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Rub of Genius A forthcoming history of America’s most iconic cold remedy celebrates the remarkable family behind it
Lunsford Richardson By Jim Schlosser Historical images from the Greensboro Historical Museum Archives
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nne Carlson, wife of Greensboro’s Carl Carlson, oldest living grandson of Vick’s VapoRub inventor Lunsford Richardson, called her granddaughter last year with a potent request. “You need to write a book immediately,” she told Ashley Kaufman, a 2000 graduate in English from Davidson College and now a public relations consultant in Charlotte. The story of the family — its business and philanthropic side — must be told, Carlson said. Some family members with stories to tell were getting on in years. Carl Carlson, for instance, turned 97 in January. Anne Carlson had also been impressed by a book about the history of the old Thalhimers Department Store chain, which was based in Anne’s former hometown of Richmond, Virginia. That book had been written by a granddaughter of the founding family. Since then, Kaufman has been researching and interviewing. In about six to eight months, she hopes to finish the book, The Blue Jar: The Legacy of a Family Remedy. Kaufman sighs as her grandmother declares, “It’s going to be a best-seller. She’s going to be on ‘The Today Show.’ She’s a good writer. She has been writing since she was a little girl.” As Anne Carlson and Kaufman talk in the living room of Anne and Carl Carlson’s spacious home bordering the eleventh fairway of the Greensboro Country Club’s Carlson Farm golf course, Carl sits quietly in a wheelchair, attached to oxygen. He had pneumonia last May. He has been forced to give up painting, which he took up in his early 70s. His works decorate both walls of an upstairs hall. He very well may be the only living person who remembers anything about Lunsford Richardson, a Greensboro resident who died at age 65 in August 1919 of pneumonia while on a Vick’s sales trip to San Francisco. Carl Carlson was
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about three and a half at the time. “Vague,” he says of his recollection of Richardson. “I remember going to their house (on Smith Street). I remember my grandmother much better.” Lunsford and Mary Lynn Richardson’s children, including Carl’s future mother, had a role in the invention in 1894 of VapoRub. When they came down with colds, Richardson, a pharmacist who owned a drug store in the 100 block of South Elm Street, mixed a concoction in a brass mortar and pestle cup. He applied the poultice to the chests of the children. Almost overnight they were much better. Word spread around Greensboro of Richardson’s creation, which he at first called Richardson’s Magic Croup Salve. The salve helped other sick children in Greensboro. Eventually, the product would become — and remains — a worldwide product. Anne Carlson has a mortar and pestle cup that belonged to Lunsford Richardson, perhaps the very one in which the pharmacist mixed the ingredients that became VapoRub. Later, Richardson’s son, the innovative Smith Richardson, took the renamed VapoRub and other cold remedies that his father invented and formed Vick Family Remedies Co. in 1905. The Vick name honored one of Lunsford Richardson’s brothers-in-law, Dr. Joshua Vick of Richardson’s native Johnston County in eastern North Carolina. The company sent traveling salesmen out in cars equipped with ladders. The salesmen stopped every chance to plaster barns and hang from tree limbs advertisements for VapoRub. Anne Carlson remembers seeing one of those barn signs in Virginia as a young girl. She never dreamed that someday she would be part of the family that owned the product. In 1919, the year Lunsford Richardson died, the company changed its name to Vick Chemical Co., with Smith Richardson at the top. The company already had a plant on Milton Street off Spring Garden Street and in the 1930s built another on Cridland Drive, next to Latham Park. In 1985, the company, by then called Richardson-Vick, was acquired by Procter & Gamble. The Art & Soul of Greensboro