Castor oil leads to longevity
By Bill Duncan
The View From Here
I had no idea that a column on castor oil would stir so many memories until my column of two weeks ago generated such a large response.
One reader even sent me a note that said: "Your column was hard to swallow."
My biggest surprise was when I visited an Alzheimer’s patient in a nursing home, and he greeted me with: "We must have had the same mother." Then he explained that his mother also kept a special spoon to administer castor oil. Could this magic elixir be a cure for Alzheimer’s?
One of the letters I received even touted a smell-less, tasteless castor oil called Castiva and claimed it was miraculous in relieving arthritic pain. She didn’t know that the Duncan clan motto is "Learn to suffer."
Regardless of the smell-less, tasteless claim, just the idea would cause me to suffer. From the mail I received, I would have to think there is an entire generation that owes its longevity to castor oil or its equally evil-tasting remedy, cod liver oil.
I recalled being assigned as a newspaper reporter to take the last voyage of the Queen Mary from Southampton, England, around Cape Horn to Long Beach, Calif., and standing on the gangway with the QM’s Chief Steward Joe Allen, who was worried that there were only six coffins aboard.
Allen was taking mental note that the average age of the passengers coming aboard was in the 70s. What he didn’t take into consideration was just how tough that generation was because not one passenger died on the 40-day voyage. That is probably owing to castor oil.
One of the responses to my column was from Paul Werner of Alief, Texas, who enclosed an e-mail ditty called "Those Born 1930 to 1979." I was born a shade earlier, but from Paul’s description of those who survived the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, they did it without government intervention.
The ditty recalls that we were put to sleep on our tummies in cribs covered with brightly colored lead-based paints. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, and we rode our bikes without helmets. As infants and young children, we rode in cars without car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags.
We rode in the bed of pickup trucks, we drank water from a garden hose. We ate fatty foods, sweet cupcakes, white bread spread with real butter and amazingly we weren’t obese because we ran off the extra calories while playing hard outside.
The e-mail reminder said we would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were home when the streetlights came on and were perfectly safe without a cell phone. We built our own go-carts out of scraps of wood and tin, then rode them lickety-split down steep hills, many times coming to a stop in the bushes.
Instead of all the electronic doodads, we had friends and played with them outdoors. We fell out of trees, got cuts, broke bones and knocked out teeth, but there were no lawsuits because we considered them accidents.
We made up our own games using sticks and cans, and we didn’t need Little League to get up a game of baseball in any vacant lot. The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of because they sided with the law.
And talking back to an adult, especially a teacher, would get your backside blistered by your mother or father.
We had freedom to succeed or fail, and we knew the consequences. It was that generation – and although I am slightly older, mine too – that grew up before the lawyers and government regulated our lives for our own good. I have my parents to thank for that, or was it all that castor oil?
Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.