What Nujol Started
Chapter 1
PART 1 / PART 2 / PART 3 / PART 4
The motorman - who was the goat for the Long Island catastrophe so the Company medic - has high blood pressure, saidand eliminating the . Instead of cleaning the toxins out of his arteries disease, he was given capsules containing phenobarbitol, aminophyline and potassium iodide and then sent back to dutyminutes before he . Fifteen reached the protecting automatic signal he fell asleep at his controls. And no wonder.
Dorland's Medical Dictionary lists phenobarbitol as a hypnotic (sleep producer). Its trade name is Luminol and it is the most popular of all the sleeping pills. But many people take them and never wake up. Aminophyline is listed as a diuretic (to promote flow of urine). Potassium iodide is listed as an alternative for syphilis. The medic who did this listed in the Directory of the American Medical Association as a "specialist" in internal medicine.
In the Ohio wreck the story given this author by the engineer is the most fantastic he ever heard. This man pilotedthe Pennsylvania Railroad's crack (Overland Ltd.) "Spirit of St. Louis" which crashed into the back of a stalled troop train with horrible results.
In doing so - he admits - he passed a caution signal (which indicated 30 miles an hour) two miles from the wreck, at 75 miles an hour and kept going until he was almost on the troop train. This in spite of a red fuse dropped by the troop train's flagman 500 feet before it stopped. The near signal was red and visible for two miles but the engineer never saw any of them until (as he aptly said) it was too late.
An exhaustive investigation of the wreck scene by this author, and a complete examination of the Interstate Commerce Commision's record, indicate that the engineer was sound asleep when he passed all these warning lights.
He denied he had taken a cold tablet or sulfa drug. In fact he denied he had ever taken a doctor's precription or patent medicine of any kind during his 67 years of life. The facts speak for themselves, as Drug Trust agents well knew when they had their railroad take care of things so promptly.
The Pennsylvania Railroad is 20 years behind the times. The major airlines of the United States found, the hard way, what used to cause their major disasters in which pilotsran into mountainsides, often in broad daylight. It was sulfa pills, "to ward off a cold" or cold tablets to "cure" one.
From August 31, 1940, to March 12, 1948, they had 19 of these "mysterious" wrecks which took the lives of 438 persons, according to the Civil Aeronautics Board. At that time the airlines issued orders grounding all flight personnel from 48 to 72 hours after they had taken a drug of any sort.
The results were more than satisfactory. There hasn't been a major disaster on an American commercial airline since.
With a nation still shocked at the Ohio tragedy, the Pennsylvania Railroad pulled another one out of its hat November 23. This was the worst of all, for 77 LIRR commuters were killed in a rear-end collision at Richmond Heights and 332 were injured.
It was a replica of the other two. The motorman of the Death Train ran past red and amber lights of an automatic block system without slowing down. He ignored the red fuse and the lattern of the flagman who had dropped off the rear of the stalled train. Obviously, he was sound asleep. This motorman was killed and cannot talk. This author has information that he had been loading up on sulfa pills or cold tablets, or some such concoction, which put people to sleep at high speed.
The PRR went into action almost as quickly as it did in Ohio. The Rockefeller Center crowd had its stooge in the State House at Albany (Governor Dewey) announce from a vacation spot in Cuba that he had 'ordered' a complete and thorough investigation of the wreck. The little man with the Charlie Chaplin moustache got plenty of publicity for his next election campaign. But here is the pay-off. Dewey announced that he had turned the entire investigation over to Robert P. Patterson, a staunch and able Rockefeller puppet who has spent most of his private life on the Rockefeller payroll.
End Chapter 1