SOUTHFIELD — The late Frank B. Sewell, 1916-2006, or as some called him, “The Ringmaster,” marched to the beat of his own drum.
Published February 23, 2023
Touched by this encounter, a 20-year-old Frank Sewell packed his bags and headed to Detroit hungry for his destiny. Having moved to Detroit during the Great Depression, Frank Sewell found himself doing odd jobs to stay afloat, “since at that time, he couldn’t just go to a bank and borrow money and then start a company. So, what he would do is work on small projects for people, like putting water tanks in their homes, and that’s how he would buy his raw materials and earn his money,” Doug Sewell said. Doug Sewell recalls as a boy going door to door with his father selling things, a tradition the two would keep into Doug’s adulthood as he became more immersed in the family’s business, Painex Corp.
In 1947, Frank Sewell began experimenting in anticipation of creating a medication that would alleviate body aches and pains. Despite his knowledge of chemistry, he struggled for a few years to create a successful formula. Doug Sewell recollects that it wasn’t until 1949, when George Washington Carver appeared to his father in a dream and showed him how to mix the formula, that he was able to get the right blend of the methyl salicylate, a derivative of birch, Doug Sewell explains, and peanut oil, an homage to the works of Carver.
Sewell saw the success of the newly minted product after the wife of a retired sea captain with an amputation approached him for something to ease her husband’s pain. After applying the product just once, they were amazed to find that the sea captain slept peacefully through the night for the first time in years. Frank Sewell states that after the wife called again two weeks later asking for more of the product, he knew that he had the correct formula.
Now that he had the formula, all he needed was a name for the product. In an excerpt from his autobiography, Frank Sewell writes, “The only thing lacking from the rubbing oil when I dreamed the formula was a name. I concentrated several days on a name, and finally the name came, appeared written on the piece of paper I had been writing on at the kitchen table. I remember at the time I sat at the table, such thoughts were going through my mind, ‘You are suffering from weak almost crippled legs. Your left lung had adhesions. You have six children of your own, three boys and three girls, the eldest only 10 years old and the youngest six months old and all these problems besetting you and on top of everything you are without money.’ With such thoughts going through my mind the word ‘ringmaster’ appeared written on the paper I had been writing on. I sat there and thought of the significance of the word Ringmaster.”
Frank Sewell would then spend the next few years traveling the country, giving Ringmaster away for free to those who needed it, praying for their healing as he applied it to them.
Doug Sewell remembers his family loading up his 1956 blue Ford with a trunk full of Ringmaster.
“When he would go down south, he would pray with people, evangelize them and offer wisdom and advice and things like that. So, by the time he got back from his travels, his trunk would be empty. He would always record people and their recoveries.”
As Frank Sewell declined in his later years, Doug Sewell joined him on the road equipped with a video camera to record the testimonials of the people using Ringmaster. Soon they were able to fill a 9-by-12-foot room with testimonial tapes speaking to the effectiveness of Ringmaster Rubbing Oil.
Located just down the street from Painex’s headquarters, Dr. Herman J Glass II, one of the first African American chiropractors in the area and the first Black doctor appointed on the board of examiners in 1988, swears by Ringmaster Rubbing Oil in his practice. In his 40 years of practicing, the Southfield-based doctor said, “Back in the ’80s and early ’90s, I compared it side by side with other products, Icy Hot, Biofreeze. Ringmaster was the best stuff that I’ve used on patients. That oil sinks through the dermal layer, penetrating the nerve root deeper than all those creams.”
Carrying on Frank Sewell’s legacy, the Sewell family, to this day, makes a point to pray over the formula before it is poured into the glass bottles and sent out. Doug Sewell believes that they can take prayer and positive feelings and incarnate that into a result.
“We continue to pray over the product. My sister comes whenever we make a new batch, and we both pray over it.”
