The way to Zzyzx, Calif.--marked by green and white signs pointing to a road off a desolate stretch of Interstate 15 southwest of Las Vegas--is a road less traveled these days.
This 4 1/2-mile byway with a name like a word on a Scrabble board shoots off seemingly to nowhere, offering travelers glimpses of Mojave Desert history and the days of a radio evangelist-health food huckster and his "Boulevard of Dreams."
Zzyzx (pronounced Zy-Zix, to rhyme with Isaacs) Mineral Springs and Health Resort was a town created out of nothing in 1944 by one of the Mojave Desert's most fabled characters, Curtis Howe Springer.
In a region devoted to health and fitness fads, Springer was an early master, coupling religion with the marketing of "miraculous" health food and water cures. His enduring inspiration, though, was to name his headquarters Zzyzx, figuring that by having the last word in the phone book, he'd have the last word in his business.
The self-proclaimed "old-time medicine man" and self-ordained preacher gained notoriety in the 1940s and '50s not only for Zzyzx, but also for his special line of health foods. He claimed curative powers could be derived from concoctions of carrots, celery, turnips, parsley and brown sugar.
For more than 30 years, believers, health seekers and the just plain curious were drawn to Zzyzx by Springer's promises and the products he pitched on half-hour radio broadcasts carried by 221 radio stations in the United States and 102 overseas.
He hawked such curative wonders as Manna, a "Hollywood Pep Cocktail"; Antediluvian, a peppermint-flavored desert herb tea; and a $25 cure-it-yourself hemorrhoid kit, along with enthusiastic testimonials from their users. Interspersed with all this was gospel music and a homespun philosophy all his own.
Springer claimed that his success began in 1924, after he sang a solo for the Pittsburgh experimental radio station that evolved into KDKA, the nation's first commercial radio station. Over the next two decades he preached, sang and managed resorts in six states before coming to California.
In 1944, when he and his fiancee, Helen, arrived at Soda Springs, along with his daughter, Marilou, they filed a mining claim on federal land they described as a "mosquito swamp," a patch of 12,000 acres 8 miles long and 3 miles wide south of Baker.
