Headache Powder: For What Ails You

Moments after Marcella Gautier opens for business each morning, her regular customers begin arriving for their daily fix.

The customers, blue-collar workers for the most part, quickly purchase a small amount of the fine, white powder they have come for. Many of them ingest it on the spot.

“They tell me they need some of my powder to get them going in the morning,” she said.

If it sounds as if something illegal is going on here, no one in Midway would be misled.

Midway, you see, is midway between Salisbury and Winston-Salem, two of the region’s remaining three headache powder producers.

‘Sell Oodles of Stuff’

“Mister, you’re smack in the middle of headache powder country,” Gautier said. “We sell oodles of the stuff.”

She pointed to a shelf crammed full with packets of B. C., Stanback and Goody’s, the last remaining brands in an industry that once had scores of competitors.

The powdery concoction--traditionally a potent mixture of aspirin and caffeine--used to be called “production powder” in the tobacco and textile mills that proliferated throughout the Southeast after the turn of the century.

“The tobacco and textile mills were hot, noisy places and the . . . workers needed something that would give them quick relief from the long hours and bad working conditions,” said Tom Chambers, president and chief executive of Winston-Salem-based Goody’s. He noted that the first powders came on the market around 1910.

Dozens of druggists throughout the South--and especially the Carolinas--came up with their own special formulas. In the late 1920s, Winston-Salem druggist M. C. (Goody) Goodman combined powdered caffeine, aspirin and the analgesic acetaminophen.

Goody’s has always been a Winston-Salem firm. The company currently occupies a renovated overalls factory just down the street from where Goody Goodman used to dispense the original product over the counter.

Chambers can recall the days when Goody’s and competing powders were sold inside the mills from so-called “dope carts” that also offered cigarettes, coffee and cookies.

“They’re still sold in the mills today, but through vending machines,” he said. A packet of two powders sells for about half a dollar.

The three companies that survived--B. C., Goody’s and Stanback--did so because they were better able to promote and market their product, Chambers said. “Marketing was the key because the ingredients weren’t all that different.”

There’s one notable exception to that: B. C. and Goody’s still contain caffeine, but Stanback dropped the stimulant in 1984. “It hasn’t worked worth a darn,” William Stanback, son of the company’s founder, said of the move.

Stanback, located at nearby Salisbury, and Goody’s are still small, family owned operations. B. C., which began in Durham, N.C., was bought out by the Block Drug Co. in the mid-1960s and was moved to Memphis, Tenn.

Industry insiders generally recognize B. C., which was concocted in 1910 by the late Commodore Thomas Council, as being the first commercial headache powder to appear on the market.

The headache powder industry grew rapidly in the 1920s and ‘30s, Chambers said. It continued to expand until World War II, when mechanization reduced the work forces at the plants and mills across the region.

Today, headache powders account for about $50 million of the annual $1.4-billion analgesic market. They remain primarily a regional product.