Find
out what Harry Reasoner discovered in his interview of Doc Willard All
the way from the South Dakota town where it originated to a segment on the
CBS 60 Minutes...Willard Water has been brewing up a storm of controversy
and simultaneously has gathered some loyal users. Some
use it to fix whatever ails them while others brush it off as a form of quackery.
Of course,
you'll have to decide for yourself. Here is the transcript from the 60 Minutes
interview of Dr. John W. Willard Senior by Harry Reasoner on November 23, 1980. The
transcript of the show
HARRY
REASONER:
What is your problem, my friend? Dandruff? A calf with water
belly? Perhaps you want to grow a 32 lb. squash? Do you have emphysema, or a painful
burn? Well, if I told you I had something right here in this little bottle of
Doc Willard's Wonder Water that would solve all of those problems.... You’d possibly
say that's the same kind of talk I heard from that snake oil salesman we ran out
of town. Well,
if you went to Rapid City, South Dakota, you'd find a lot of folks who swear by
something they say will do all these things ... the wondrous water of Doctor John
Wesley Willard. Too good to be true, you say? We went out to take a look.... with
an open mind ... but on the alert for the first whiff of snake oil. HARRY
REASONER:
What we found was a vat of hot brew being stirred up out back
in a truck repair shop and watching over it was Doc Willard who is not a wizard,
but a Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the South Dakota School of Mines. (Editor's
Note: It is now produced in a modern facility and is tested by the FDA in random
visits to the plant to be certain it is safe for human consumption. It has never
failed the test.) Here's
what some folks say his "Real" Willard Water can do: Doc Lemley says it's good
for his emphysema. Chauncey Taylor used it on his second and third degree burn.
Ranchers give it to cattle to keep them healthy. Farmers say it makes wheat grow
better. A quail breeder says it helps his birds grow faster and fatter. DOC
WILLARD:
People can't comprehend that this is possible and they're skeptics.
And I suppose I would have been the same way if I hadn't spent the past ten years
of my life living and sleeping with this water. REASONER:
So what's in it that could make so many things happen? Well, a little liquid road
salt, that's what melts snow and rots your car, and sodium silicate and magnesium
sulfate and sulfated castor oil and then Doc Willard mixes some of it with powdered
lignite. What you have finally are various mixtures called by different names:
LA Water, (it has nothing to do with that town in California, it means lignite
activated water) or CAW water, catalyst activated water. But it's all Willard
Water, whatever it is. DOC
WILLARD:
Well, it's the calcium magnesium, polysilicate polymer with
a castor oil. .... REASONER:
Now that's chemist talk. You've already lost me. DOC
WILLARD:
All right. It's a catalyst that alters the structure of the
water making water behave in a manner that heretofore has not been reported in
the literature. REASONER:
Whatever "Real" Willard Water is, we set out to visit some folks around Rapid
City who talk about what it has done for them. On burns for example, producer
Paul Loewenwarter talked with Chauncey Taylor who scorched his leg doing some
welding on an old oil drum. CHAUNCEY
TAYLOR:
The fumes in it, I guess, ignited and blowed out a hole and melted
my overalls. I had a pair of poly .. polyester overalls on and it melted them
and melted my shirt and burnt my leg. PAUL
LOEWENWARTER:
So you looked down and just saw your leg charred? TAYLOR:
I looked down and the skin was just hanging all different ways there. LOEWENWARTER:
Well what did you do to treat it? TAYLOR:
Oh, I had a bottle of this LA Water and I just started squirting it on there
and just kept pouring it on, a fine mist. LOEWENWARTER:
And what does it do? TAYLOR:
It heals it I guess. DR.
RAY LEMLEY:
And I said now look, let's try this out. REASONER:
Dr. Ray Lemley is a prominent surgeon, now retired, but still Chauncey Taylor's
family doctor. He told Chauncey to keep spraying the burn with "Real" Willard
Water. We wondered what the normal treatment would have been. LEMLEY:
Well you'd put different kinds of medicine on it. There are all kinds of
medicine for burns. Any housewife has a dozen and that would kill off the new
cells and damage the wound. It would be too strong, usually, and burn it and interfere
with the healing of it. This, we did nothing to interfere with the healing of
it. REASONER:
Would the normal procedure be to graft? LEMLEY:
Well, if you took him to the hospital they would have probably grafted that
by this time and by the time that he gets the scabs off of this and it's all healed
up, your place you took your graft off from it would still be raw. So we're way
ahead. REASONER:
Chauncey's scab was all gone about three weeks after the burn, and three
months after that we dropped by to see the final results. CHAUNCEY
TAYLOR:
Well, it's all healed up. REASONER:
Dr. Lemley does not just recommend "Real" Willard Water for others. Several
times a day he guzzles the stuff which, incidentally, tastes just like water.
LEMLEY:
I have emphysema and I wanted to see if it would help that. I mix up a jug
of it, about three times as strong as it's supposed to be. So if it's gonna hurt
anybody, it would me. REASONER:
The surprising thing is that Dr. Lemley, at 78, with emphysema, is nonetheless
able to pursue his hobby of paleontology, at which he's a recognized expert, digging
for fossils. LEMLEY:
I don't walk too far for anything on account of my emphysema but I get around.
REASONER:
And you would credit the water with part of that ability? LEMLEY:
Well I've seen a lot of emphysema in my long years of practice and most of
them get worse all the time. And mine, it's a little worse than it was ten years
ago, but it isn't anything like anybody I've seen before. REASONER:
(MUSIC) And then there's Vern Sheppard, a popular Rapid City broadcaster,
who used to miss weeks on the air every winter with a bad throat. Now Sheppard
sprays the throat with Willard Water every day and rarely misses a day on the
air. JOHNSON'S
DAUGHTER:
When I have pink eye in my eye I just squirt some LA Water
in it and then after a while it isn't so pink anymore. RALPH
WHITE:
I spray it on my head for my dandruff and I put it in my bath
water and drink some of it some of the time. REASONER:
Because people are drinking Willard Water and pouring it on burns and infections,
we wondered whether this unlikely mixture has anything in it that could do anybody
any harm. We took samples to Industrial Testing Laboratories in New York City.
Their results were the same as other tests. They found nothing harmful, either
in the way of bacteria or metals that could hurt you. But they didn't find much
else either. So, what it does, how it doe it, if it does it remains a mystery.
It remains a mystery even to the Chief Medical Officer of South Dakota's Department
of Health, Dr. Robert Hayes. DR.
ROBERT HAYES:
My professional opinion about it, of course, is, has been
that a lot of people use it. I've seen results of what they said it did. I've
never had occasion to use it on a patient. Have had no more opinion than that,
sir. REASONER:
You've never used it yourself? HAYES:
No, sir. I haven't. REASONER:
On the other hand, you've had no reason to assume it would hurt anybody?
HAYES:
No, I haven't, as a matter of fact, anything I've heard about it has been
nothing bad. It has always been on the positive side. REASONER:
Would you like to see it tested, Doctor? HAYES:
I sure would. I've in fact had a question in my mind why it wasn't tested
before and I, I think most doctors in this area who have patients who have come
in contact with it would like to see it tested. REASONER:
Willard Water gets packed for sale at a kind of Willard family bottling bee.
It's not licensed in any way for sale as a drug or a fertilizer and state agencies
in South Dakota watch closely to see that no false claims are made about what
it can do. The little bottle costs three dollars, to be mixed with a gallon of
water the way most people use it. The biggest commercial distributor of Willard
Water is Tom Callahan. How much of this stuff have you distributed? TOM
CALLAHAN:
Well, in the last four years, close to forty thousand of those
ounce bottles. REASONER:
Have you had any trouble with regulatory agencies? TOM
CALLAHAN:
Yes. They've stopped the sale of it twice and I'm sure that
we'd have a lot more except that we have so much public opinion around this area
that when the first stop sale order came out the governor got hundreds of letters
from people that were very irate about stopping this product. And they've more
or less kind of let us live ever since. REASONER:
About the only laboratory work on what Willard Water does, has been done
at the South Dakota School of Mines by Sister Marmion Howe, a Professor of Biology.
SISTER
MARMION HOWE:
I took some different species of microorganisms and tested
them with CAW or with Doc Willard's Water and without it and then I used different
antibiotics on it to see if Willard Water enhanced the action of the antibiotic.
REASONER:
Does it? SISTER
MARMION:
Yes. I found that it did with certain organisms, not all. REASONER:
The water also seemed to sometimes speed up the growth of bacteria, doesn't
it? SISTER
MARMION:
Yes, we found that out. Some of my students did some work on
that. REASONER:
Do you have any theories based on your tests as to why it does what it does?
SISTER
MARMION:
Well no, we need about a million dollars to do some studies
on it but I think the fact that this is a surfactant - or a detergent-like acting
material might make it penetrate a little bit more quickly and effectively. REASONER:
Doc Willard developed the water as a cleaner. But he learned it could treat
burns when he burned his own arm on a hot plate, years ago, dowsed it with his
water, the sting disappeared, the burn healed. As a cleaner, he heats up some
of the water and soaks an engine piston in it that's coated with carbon and the
burnt on carbon comes off easily with a rag. Normally that's done only with a
lot of scrubbing that can damage the piston or with harsh solvents that can be
dangerous. DOC
WILLARD:
This we can take and bathe in it or drink it, if it wasn't so
hot. REASONER:
(SOUND OF COWS) Ranchers and farmers of Rapid City aren't waiting for scientific
proof about Willard Water. They're using it now because they say it puts money
in their pockets. At roundup time, Don Taylor uses it on his calves when they're
branded, spraying it on fresh burns. The calves seem to quiet down right away.
Taylor says it helps the burns heal without infection, fewer veterinary bills.
If there's a sick calf, he'll get a stiff dose out of a pop bottle and ranchers
say that Willard Water can cure a calf that might otherwise die. Ranchers put
it in the wells, in drinking water, and cattle drink it year around. And it's
said to be particularly good as a kind of tranquilizer when calves are weaned
away from their mothers and become nervous, even frantic. TOM
CALLAHAN:
And we've seen this where you crowd these chickens together
or quail together how they quiet down and it definitely has an effect on the nervous
system and it isn't imagination with a calf or a chicken or a quail. REASONER:
Quail that get the Willard Water don't bite and scratch each other the way
other quail do and Jim Dickey, who breeds quail in Rapid City, says they gain
more weight on less high cost feed. JIM
DICKEY:
They're plumper. They're a little heavier on Willard Water. REASONER:
Out in the wheat fields there has been a little testing done by farmers like
Paul Zelfer who has one field with normal, untreated wheat and another whose seed
were soaked in the Willard Water before planting. PAUL
ZELFER:
From the start it was a better color and it came up quicker and
it was a thicker stand and it would yield more, would be more bushels per acre
and every bushel per acre means that many more dollars per acre. REASONER:
Zelfer then took producer Loewenwarter into an untreated wheat field to show
him the difference. ZELFER:
This here is the treated wheat and this is the untreated and you can just
see the difference in the hair roots. That's what feed the plant, that's what
makes them grow is them little hair roots. The proof is here, you can see it.
But what makes the plant do so much better with the water, I just don't know.
REASONER:
(NUNS SINGING) You wouldn't expect an order of nuns to be a little hot bed
of Willard Water boosters but at St. Martin's Academy, the Benedictine Sisters
use it daily. And it's not just because one of the members is Sister Marmion Howe,
the Biology Professor we met at the School of Mines. Many of the sisters bathe
in it, drink it, treat burns with it in the kitchen. And there's the garden where
we found Sister Jenna spraying and spraying with Willard Water last spring, hoping
for vegetables like the crops she had gotten in '79. I
understand you had some prodigious squash? SISTER
JENNA:
(A little embarrassed) Yes, I did. REASONER:
What would be the size of a good, big squash? SISTER
JENNA:
Well my largest one was 32 pounds and a 25 pounder and from there
on down to 18 and I believe 15 was the smallest. REASONER:
We couldn't resist going back this fall to see whether Willard Water had
worked in spite of the drought that struck the plains this summer. Sure enough,
monster squash, though not quite the size of the year before. I'm
no judge, but that's 20 pounds I'd say anyhow, wouldn't you? SISTER
JENNA:
I would say 20 at least. REASONER:
It would make a lot of meals (LAUGHTER) REASONER:
So here is Doc Willard, with a magic juice that people say works on quail
and squash and people and cattle and no scientific proof at all. DOC
WILLARD:
I've worked with some top-flight men at other universities and
they've made the statement, as I have myself, "I see it but I still don't believe
it." REASONER:
Well, where do we stand? We haven't proved anything and we didn't expect
to. But we've met a lot of nice people and we found a product that, everyone agrees,
can't hurt you. Maybe that's enough. Besides, anything made with road salt and
castor oil can't be all bad. *To
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