apparently could cure neither of his benefactors.) Chemists of the day found the “secret” easily unlocked: one Norman concoction was made up of equal parts alcohol and glycerine, with a dab of peppermint oil; a second was nothing more than mineral oil; a third was red clover blossom syrup, which could be purchased in the early thirties for $2 a gallon. Ordinary facial powder served as treatment of external cancer.

Norman was born in Port City and left in his mid-teens to take advantage of his tall, lean good looks-particularly the piercing gray eyes-by becoming a stage hypnotist. In the early twenties Norman was making calliopes on the side, selling them to the circuses, carnivals and riverboats in which he worked his stage act. By the late twenties he was a broadcaster, peddling clocks, brooms, coffee, underwear, flour, tires, furniture and silverware through the magic of radio.

Sometime around 1929, when the fortunes of others were quite low, Norman apparently ran into either the famous doctor or the Himalayan traveler, because by late that year he was on the air pitching his cancer cures. By early 1930, construction had begun on his clinic; by mid-1931, he cut the ribbon on his radio station, and, by early ’33, had his own daily newspaper, the Midwest Clarion. President Herbert Hoover, himself a native Iowan from West Branch, had forged a golden key and sent it on to Norman for him to use to start the Clarion presses.

Short Reign

Norman’s reign as quackery king was not as long as he would have liked, but it did last a full decade. By 1940, he was out of Port City, after several legal battles, and by 1942 began serving the four-year term in federal prison handed down in ’41 by the courts.

It was the AMA and other medical societies whose unofficial declaration of war on Norman finally caused his downfall. Ironically, his own reaction to their jabs at him in the AMA Journal caused him more trouble than the AMA itself: Norman vented so much fury in his KTKO counterattacks that the Federal Communications Commission yanked his license.

Without his most important base of pitchmanship-the radio-Norman, swamped by countless lawsuits, moved his clinic to Hot Springs, Arkansas, adding their famous waters to his own “cures,” and changed the name of his station to XTKO, the transmitter safely over the border in Mexico.

But less than a year later, his new set-up thriving, Norman was charged by the U.S. Government for using the mails to defraud, and by 1942 Doc Sy was in Leavenworth.

Remorseful Doc

In 1946 he returned to Iowa, sans purple shirt and purple car, and retired into seclusion. He has been there ever since, apparently doing nothing more than sitting around counting the reported one million dollars he racked up during his reign as king of quacks. All but forgotten by the press, even in the case of his son’s political career, Norman’s influence is said to continue via a string of Port City industries in which he is supposedly a silent partner.

Another rumor has it that Doc Sy picked up a strain of remorse during his stay at Leavenworth, and it is believed by some that he is the guiding light behind his well-known and respected son, Republican politico Richard Norman, who has been successful in Iowa politics, though failing in his bid to reach the U.S. Senate. The Register has called young Norman “the most socially concerned, dedicated young man in the state legislature,” a sore point among Demos, who feel such areas their private domain. Assertions that Doc Sy’s son is trying to atone for his father’s misanthropy, or that the father is attempting to make amends to society through the deeds of his son, are pure speculation.

But it is a fact that the primary failure of Doc Sy’s fabulous years as the quackery king was his own unsuccessful attempt to snatch the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate from an incumbent senator.

And yet another fact may be key in explaining the elder Norman’s supposed attack of remorse: May Belle (Peterson) Norman, his wife and bearer of son Richard, died in 1945… of lung cancer.