Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader (21 page)

7 States with Lowest Life Expectancy

1.
South Carolina

2.
Mississippi

3.
Georgia

4.
Louisiana

5.
Nevada

6.
Alabama

7.
North Carolina

4 Forest Service Tips on What to Do if You Encounter a Cougar

1.
Don't “play dead”

2.
Be aggressive Don't act like prey

3.
Don't run

4.
Blow an air horn (if one's handy)

3 Most Dangerous Foods to Eat in a Car

1.
Coffee

2.
Tacos

3.
Chili

2 Topics at the 2002 Taiwan Toilet Seminar

1.
Practical Means to Eliminate Bad Smells in Toilets

2.
Citizen's Satisfaction of Public Toilets in Korea

2 Famous Number Threes

1.
Dale Earnhardt

2.
Babe Ruth

7 Places You Can Legally Carry a Concealed Weapon in Utah

1.
A car

2.
A city bus

3.
A train

4.
A mall

5.
A bar

6.
A church

7.
A school

3 Things Rats Can Do

1.
Wriggle through a hole the size of a quarter

2.
Survive being flushed down a toilet

3.
Multiply so fast a single pair could have 15,000 descendants in a year

5 Things That Have Been Sold in Vending Machines

1.
Emu jerky

2.
Poached eggs

3.
Holy water

4.
Beetles

5.
Live shrimp

It's hard to imagine anyone rejecting the opportunity to hire Harrison Ford, but people make mistakes. Here are a few examples of a few unbelievable rejections.

W
hat They Said:
“With your voice, nobody is going to let you broadcast.”

Who Said It:
CBS producer Don Hewitt, 1958

Rejected!
Barbara Walters (she signed with NBC)

What They Said:
“Stiff, unappealing. You ain't got it, kid.”
Who Said It:
Columbia producer Jerry Tokovsky, 1965
Rejected!
Harrison Ford

What They Said:
“You have a chip on your tooth, your Adam's apple sticks out too far, and you talk too slow.”

Who Said It:
Universal Pictures executive, 1959

Rejected!
Clint Eastwood

What They Said:
“The girl doesn't have a special perception or feeling which will lift that book above the curiosity level.”

Who Said It:
Anonymous publisher, 1952

Rejected!
The Diary of Anne Frank

What They Said:
“Go learn to cook. Your book will never sell.”
Who Said It:
A literary agent in the early 1970s

Rejected!
Danielle Steel, who got a new agent, and has since sold over 350 million books.

What They Said:
“The band's okay but, if I were you, I'd get rid of the singer with the tire-tread lips.”

Who Said It:
BBC radio producer at a 1963 audition

Rejected!
The Rolling Stones—and their lead singer, Mick Jagger

What They Said:
“His ears are too big. He looks like an ape.”

Who Said It:
Talent scout Darryl F. Zanuck

Rejected!
Clark Gable

Everybody knows a Stradivarius is the world's most valuable kind of violin. (Read more on page 359.) So how could anyone lose one? Here are a few amazing stories of violins that got away.

Master violin maker Antonio Stradivari created more than 1,100 instruments during his lifetime. The several hundred that survive are so valuable and so well documented, you'd think nobody would try to steal one because it would be immediately identified as stolen property. Considering their worth, you'd also think their owners would take good care of them. Guess again.

Missing!
The Gruenberg Stradivarius, made in 1731; estimated value (1990): $500,000

Background:
In July 1990, violinist Erich Gruenberg arrived at Los Angeles International Airport and was met by a friend. As he was loading his luggage into the friend's trunk, he let his violin case out of his sight for just a moment. When he looked back, it was gone.

Outcome:
Police put out an international bulletin alerting the music world to the theft…and in April 1991, police in Honduras arrested 30-year-old Nazario Ramos when he tried to sell the violin to a member of a local orchestra. Police speculate that he was just a petty airport thief who didn't know what he was stealing until after he got it.

The violin was secretly flown back to Los Angeles. It was met at the airport by an armored car and taken immediately to a bank vault, where an insurance company executive verified that it was the genuine article. News of the violin's return was kept secret for several days. “We weren't going to give anyone a chance to steal it again,” says police spokesman Bill Martin.

Missing!
The Davidoff Stradivarius, made in 1727; estimated value: $3.5 million

Background:
The Davidoff Stradivarius vanished from the Manhattan apartment of its owner, 91-year-old Erika Morini (considered one of the greatest violinists of all time) as she lay dying in a hospital a few blocks away. For years the former child prodigy had kept the violin locked away in a closet rather than in a safe, because she wanted it to be within close reach. While Morini was hospitalized, someone entered her apartment, unlocked the closet, and stole the violin, leaving an inferior violin in its place. It was insured for only $800,000.

The theft was discovered when Morini's goddaughter Erica Bradford and her daughter Valerie Bradford let themselves into the apartment to prepare it for Morini's return. Morini made it back home and lived out her last few days in the apartment, but the violin never did. Friends substituted a fake so that when she asked to see if the violin was safe, they could point to it and assure her that it was.

Outcome:
The Davidoff Stradivarius is still missing. Reward: $100,000. According to news reports, Valerie Bradford “keeps failing lie detector tests and doesn't quite know why.” The question she keeps failing: “Do you know who took the violin?”

“I guess I get nervous,” she says.

Missing!
The Duke of Alcantara, made in 1732; estimated value (1994): $800,000

Background:
The Duke of Alcantara was owned by the University of California. On August 2, 1967, David Margetts, a second violinist with the UCLA string quartet, borrowed the Duke from the university collection for a rehearsal in Hollywood. On his way home he bought some groceries and then stopped at a restaurant. When he got back to his car—which was
unlocked—
he realized the violin was gone. To this day, Margetts can't remember if he put the violin in the car after rehearsal—which would mean that somebody stole it—or if he simply left it on the roof of his car and drove off.

In January 1994, a violin dealer recognized the violin he was working on as an authentic Stradivarius. He looked it up in a reference book, found a photograph of the same violin, and discovered that it had been missing from UCLA for 27 years. It turned out the violin's “owner” was an amateur violinist named Teresa
Salvato, who had gotten it from her ex-husband as part of their divorce settlement. He had gotten it from his aunt, who claimed to have found it beside a freeway in 1967. “That sort of matches the violin-left-on-the-top-of-the-car version,” says Carla Shapreau, an attorney for UCLA.

Outcome:
At first Salvato refused to give the violin back, but she eventually agreed to relinquish all claims of ownership in exchange for $11,500. She claims she only wanted to do the right thing for the instrument. “UCLA lost it once. They're really not very careful,” she explains.

Missing!
The Ex-Zimbalist, made in 1735; estimated value: $1 million

Background:
In 1949 an NBC Symphony Orchestra violinist named David Sarser scraped together all the money he had and borrowed a little more so that he could buy the Stradivarius being sold by Efram Zimbalist, Sr. (father of
The FBI
star Efram Zimbalist, Jr.). It cost him about $30,000.

“Buying that Strad got me a different life,” Sarser remembers. “I was in the newspaper. I took it everywhere with me, and everyone was in awe.” He planned on eventually selling the violin and living off the money in retirement, but his plans were dashed when the instrument was stolen from his studio in the mid-1960s.

Sarser says that at one point the FBI was close to solving the crime, but the instrument vanished a second time and was apparently sold to a buyer in Japan. The Ex-Zimbalist has since been photographed in Japan and even displayed in a department store, but Sarser hasn't been able to retrieve it or identify the new owner. “I have no desire to play any other instrument,” he says. “It became part of me, and I became part of it.”

Missing!
The Gibson Stradivarius, made in 1713; estimated value: $1.2 million (1988)

Background:
Polish virtuoso Bronislaw Huberman may be the only person ever to have the same Stradivarius stolen from him twice. In 1919 the Gibson was stolen in Vienna, then recovered a few days later when the thief tried to sell it to a dealer. In 1936 it was stolen from Huberman's dressing room while he was onstage at Carnegie Hall. He never saw it again—the violin was still missing when he
died in 1947. Lloyd's of London paid him $30,000 for his loss.

In 1985 an ex-con and former café violinist named Julian Altman summoned his wife, Marcelle Hall, to his deathbed and told her to take good care of his violin after he was gone. “That violin is important,” he told her. He also instructed her to carefully examine the violin case. She did…and found newspaper clippings from the 1936 theft stuffed inside. She confronted her dying husband. At first he told her he had bought it from the thief for $100. Later he confessed that he'd stolen it by distracting a guard with a fine cigar, sneaking into the dressing room, and walking out with the Stradivarius under his coat. Unlike other thieves, he didn't want to sell it, he just wanted to play it. “Julian didn't get rid of it,” Hall told reporters, “he played it for 50 years.”

Outcome:
After Altman died, Hall turned the violin over to Lloyd's of London. They must have believed Hall's claim that she didn't know anything about the theft until Altman confessed, because when they sold the Gibson Strad to a British violinist for $1.2 million, they paid her a $263,475 finder's fee.

“You know, Julian would tell people that his violin was a Stradivarius,” remembers Altman's friend David Gartner. “They would just laugh at him. They thought he was kidding.”