Who Zoomin' Who?

In 1974, when my partners, Hilary and Chuck, and I (on $1,600.00 borrowed dollars), founded Whale's Tale in Cape May, NJ, we necessarily had to work additional jobs to support ourselves the first two years. One of the jobs I worked was painting houses, and I did a lot of work for Grace Buck at her houses in both Cape May and Bryn Mawr, PA. Mrs. Buck was a very kind lady.

In the course of working for her, she tried to introduce me to her religion, Christian Science. I loved her positive outlook on life and I was impressed by the steady stream of leaders of charities who visited her to update her on how they were spending her donations, particularly in support of schools for orphans, but I could not accept the Christian Science tenet that God was everything, everything BUT medicine. I remember how flummoxed she was that the Church's adherents, herself included, did find it necessary to use dentists.

But the most amazing thing was that she was the widow of J. Mahlon Buck, board member of (then) SmithKlein. He, the descendant of one of the Smith Brothers whose cough drops had been the founding nucleus of what today is GlaxoSmithKline, maker of Avandia.

I never joined Christian Science, but later I studied deeply in Religious Science, its God-is-ALL (with no egomaniac-Mary-Baker-Eddy dictator), spiritual cousin, but that began in 1987. In 1978, when I blasted out of Cape May into a nut-house commitment, I was given Lithium. Eskalith from SmithKlein, to be precise, and its being manufactured by Grace Buck's husband's company was the only reason I felt I could trust it.

Only after I went off it for a milder drug in 2007, did I come to realize that while Lithium did not harm my body, and it did indeed seem to keep me from getting overly manic, it was spiritual poison. It disconnected me from intuition and artistic inspiration. How not surprised was I when in the Metaphysical Bible Dictionary I later discovered that Grace's husband Mahlon's name meant "The Sickness."

It was Lithium, which my mother, with the conviction of a Nazi, insisted I take, that kept me unaware all these years that I had the key to collapsing Michael Remer's theft of Tennessee Williams' estate from Harvard (and so much more).

Over the years, I have thrown out the copy of self-published songs Mahlon had written and Mrs. Buck gave me. I often wonder what it would have been like to listen to Mahlon sitting at the grand piano, singing. I dare say that government officials will compel his corporate descendants to soon sing, and we'll all be shocked by the truth about the drug companies, our actual Worldwide Sickness.