Notorious quack physician, radio pioneer, first to politically campaign using an airplane. Also known as John Richard Brinkley. His parents were John Richard Brinkley and Sarah T. Mingus. His father had been a medic during the Civil War and practiced medicine in rural North Carolina. Brinkley wished also to become a doctor but had little formal education. In 1907, he married Sally Wike and enrolled at Bennett Medical College in Chicago where he studied glandular extracts and their effects on humans. In 1911 he began working as an "undergraduate physician", finding it difficult since his only credentials came from a diploma mill. After a divorce he relocated to Memphis, Tennessee, where he met and married Minerva Telitha "Minnie" Jones, daughter of a local physician, in 1913. In 1914 they moved to Kansas City where he studied at the Eclectic Medical University. After graduating in 1915, he used his diploma from Eclectic to practice medicine in other states. In 1917, they moved to Milford, Kansas, and began to perform operations he claimed would restore male virility and fertility through implanting the testicular glands of goats in his male patients. He built radio station KFKB ("Kansas First, Kansas Best") using a 1-kilowatt transmitter in 1923, considered among the first radio stations in the state of Kansas. His new station featured himself as announcer and French lessons, astrological forecasts and storytelling mixed with native Hawaiian songs, bluegrass, gospel and country music. In 1930 the Kansas Medical Board revoked his medical license and the Federal Radio Commission refused to renew his station's broadcasting license. The lawsuit Brinkley v. FRC became a landmark case in broadcast law. He ran for governor of Kansas losing several times, then moved his medical business in 1933 to Del Rio, Texas. In 1931 he had obtained a radio license from the government of Mexico. He proceeded to construct a 75-kilowatt station at 840 kilohertz on the AM dial, radiated by a sky wave antenna held aloft by 300-foot towers. His station was located on the other side of the Rio Grande from Del Rio. Under the call sign of XER, his new "border blaster" could be heard as far north as Canada. The government of Mexico issued a license to his partner Ramon D. Bosquez for another station under the new call letters of XERA at 500 kilowatts. Among the performers who achieved stardom on this station was the famous Carter Family of Country music fame. The United States banned cross-border links between U.S. radio studios and Mexican transmitters without a U.S. license by enacting legislation that became known as the Brinkley Act in 1934. This provision prohibited Brinkley's method by which broadcasting studios in the U.S. were connected by live telephone line or other means to a transmitter located in Mexico. Many reverses led to bankruptcy in 1941. That same year, the Mexican government agreed to restrict renegade stations such as XERA and it went out of business. Brinkley suffered three heart attacks and the amputation of one of his legs due to poor circulation. At his death in 1941, he left instructions that he wanted to be buried in Memphis, Tennessee. The majestic bronze figure of "Winged Victory" atop his memorial once stood on the front lawn of his mansion in Texas. Unfortunately it was stolen by metal thieves.