“Oh, well, he’s made a big success of a shoe business out there that employs two thousand people and he’s given money for different things.”
“So they’re naming the town after him?”
“Yes. He’s a pretty good fellow, I guess. They say he is.”
Not knowing anything of Mr. Johnson, good, bad, or indifferent, I agreed with myself to suspend judgment. A man who can build up a shoe manufacturing business that will employ two thousand people and get the residents of a fair-sized city or town to rename it after him is doing pretty well, I think. He couldn’t be a Dick Turpin or a Jesse James; not openly, at least. People don’t rename towns after Dick Turpins.
But Binghamton soon interested me from another point of view, for stepping out of this store I saw a great red, eight or nine story structure labeled the Kilmer Building, and then I realized I was looking at the home of “Swamp Root,” one of those amazing cure-all remedies which arise, shine, make a fortune for some clever compounder and advertiser, and then after a period disappear. Think of Hood’s Sarsaparilla, Ayer’s Sarsaparilla, Peruna, Omega Oil, Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound! American inventions, each and all, purchased by millions. Why don’t the historians tell us of the cure-alls of Greece and Rome and Egypt and Babylon? There must have been some.
Looking at Dr. Kilmer’s Swamp Root Building reminded me of a winter spent in a mountain town in West Virginia. It had a large and prosperous drug store, where one night I happened to be loafing for a little while, to take shelter from the snow that was falling heavily. Presently there entered an old, decrepit negro woman who hobbled up to the counter, and fumbling under her black shawl, produced a crumpled dollar bill.
“I want a bottle of Swamp Root,” she said.
“I’ll tell you how it is, mammy,” said the clerk, a dapper country beau, with a most oily and ingratiating manner. “If you want to take six bottles it’s only five dollars. Six bottles make a complete cure. If you take the whole six now, you’ve got ’em. Then you’ve got the complete cure.”
The old woman hesitated. She was evidently as near the grave with any remedy as without one.
“All right,” she said, after a moment’s pause.