4A COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL OCTOBER 18, 2017
O PINION
Offbeat Oregon History: Lakeside resort and Hollywood
By Finn JD John
For The Sentinel
For people like Bing Crosby, Lily Pons and
Clark Gable, success in show business came with
some distinct drawbacks ... millions of them: the
fans. Screaming, pointing, asking for autographs
and sending mash notes, they were a great in-
convenience — yet it was their attention that had
made the movie-star lifestyle possible.
On most days, the big stars handled it OK. But
everyone needs a break now and then. Sometimes
they wanted to go (with apologies to the classic
sitcom Cheers) where absolutely nobody knew
their name.
On those days, they would often point their
long, low, powerful automobiles northward and
drive deep into the lush forests of southern Or-
egon.
There, you might fi nd them fi shing on the
Rogue, or relaxing in the Wolf Creek Tavern. But
you would be more likely to fi nd them playing
$100-a-hand baccarat in the Lakeside Café on the
pier in Currier’s Village.
Currier’s Village was an isolated resort proper-
ty at Lakeside, on Tenmile Lake by the southern
Oregon Coast. It was the pet project of a fascinat-
ing Los Angeles man named Roy Currier, a tall,
charismatic patent-medicine peddler with friends
in some very high places — as well as, persistent
rumor had it, some very low ones.
Roy Currier made his fortune in the patent-med-
icine racket long after most other patent-medicine
hucksters had been forced out of the market by
the American Medical Association and Federal
Trade Commission. In 1928, he founded Currier’s
Tablets, Inc., the corporation behind whose veil
he would launch his bid to turn about fi fty dollars’
worth of antacid tablets into a fortune numbered
in millions.
Currier’s Tablets were a bit different from other
patent medicines, in that they actually listed their
ingredients on the front label: Bismuth Subnitrate;
Magnesium Hydroxide; Sodium Bicarbonate; and
mint oil for fl avoring. For a “secret formula” rem-
edy, this was unusual.
There may have been a method in that madness,
though. Most of the patent-medicine scandals of
the 1910s and 1920s involved remedies with se-
cret ingredients. Usually those ingredients were
either dangerous — powerful opioid drugs, toxic
heavy metals, that sort of thing — or complete-
ly ineffective and therefore an outright fraud. To
expose them, the AMA investigators would buy a
sample and run it through a chemistry lab, then go
to the FTC with the evidence to shut them down.
By putting the ingredients on the label, perhaps
Currier hoped to avoid this.
But there may have been another reason as
well. The best remedy then available for syphi-
lis was an arsenic preparation called Salvorsan
(arsphenamine — popularly called “The Magic
Bullet”). And it had just been learned a few years
earlier that Salvorsan worked much better if aug-
mented with bismuth. Bismuth Subnitrate is one
of the less stable compounds of bismuth; the FTC,
when it fi nally got around to investigating Cur-
rier’s Tablets, noted that there was a “risk” of it
decomposing into elemental bismuth and nitric
acid in the stomach. That would be bad for some-
one with ulcers, since the nitric acid would attack
them; but it would be a pretty happy outcome for
someone with syphilis ... and, of course, having
a cover story along the lines of “I get heartburn
real bad” might be important for a secret syphilis
sufferer whose public image would be irreparably
harmed if anyone found out.
This, of course, is pure speculation. Still, it’s an
interesting thought. And certainly there had to be
some reason why Currier’s Tablets sold so aston-
ishingly briskly at such a shockingly high price;
a bottle of twenty of them fetched $1.25, which
in modern dollars comes to just under $20 — a
dollar a pill, for what amounts to an Alka-Seltzer
tablet soaked in Phillips Milk of Magnesia and
Pepto-Bismol.
But perhaps those brisk sales can be simply put
down to dishonest advertising:
“CURRIER’S FAMOUS STOMACH TAB-
LETS never fail to rid sufferers of gas pains, indi-
gestion, ulcers, nausea, heartburn, acidosis, con-
stipation!” screeched one newspaper ad from the
early 1930s. “Agnes Riley of Monrovia, Calif.,
writes: ‘My husband in bed with terrible gas pains
and ulcers was given up. After taking three CUR-
RIER’S TABLETS he began to improve. Now he
is well and at work!’
“Please do not confuse Currier’s Tablets with
the ordinary stomach remedy, or anything that
you have ever heard about or tried before,” cau-
tioned a radio announcer, in an advertisement
transcribed by FTC investigators. “The discovery
of the formula for Currier’s Stomach Tablets has
startled the civilized world, and I say to you that
it makes it absolutely unnecessary for anyone to
continue to suffer from these conditions.”
It would be these advertisements that would
fi nally get Currier into trouble with the FTC, in
1934. But he wouldn’t get into very much trouble
at that. By 1934, six years of diligent huckstering
had done its work, and Currier’s brand had taken
its place on the shelves of drugstores alongside
mainstream remedies such as Alka-Seltzer. More-
over, he was already negotiating with McKessen
Pharmaceuticals to buy him out. By the time the
FTC, citing the examples of bad advertising men-
tioned above, issued him a cease-and-desist order
(commanding him, among other things, to never
again claim that X-rays could reveal the status of
stomach ulcers or that his pills had “startled the
civilized world”), he no longer needed to adver-
tise the things. He’d cashed out.
Then he turned and sank his cash into building
his dream resort on Tenmile Lake, on the Oregon
Coast.
The resort he built there wasn’t outrageously
opulent. The cabins were neat and tidy, but tiny.
Guests weren’t paying $250 a week ($3,700 in
2016 currency!) for deluxe accommodations; they
were paying that money to spend a week away
from prying eyes, in a place with top-shelf cui-
sine, fantastic entertainment, and a little surrepti-
tious casino action downstairs.
Actually, the casino action wasn’t very sur-
reptitious at all. It didn’t have to be. The whole
place was on private property — Currier’s very
own 160-acre townsite. No cops, no district attor-
neys, and of course no liquor-control agents were
allowed in Currier’s Village.
What Currier was going for was a nice, tidy,
and very discreet rustic getaway on a great fi shing
lake. He spent an enormous sum on landscaping
to make it look just right, and paid his carpenters
well above prevailing wage to ensure he got the
very best craftsmen. The amenities were all there:
an airstrip; a seaplane to charter for cruises; and,
of course, boats to rent to take out on the lake and
fi sh. The fi shing on Tenmile Lake was really good.
To top it all off, Currier built a home for himself
and his wife, Jane, on Tenmile Island. The house
was accessible only by boat. It was a massive rus-
tic palace with myrtlewood walls, an extensive
aviary, and climate-controlled kennels for his
Great Danes that actually had their own kitchens
— specially equipped to barbecue goats for the
lucky dogs. In the front yard, facing the lake, a
bed of fl owering azaleas was planted and trimmed
like a hedge, shaped to spell the name “CURRI-
ER.”
Currier advertised the place in Los Angeles
as a vacation getaway you could drive to with-
out ever leaving paved streets. And he worked all
his contacts in Hollywood to make sure word got
around. Celebrities who came to stay at his place
included Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Lily Pons, Sid-
ney Greenstreet and Roy Rogers. Roy came with
his band, the Sons of the Pioneers, and played a
gig there. Another time The Ink Spots came and
played.
Rumor has it Currier was working some oth-
er contacts, too. The claim was that he had some
connections in organized crime, which were help-
ing him out with advice and maybe fi nancial as-
sistance with his gambling and fi ne-dining oper-
ations.
In any case, Roy and Jane Currier lived there
like resident royalty in their great lakeside pal-
ace, dining and hobnobbing with the stars in their
plush dockside restaurant, until 1939, when Cur-
rier sold the place to Edward Jackson of San Di-
ego for $75,000 ($1.3 million in 2016 dollars — a
smoking deal if true; the newspaper reports on it
at the time seemed skeptical). He hung onto his
home on Tenmile Island, though, and he and Jane
stayed on there until a fi re burned it to the ground
in 1942. When that happened, the Curriers moved
back to Los Angeles. Roy Currier died there in
1960; despite announced plans to rebuild and
move back, he never did.
As for Currier’s Village, it soldiered on, looking
seedier and seedier, as the postwar boom slowly
changed the state around it. With Currier no lon-
ger there, the celebrities stopped coming, and
cabin prices dropped back down to normal-tourist
rates. In the early 1950s it was still there; but by
the end of the decade, it was starting to be disman-
tled. A couple of fi res, including a monster that
broke out in 1965, helped the process along.
Today, all that remains of Currier’s Village are
the concrete pads that once underlaid the garages
of its cabins; the Lakeshore Lodge now stands on
the old grounds.
C ottage G rove
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