"Ton Jon: A Patent Medicine"

WrWritten by Joy Dun Shoemaker

These Ton Jon artifacts were donated to the Sabina Historical Society by Gib Whiteside.

Grant was experimenting with various ideas he had. One was a shoe dye that he tried on Peggy's shoes. It didn't come out the way he hoped, so she had to go to school with one shoe one color and the other shoe a different color. He also made a salve of sulfer and lanolin for Mamie's rheumatism. It had a nasty odor and was so thick it wouldn't spread well. He used Mamie's cooking pans to experiment with his patent medicine formula that he called Ton Jon. Much to the annoyance of Mamie, he burned the bottoms of the pans. Later, he had some success manufacturing a medicine he called "Carolina" to combat cholera in chickens. It was a white substance made of chemicals and minerals, but no herbs. The product was effective but didn't sell well. The chicken house behind the apartment caught on fire, killing all the chickens, although the apartment did not burn. The family then moved to the east side of North Howard Street, two doors north of the Sabina Theatre.

Mamie continued her creamery business and helped take care of the chickens housed in a shed behind the house. Not long after they moved in, Grant received a note that said, "We burned you out once and we can burn you out again." It was a threat they didn't take lightly, but, fortunately, there was not a second fire.

When Grant had his Ton Jon formula ready for sale, he took a supply of the patent medicine to Circleville for tryout. He displayed it in a store there, but because of the distance between Sabina and Circleville, he wasn't able to oversee the operation of his product the way he wanted to. He took a supply to Downtown Drugs, owned by Pete Hayes, in Washington C. H. This time he was close enough in distance that he could be in the store evenings and weekends to get a feel of how to run the operation. He would be there when customers came in and could explain which of the three different Ton Jon remedies would be most effective for the customer with a particular health problem.

When the customers returned for second and third purchases of the patent formula, Grant took down their testimonials and began using them as advertisements. The ad would state that the person had been cured of a stomach disorder or kidney trouble after using Ton Jon.

Grant had an instinct for selecting the right people to work for him. When he had his product in 100 different stores from Akron to Cincinnati, he needed good distributors to represent the company and its product. Of the twenty representatives working for him, one man stood out as his top salesman. He was Bob Spence, a young, good-looking, personable man who had worked as a car salesman, among other things, in Washington C.H.

By that time, Grant, Mamie and the children were back on College Street, living in a house across the street from the one they lived in when they first moved to Sabina. They then moved to a South Howard Street residence and Bob and his wife, Genevieve, moved into their College Street house.

Bob, as a distributor, traveled from town to town, checking on the sale of the patent medicines and making sales calls on prospective store owners who might agree to display the product.

The Ton Jon business was always a family affair with Mamie, Peggy and Gibby as much a part of the operation as Grant. The four of them would sit at the kitchen table where they made it a game to see who could come up with a name for a new product that Grant was ready to put on the market. Although Grant relied mostly on testimonials for advertisements, they all helped put ads together for the newspapers.

On the west side of North Howard Street, in the area near the railroad tracks (the buildings have since been torn down), Grant had a building where he made his Ton Jon patent medicine. The back room was used to prepare the herbal mixture for bottling. Gib poured hot water over the herbs, which were in a 300 gallon stainless steel vat. They had to be strained more than once, as it was difficult to eliminate the sediment.

The liquid was moved to the front part of the partitioned room and put into a large, elevated drum with spigots which allowed the liquid to drain into the bottles. The bottles were then labeled and packaged for shipment by Commercial Freight Trucking Company.

Grant's sister, Mabel Whiteside Arehart (Herb), helped temporarily in the beginning of the business. Helen Lancen was in charge of accounting and managed the office and Leona Fowler did the labeling, bottling and packaging for shipment. (Attractive labels were made by Ralph Gaskins of Gaskins Printing.)

Grace Chaney helped Grant write up the testimonials for the newspapers and Peggy did odd jobs - typing, posting checks and sometimes bottling the patent formula. She received six dollars a week in payment.

Grant's favorite method of advertising was using testimonials. They were effective, but the government frowned on them because there was no diagnosis made by a medical doctor of the ailments mentioned and no proof that the person endorsing Ton Jon actually had the disease he or she professed to have.

In 1945, when Grant crossed state lines into West Virginia to sell his product, the Food and Drug Administration issued a cease and desist order and the battle began. Grant had lawyers in Washington, D.C. working for him. It finally came down to whether or not he would pay the $45,000 fine to continue in the business without using the testimonials or get out. He chose not to pay the money and had to virtually shut down his patent medicine business.

A few years later, Grant tried to resurrect the patent medicine business by using a new name and by getting his good friend, Bob Spence, to introduce the product in Richmond, Indiana. However, the time for patent medicines had passed and the sales didn't develop.

Grant was a man with a creative mind, who had no fear of failing. He experimented with his ideas and if they didn't work, he went on to something else. He was a good judge of character and surrounded himself with people he liked and trusted.

As a young man still in his teens, he hopped a freight car and bummed his way to California and back. He shared food cooked over an open fire with other hobos, but when the opportunity arose, he worked at different jobs for pay. When he was in Sioux City, Iowa, he bellhopped at a big hotel. He was a man who put no limits on himself.

Between the two of them, A. J. and Grant had over one hundred medicine books on herbs. They were both very knowledgeable about the efficacies of the herbs they used. They covered the ailments that were prevalent in the years that they sold patent medicines.

Grant Whiteside died in 1992 in Washington C.H. His father,A. J., died in 1950.

 

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