221 Stations and a Microphone: How Curtis Springer Built a Radio Health Empire

By C. V. Wooster · October 5, 2026

Before there was Zzyzx, there was the voice. Curtis Howe Springer's real product was never a tin of tea or a jar of salts. It was a half-hour of radio that made lonely, ailing listeners feel that someone understood them, and then told them what to send for.

By the time the federal government evicted him in 1974, Springer's program had been carried, at its peak, by 221 radio stations in the United States and 102 overseas, according to the Los Angeles Times. The National Park Service puts the figure even higher, at "over 300 stations worldwide." This post traces how he built that reach, and how the radio, a newsletter and a weekly bus fed one another.

Origins: a solo, and a story about it

Springer liked to date his success to 1924, when, he claimed, he sang a solo on the Pittsburgh experimental station that grew into KDKA, often called the nation's first commercial radio station. That is Springer's own account as reported by the Los Angeles Times in 2002, and like many of his stories it is hard to verify.

What is better documented is Chicago in the 1930s. According to Wikipedia's summary of the AMA's records, Springer applied for airtime on WGN in 1934. The station checked with the American Medical Association's Bureau of Investigation, and the AMA's file on Springer's invented degrees did not help him. WGN said no. He found a twice-daily slot on Chicago's WCFL instead and began broadcasting there in 1934. Around 1935 he moved on to preaching over KDKA in Pittsburgh. Through the 1930s he also ran health resorts and lecture tours in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Iowa, billing himself with letters he had not earned: M.D., N.D., D.O., Ph.D.

The formula: gospel, folk wisdom and a request

Springer's broadcasts mixed religious music, homespun philosophy and health advice. The Mojave Project describes a program built on the idea that following Christian doctrine would make a listener physically fit, mentally alert and spiritually sound, and that a proper diet was the way to become "internally, externally and eternally clean," a phrase reported by the New York Times in 1970.

Then came the ask. Listeners were urged to send donations for remedies aimed at everything from minor ailments to cancer, as the Times' Charles Hillinger put it in 1990. The products themselves were cheap: baking soda, laxative herbs, vegetable powders and salts. See our post on what was in the cures. The value was in the voice.

Recording in the desert, mailing to the world

Once the resort at Zzyzx was running, Springer recorded his program in a studio on the property; Hillinger described a daily religious and health program from "his radio studio here." But Zzyzx is a long way from a transmitter. According to the 2002 Los Angeles Times history, Springer spent three days a week in Los Angeles, staying in a suite at the Alexandria Hotel. From there he ordered ingredients for his food products, mailed his weekly radio tapes out to stations and returned listeners' phone calls.

Anyone who called his Los Angeles number heard a recording that the Times quoted in full: "Hello, this is your old friend Curtis Springer coming to you from Zzyzx Mineral Springs out in the heart of the great Mojave Desert." The line did three jobs at once. It was friendly, it named the place and it made a remote desert spring sound like the center of the world.

The Elucidator and the free bus

Radio reached the masses; print kept the faithful. Springer published a newsletter called The Elucidator, which, along with radio and newspaper advertising, publicized the resort, according to The Mojave Project.

And then there was the bus. The Los Angeles Times reported that Springer offered free bus rides every Wednesday morning from the Figueroa Hotel in downtown Los Angeles to Zzyzx. The Mojave Project adds that a fleet of buses and an eight-door Chevrolet utility vehicle shuttled guests back and forth. Some riders were believers, some were curious, and some, the Times noted, were elderly or homeless people riding out for a free meal. At the other end waited sermons, mineral baths, a special diet and more requests for "donations."

Springer also gave free public lectures twice a day at downtown hotels such as the Alexandria, The Mojave Project says. Each channel led to the others: the radio sold the products and the resort, the lectures and newsletter deepened loyalty, and the bus delivered people to the place where the whole system came together.

Why radio was the perfect medium

Springer was not the first to discover this. In the 1920s and 1930s, John R. Brinkley in Kansas and Norman Baker in Iowa used their own radio stations to sell dubious cures to huge audiences. See the radio quacks who came before Springer. Radio was intimate in a way print never was. It came into the kitchen at dinnertime in a warm, familiar voice. It reached rural listeners far from specialists. And in its early decades it was lightly policed.

Springer's innovation was scale and persistence. Rather than owning one powerful station, he placed recorded programs on hundreds of smaller ones, at home and abroad, and kept them running for decades. As our book argues, that overseas reach carried an irony: his health claims went to listeners in countries even less equipped than the United States to police them.

The end of the broadcast

The empire did not fall because people stopped listening. It fell because two separate parts of government finally caught up with him. In 1968 California charged him with false advertising; a 1972 federal appeals opinion lists eighteen counts of false advertising among his convictions. Meanwhile the Bureau of Land Management had been challenging his right to occupy the land at all. On April 11, 1974, he was removed from Zzyzx, and the studio went silent. See the day the government closed Zzyzx.

Even then, Springer kept talking, in print. In 1984 he published "The Legal Rape of Zzyzx" in the Baker Valley News. He was still making his case to an audience until the end.