"60 MINUTES", Program On
WILLARD WATER (LA WATER)
VOL.XIII, No. 10, FINAL CUT, November 23,
1980
REASONER:
What's your problem my friend? Dandruff? A
calf with water belly? Perhaps you want to
grow a 32-pound 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 out 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.
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. Here's what some folks say his
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 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 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
Willard Water. We wondered what the normal
treatment would have been.
LEMLEY: Well you'd put different
kinds of medicine on it. There's 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. Thus, 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 its 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 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 or
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 does
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 he
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's 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, 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: 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. -END-
1998 Editor's Note:
Willard Water has been produced in an
approved lab for production of products for
human consumption since 1981.
Fern Gunderson’s family and
friends have been using Willard Water since
1984. They will not leave home without it.
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