It’s conceivable that Roland just happened to be standing outside Alice Bellinger’s home when Blanche and Barnet walked out the front door. In view of subsequent events, however, it seems far more likely that he had come there with a specific purpose in mind—likely, to renew his relationship with Blanche. If that was indeed the case, he clearly hoped to have a private moment with her. It is hardly surprising that he reacted so badly when he found her heading out for a romantic evening with Barnet.
Seeing her on the arm of his rival might have been galling to Roland. But it did not deter him from his goal. On the contrary, it only seemed to strengthen his resolve. Despite his apparent capitulation to Barnet, Roland meant to have Blanche back.
First, though, there were certain problems that he had to take care of.
Nicholas Heckmann, forty years old, owned a small advertising agency located at 257 West Forty-second Street in Manhattan, not far from Jim Wakeley’s saloon. To bring in extra income, Heckmann also rented out private letter boxes at the rate of fifty cents per month.
At approximately ten minutes past six on the evening of May 27, 1898—just a few days after Roland Molineux’s encounter with Blanche and Barnet—the door to Heckmann’s office opened and in strode a well-dressed gentleman who looked to be in his thirties. Though he did not know the gentleman’s name, Heckmann recognized him right away, having passed him many times on the street. He was of medium height, with a slender, athletic build and the air of a man of breeding. He had strikingly handsome features and sported a large handlebar mustache.
Did Heckmann rent letter boxes? the gentleman inquired.
Heckmann confirmed that he did and quoted his rate.
“Very good,” said the fellow, who explained that he wished to take a box for at least three months.
Heckmann got out his ledger, and seeing that box 217 was available, assigned it to his new customer.
“Name, please?” asked Heckmann, pen at the ready.
As Heckmann inscribed the information, the man looked down and, spotting a misspelling, pointed out that there was only one t at the end of his name. Heckmann made the correction.
Then, after paying for three months in advance, the gentleman—who had given his name as “Mr. H. C. Barnet”—turned and left the building.1
Dr. Vincent G. Hamill, a graduate of the University of Buffalo, was president of the Marston Remedy Company, headquartered at 19 Park Place in Manhattan. It was a thriving business, serving as many as twelve thousand customers each year, all of them male and all responding to the company’s widely distributed advertising circulars:
PERFECT MANHOOD
AND HOW TO ATTAIN IT
A BOOK FOR MEN MARRIED AND SINGLE
A full explanation of a wonderful method for the quick restoration of PERFECT MANHOOD, in all that term implies.
A method that overcomes EVERY EVIL CONDITION of the sexual system.
Gives to the weakest organs and parts their NATURAL VIGOR AND TONE.
And to those shrunken and stunted their NORMAL AND PROPER SIZE.
IT EXPLAINS how to build up all sexual vigor.
IT EXPLAINS how to avoid all the physical evils of married life.
IT EXPLAINS how to cure sexual weakness in any stage for all time.
IT EXPLAINS how to cure unnatural losses from dreams, in urine, etc.
IT EXPLAINS how to cure nervousness, trepidation, lack of self-confidence.
IT EXPLAINS how the entire sexual system of the male may be brought to that condition so essential to general good health and peace of mind.
IT EXPLAINS how to develop, strengthen, enlarge all weak, stunted, undeveloped, feeble organs and parts of the body which have lost or never attained a proper and natural condition, whether through early errors, ill-health, or other causes.
IT EXPLAINS how to be free from degrading thought, superior to debasing conditions, to feel
A VERY KING AMONG MEN!
The book, along with a one-month supply of an accompanying medicinal “remedy,” cost five dollars. On May 31, 1898, Dr. Hamill received a letter, signed “H. C. Barnet.” It contained the necessary amount of cash with a request that the manual and impotence remedy be mailed to box 217, 257 West Forty-second Street.
Dr. Hamill immediately sent back a “diagnosis blank,” a four-page confidential questionnaire that potential patients were required to answer “as carefully as possible,” so that—as the instructions explained—“a full and perfect understanding of each case may be had, and the proper remedies selected.” There were sixty-three questions altogether, beginning with the applicant’s age (given as thirty-one) and occupation (“clerk”), and continuing on to the most intimate matters of sexual functioning.
In answer to question thirty—“Have you had gonorrhea?”—the applicant answered yes. He went on to reveal that he had masturbated (“practiced self-abuse,” in the idiom of the time) for ten years; that his erections were “very feeble” and that “during connection” (sexual intercourse), his ejaculations were “very long delayed.”
He was also asked for the size of his waist and chest, which he gave as thirty-two inches and thirty-seven inches, respectively.
On June 6, one day after Dr. Hamill received the completed form, the book and impotence medication were mailed out to the person who identified himself as H. C. Barnet but whose measurements, as he gave them, were those of a man with a far trimmer physique.2
Dr. Hamill was not the only peddler of impotence “remedies” in the latter years of the nineteenth century. Far from it. The 1890s were the golden age of patent medicines, a totally unregulated era when the American marketplace was flooded with snake oil. Generally compounded of little more than alcohol, opiates, and enough bitter-tasting ingredients to give them a suitably medicinal flavor, these high-sounding nostrums—Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery, Munyon’s Miracle Phosphate, Horsford’s Neuralgia Tonic, and thousands more—promised to cure every ailment known to man, from head colds to consumption, asthma to arthritis. Beyond inducing a mild state of intoxication, however, they had no effect at all.
Over a two-week period, beginning on June 4, 1898, packages addressed to Mr. H. C. Barnet arrived on an almost daily basis at his private letter box at Nicholas Heckmann’s establishment. Virtually all of them contained marriage manuals, books of sexual advice, and guaranteed cures for impotence. Some of the latter came in liquid form, like Dr. Rudolphe’s Specific Remedy for Impotence, sold by a physician named Fowler of Moodus, Connecticut. Others consisted of tablets or capsules, like a product called Calthos, touted in full-page newspaper ads as “the greatest sensation in the medical world today.”
The purported invention of the “famous French specialist, Prof. Jules Laborde,” Calthos had (so its maker claimed) restored the “vital forces” of countless satisfied customers, including several thousand male insane-asylum inmates, who had been reduced to their pitiable condition by youthful self-abuse. Anyone who suffered from “Lost Manhood or weakness of any nature in the Sexual Organs” could receive a free five-day trial treatment by sending a request to the manufacturer, the Von Mohl Company of Cincinnati, Ohio.3
On June 1, 1898—at precisely the same time that the man calling himself H. C. Barnet was sending out his requests for various remedies—an envelope of a distinctive blue color arrived at the Manhattan office of Dr. James Burns. In addition to his private practice, Dr. Burns sold a mail-order nostrum called the “Marvelous Giant Indian Salve.” Supposedly concocted from a secret Native American recipe—“buffalo tallow combined with healing herbs and barks”—Dr. Burns’s ointment was, according to its ads, a “guaranteed, permanent” cure for male “atrophy.” For twenty-five cents in cash, money order, or stamps, a sample box would be “mailed in a plain wrapper.”4
The blue envelope was opened by Dr. Burns’s bookkeeper, Agnes Evans, who was struck by the elegance of the enclosed sheet of stationery. It was the same robin’s-egg hue as the envelope and embossed with a crest of three interlaced silver crescents. “Please find enclosed 25 cents, for which send remedy, and oblige,” read the handwritten note.
The sender gave his return address as 6 Jersey Street, Newark, New Jersey—the location of the Morris Herrmann and Company paint factory. The letter was signed “Roland Molineux.”