How a hepatitis song infected Phoenix, divided family

It was a popular song about the unlikeliest of topics: a jingle that preached hand washing after using the bathroom.

It was created with the aim of stopping the spread of hepatitis, but it was the song itself that would become — dare we say it? — infectious in Phoenix during the early 1980s.

The song lasted on the city's airwaves for five years, playing as a public-service announcement on television and radio stations. There are no figures about how often it played, but those who grew up in the city during that time would say it was ceaseless.

The song ran amid a hepatitis epidemic in Phoenix, which public-health officials said was among the worst in the country.

It is impossible to gauge how much of an effect the commercial had on rates of hepatitis infections. One public-health official called it a success story. Another estimated the likely impact at somewhere close to zero.

Instead, arguably, the biggest legacy of the public-service announcement was the divide between its creators, two sisters who today don't speak to each other.

"The Hepatitis Song" — the official name listed in the Library of Congress — itself resides only in the memories of those who had it burrowed there through repeated airings. When it left the airwaves around 1985, it left for good.

In an age when it seems everything is on the Internet, this commercial is not.

The only known copy of the PSA is in a box in Forsyth, Mo., at the home of Sally Niner, the woman who ran the day-care center where it was filmed. Her sister, Dianne Whiles, the credited writer of the song who lives in Moline, Ill., says she does not have a copy.

Niner will tell the story of the song, and how she tried to help stop the spread of the disease. But she did not want to make the videotape of the PSA or any other materials she made for the campaign publicly available. It is a painful part of her life she has packed away and doesn't want to re-open.

A PSA incubates

The song that was the centerpiece of the public-service announcement set hygiene tips to a simple melody sung in the dissonant tones of an amateur children's chorus.

"Hepatitis has some symptoms we should learn to recognize," the song began. "Like fever, feeling very tired and loss of appetite." The verse continued with other symptoms: Your tummy would hurt, you would feel real sick, you would not eat a bite. Eyes, the song said, turned sort of yellow where they only should be white.

A musician has uploaded a video to YouTube of her singing the song

Each line of the song's verse rhymed based on the -ite ending. In perhaps an act of elegant songwriting problem-solving, there was no attempt to rhyme anything with the word "hepatitis." The chorus moved to an A-B-C-B pattern. It also contained the practical advice:

"So, wash your hands after going to the bathroom. Wash your hands after changing baby, too. 'Cause we don't want to spread hepatitis. And we don't want hepatitis to catch you."

At this point during the public-service announcement, the screen showed a row of children who were singing the song. A woman off-screen asked, in rhythm, "Who?" The children answered in unison, pointing at the viewer: "You."

The song spreads

Leonard Pierce remembered watching the spot as a child at his Phoenix home in the mornings. It seemed like it played a lot during the "The Wallace and Ladmo Show," the long-running and highly-rated children's show, he said.

"The tune was so catchy, it was so infectious," Pierce said. "You remembered it if you heard it once. If you heard it 100 times like I did, it was burrowed into your brain."

Pierce's memories of the ad were posted on the website of "The Onion," the satirical newspaper. The article, in the non-fictional A/V Club section, solicited readers to describe their nostalgia for local TV commercials. Pierce, who now lives in Chicago, said he remembered the song more than the visuals, which he hazily recalled as a chorus of kids and a shot of a baby being changed.

"I don't know if Phoenix had a huge hepatitis problem at the time," he said. "I'm guessing it did from the amount of times that song was played."

Jonathon Brandmeier, at the time the newly installed morning show host at KZZP, 104.7 FM, one of the city's top-rated Top 40 stations, remembers playing the public-service announcement as part of a commercial break.

"This is so stupid," he thought. "I'll play it again."

The song was on a tape cartridge. When it ended, Brandmeier cued it up again. Then again.

"I was just reacting to it," Brandmeier said, during a recent interview following his syndicated morning radio show at WLS in Chicago.

The song struck him as odd and the repeated plays only solidified the thought.

"Why do we need this song about washing hands after going to the toilet?" he said. "Don't people do that anyway? And, I guess, the answer was no."

Brandmeier made sport of the song on-the-air. On that day and on other days. "I made it a hit," he said.

He had a band, the Leisure Suits, and decided they should cover "The Hepatitis Song" live on stage at a concert at Arizona State University.

He got a hold of Niner, and she agreed to take the stage and lead the crowd in a mass sing-along.

"I'll never forget how scared I was," she said. "I shook." She remembered Brandmeier being "a very nice man. But he scared me to death."

The concert must have been in 1981 or 1982, the only two years Brandmeier was at KZZP. Neither Niner nor Brandmeier could pinpoint the exact date.

But at the time, Niner's PSA was being widely screened on television, including during the state's most popular children's television show. And it was getting mass airplay on the city's most popular radio station, raising awareness even if it was played for laughs. It was the pinnacle of popularity for "The Hepatitis Song," and a tangible representation for what Niner wished to achieve.

"I did it as a public service," she said. "All of it, I did to help kids."

The ad disappeared from the airwaves by 1985. At the time, the public didn't question why. It was as if it had just run its course.

Few knew that "The Hepatitis Song" was the subject of a dispute between two sisters that would stretch from Phoenix to Moline and sprout from seeds of distrust rooted in Nashville.

Roots of distrust

Whiles, a single mother raising four kids, entered a singing contest at the state fair in Davenport, Iowa, in the late 1960s. One of the judges was Dottie West, at the time a rising star of country-and-western music.

Backstage, West was cold. She didn't bring a jacket. Whiles said she remembered offering the singer hers. That simple gesture, Whiles said, struck up a friendship.

The two exchanged numbers and easy phone conversations, she said. Whenever West performed in the area, she would invite Whiles.

After one show, in 1970, Whiles said, she was sitting on West's tour bus playing songs she had written. Whiles said West liked what she heard and asked her to come into a studio and make quick demonstration recordings of them — demos in the parlance.

Nothing came of the recordings. Or so she thought.

Whiles said one of those demoed songs was called "Country Sunshine." In 1973, she said she saw a television ad for Coca-Cola and recognized that song being played as the jingle, with West singing it.

The song helped make West's career. She signed a lifetime endorsement deal with Coke. The song was later released as a single, becoming a Top 10 hit on country charts. It was nominated for a Grammy as the best country song of the year. The nominees were the two credited writers, West and producer Bill Davis.

Davis's name may help explain the Coke connection. He was an ad executive and jingle writer who, two years before, had helped create the "I'd Like To Buy The World A Coke" song — the jingle that featured so prominently during the recent finale of the TV show "Mad Men."

Whiles sued. The litigation took years, she said. And ended with an agreement that she wouldn't discuss the financial settlement. Records of the lawsuit could not be located. But today, official records list three writers of "Country Sunshine." Whiles is the third.

It wasn't the sort of payday she would have made had she been given a solo credit for the song, she said. But for a single mother, the money was a help. "It worked out that I got something out of it anyway," Whiles said.

Cure for an epidemic

In 1976, Whiles's sister, Niner decided to move away from the harsh Midwestern winters to Arizona. She opened Happy Faces Day Care in north Phoenix.

Around the time the center opened, the Phoenix area was experiencing an outbreak of Hepatitis A. News stories from the time were describing it as an epidemic by 1979, with cases doubling year over year.

The disease is spread — and, fair warning, this is not pretty — from fecal matter somehow entering the mouth. Other types of hepatitis, B and C, are spread through blood.

The Centers for Disease Control, which had an office in Phoenix at the time, started examining whether the spread could be linked to child-care centers. A two-year study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980 established the link to day-care centers.

"This was the epitome of success in epidemiology," said Hannah Webster, one of the authors of the study. Now retired and living in Chandler, she had file folders filled with documents about the outbreak.

The disease was quickly spread among toddlers, a growing segment of the day-care population, the study concluded. Children might not show symptoms, the study said, but the disease would spread to adults who didn't take proper hygenic precautions after changing diapers or simply touching children who might have soiled clothes. Adults would be sickened with stomach aches for weeks.

Child-care centers became a focus, said Bob England, a physician and director of Maricopa County's department of public health. "Because poopy diapers and curious hands are a really bad combination," he said. England was a medical student in the late 1970s but would study the epidemic later in his public-health career.

Children, England said, were asymptomatic, meaning they could be carrying the virus but show no symptoms. But if they contracted the virus at a day-care center, they could carry it home to their parents or others. And it was adults who were hit particularly hard. "It makes you sick as a dog for about a month," England said.

The Happy Faces day-care center was hit by a wave, Niner said. She decided she needed to do something. "It's terrible," she said of the disease. "It's not a nice thing."

Niner said she thought a song would do the trick. She called her sister, Whiles, and asked if she could write a song about a less-than-obvious pop-tune topic: a viral disease spread by fecal-oral contact.

Niner said she researched the disease and gave Whiles the outlines of what the song should include. Whiles said she did her own research, then wrote the song in a single evening, finishing up at 3 a.m.

Niner created a cartoon character she called Hep. It was a tear-shaped, scary-looking virus. She planned a comic book, stickers and T-shirts, thinking the Hep character could help spread the hepatitis-prevention message.

When her sister gave her the completed song, Niner first taught it to the children at the Happy Faces center. Then, she said, she thought bigger. She became part of a hepatitis advisory board that included other pre-school owners and state and county health officials.

Minutes of meetings — contained in files Webster, the retired CDC employee, kept, — show county and state officials discussing how to get funding for distribution of the song. One plan was to distribute 300 copies of it, on records carved into thin plastic sheets, to every day-care center in the state. There was also discussion of creating a public-service announcement.

Webster said the health departments were able to tap into federal grant money to publicize the hepatitis song. The paperwork did not specify exactly how the public money was spent.

A camera crew from KPHO-TV, Channel 5, came to Niner's center to film the spot.

One of Niner's own children played a kid sick with hepatitis in the spot. And Niner's voice provided the off-screen prompt — "Who?" — that ended with the unison chant and finger-pointing – "You."

A spot disappears

The song started airing on radio stations by March 1980, according to a Phoenix Gazette story, coinciding with a hepatitis awareness week declared by then-Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt.

Whiles said she had no idea what had happened to her composition. Her first clue, she said, was when she took her daughter to a national Little Miss America beauty pageant. The contestant from Arizona, who was sitting behind her, started spontaneously singing the song, she said.

"I just about fell out of my chair," Whiles said.

On a later trip to Arizona to visit her sister, Whiles said she heard the song on the radio and saw the ad on television. She was surprised. She said she thought her sister would only use the song at her own day-care center.

In 1980, Whiles filed a copyright for a composition called "The Hepatitis Song" that she said was created in 1979. She was listed as the sole writer.

What truly happened next is buried in the murky back-and-forth of a family dispute. The song was either at the center of it, or was the tip of the iceberg, depending on the version of events.

Whiles's daughter, Lallie Bridges, who lives in Branson, Mo., said she has heard competing versions of the dispute. But it involved songwriting credit and potential royalties.

Whatever happened, by 1985, the ad was off the air. And the feud between the sisters had escalated. Neither wants anything to do with the other.

As for the ad itself, no one contacted at the state or county health departments had a copy. Longtime employees at KPHO-TV also could not find a copy of the spot. A collector of Brandmeier's shows on KZZP has audio of the host mocking the song, but not the ad itself.

A viral sensation

Niner takes solace in what health officials told her at the time about the effect of "The Hepatitis Song." She said she was told cases plummeted by 77 percent the year after the song came out.

Webster said the song was effective because it reached children. Getting adults to change behavior is hard, but the tune stuck in kids' minds and they might have served as persistent ambassadors of good hygiene to parents and day-care workers, she said. "Let the children tell them that they think it is important for them to do this," she said.

A 1999 study on the outbreak showed that by 1981 cases had dropped from their 1979 high.

But, the numbers steadily started climbing again. By 1984, the rates of Hepatitis A infection appeared to be the same as the start of the outbreak in the mid-'70s. They would climb to epidemic levels again by the end of the 1980s.

England, working as the state epidemiologist at the time, said changing human behavior is difficult. Public-health professionals can't rely on that alone, he said.

What stopped the spread was the county instituting a requirement that all children attending day-care centers be vaccinated for Hepatitis A. "We dropped the Hep-A rate sixfold overnight," he said.

But even if England doubted the effectiveness of the song from a public-health perspective, he credited its musical infectiousness. "We grew up knowing the damn song," he said. "It went viral."

Hurt over hepatitis song

Whiles said a few years ago she typed "The Hepatitis Song" into an online search engine and was surprised to find so many people sharing memories about the song.

"It was a big surprise to find that, that anyone even remembered it," she said. "I am honored."

What she found was an online community of people who remember the song. Some were out of Oregon, where the song also played. Webster said federal officials funded the song being played in that state, as well.

Some fans started a page on Facebook hunting for anyone who might have a videotaped copy of "The Hepatitis Song." On YouTube, at least three people have posted videos of their own renditions of the song.

Whiles is glad for the nostalgia, but at the same time, she was upset that the ad received so much airplay and she received no remuneration. "I never got any royalties or any money for it," she said. "I was not happy."

Niner said that chapter of her life is over and she does not want to make the video public again. She also didn't want to share images of the Hep cartoon character she created.

At times, Niner sniffled back tears as she spoke about the song. She apologized for getting upset. "The hurt and grief," she said, "I thought had gone."

Still, she said she cherishes that time and the good she did.

"I have all those memories of all those kids," she said. "I hope it helped."

ON THE BEAT

Richard Ruelas is a features reporter who has been with The Republic since 1994. An Arizona native, "The Hepatitis Song" is embedded in his brain.

How to reach him

richard.ruelas@arizonarepublic.com

Phone: 602-444-8473

Twitter: @ruelaswritings