Uncle John’s Briefs (25 page)

Religious leaders condemned the show for undermining the institution of marriage, but Fox went ahead with it anyway…and on February 15, 2000, more than 23 million people tuned in to watch real estate developer Rick Rockwell, 42, step out from behind the screen to choose Darva Conger, 34, a Gulf War veteran and emergency room nurse, as his bride.

Singing cowboy Gene Autry is the only entertainer with five stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one in each category: movies, recording, radio, TV, and theater.

THE MORNING AFTER

The Rockwell-Conger union wasn’t exactly love at first sight; many viewers
found their first kiss almost too creepy to bear, and things got worse after that. They slept in separate rooms during their “honeymoon” cruise, and within a week of returning to port, Conger was in Las Vegas seeking a quickie annulment.

By then, Rockwell’s Prince Charming image was taking quite a beating. The Smoking Gun website revealed that in 1991 a judge had issued a restraining order against Rockwell after his ex-fiancée accused him of hitting and threatening to kill her. (Rockwell denied hitting her.)

That was just the beginning—it turned out that Rockwell wasn’t a millionaire real estate developer after all; he was a stand-up comedian and occasional motivational speaker with a lot less than the $2 million in assets he was supposed to have to qualify for the show. The
Vancouver Province
newspaper quoted real estate agents who described him as a “flake” and a “loser whose only investment property is a low-end condo that leaks.”

As for Conger, it turns out that she wasn’t what she claimed to be, either. She wasn’t a Gulf War veteran—she spent the entire war stationed at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois. “You can’t call yourself a Gulf War veteran if you’ve never been to the Gulf,” retired army colonel Daniel Smith explained to reporters.

CASHING IN…AND CASHING OUT

A judge annulled the marriage on April 5, 2000; by that time, Conger and Rockwell both were well on their way to making the most—financially, at least—of their brush with fame. Conger, who donated her $35,000 engagement ring to charity, signed a deal to pose in
Playboy
for an estimated $500,000. She later launched her own website,
www.darvashouse.com
. As for Rick Rockwell, his once-sleepy comedy show suddenly sold out all over the country.

About the only people involved who didn’t cash in were the folks at Fox—as soon as the network learned of Rockwell’s restraining order, it cancelled its scheduled rebroadcast of the show and later announced it was abandoning its entire lineup of upcoming “exploitative reality specials,” including
Plastic Surgery Nightmares, Busted on the Job 5
, and
The World’s Biggest Bitches
.

“They’re gone,” a spokesperson told reporters. “They’re over.”

I APOLOGIZE

With our sincerest regrets, we’re very sorry to bring you this collection of some of the funniest and strangest apologies ever uttered
.

“We apologize for the error in last week’s paper in which we stated that Mr. Arnold Dogbody was a defective in the police force. We meant, of course, that Mr. Dogbody is a
detective
in the police farce.”

—Ely Standard
(U.K.)

“My family and I are deeply sorry for all that Vice President Cheney and his family have had to go through this past week.”

—Harry Whittington, Washington lawyer, after Dick Cheney shot
him
in the face

“In previous issues of this newspaper, we may have given the impression that the people of France were snail swallowing, garlic munching surrender-monkeys whose women never bother to shave their armpits. We now realise that the French football team can stop the Portuguese from getting to the World Cup Final. We apologise profusely to France.
Vive la France!”

—Daily Star (U.K.), after France beat the U.K.’s rival, Portugal, in the 2006 World Cup semifinals

“I am so terribly sorry for urinating outside of a public place in your city. It was not a very intelligent thing to do.”

—a man charged with public urination in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, where all offenders now have to write letters of public apology

“I’m sorry I bet on baseball.”

—Pete Rose, written on 300 baseballs that he then sold at $1,000 each

“Oh, goodness, I regret it, it was a mistake! I’m solely responsible for it, and I’m very, very sorry. It was a mistake, I was wrong, it’s my fault, and I’m very, very sorry to hurt anyone.”

—Sen. George Allen (R–VA), after referring to an Indian-American constituent as a “macaca”

“We ate everything but his boots.”

—part of an apology from the Navatusila tribe of Fiji, who killed and ate a British missionary in 1867, to the missionary’s descendants

First people to use sails on their ships: the ancient Phoenicians (around 2000 B.C.).

WRONG WAY CORRIGAN

While rummaging through our “Dustbin of History” file recently, we discovered the story of this colorful character. He snookered his way into the hearts of people on both sides of the Atlantic by heading in the wrong direction and ending up in the right place
.

T
HAT’S MY STORY…
On the foggy morning of July 17, 1938, a 31-year-old pilot named Douglas Corrigan took off from Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field on a solo, nonstop trip to California. Twenty-eight hours later, he landed in Ireland…with a lot of explaining to do. He had no passport or papers of any kind, nor had he received permission from U.S. officials to make the transatlantic flight.

Safely on the ground, Corrigan offered this explanation to Irish customs: Heavy fog in New York had forced him to navigate using only his compass. The fog continued all that day and into the night; there was never good visibility. When the sun rose the next morning—26 hours into his flight—he was surprised to find himself over an ocean. Taking a closer look at his compass, Corrigan realized he’d been following the wrong end of the needle—heading due east instead of west! But by now he was almost out of fuel; he couldn’t turn around. His only hope was to continue east and hope to reach land before he ran out of gas. Two hours later he saw fishing boats off a rocky coast and knew he was safe. From there, he made his way to Baldonnel Airport in Dublin. His first words upon exiting the plane: “Just got in from New York. Where am I?”

…AND I’M STICKING TO IT!

He repeated the story to the American ambassador and then to Ireland’s prime minister. By this third telling—to the Irish cabinet—the European and American press had got wind of the story and ran with it. When he got to the part about misreading his compass, the cabinet ministers all laughed and Corrigan knew that things would work out. Ireland graciously sent him home without penalty.

When he got back to New York, Corrigan was amazed to find out
he’d become a folk hero. In the bleak days of the Great Depression, Corrigan’s achievement and amusing explanation lifted people’s spirits. Over a million well-wishers turned out for a ticker-tape parade in his honor (more than had turned out to honor Charles Lindbergh after his transatlantic flight). The
New York Post
even ran a backward headline that read “!NAGIRROC YAW GNORW OT LIAH!” (“Hail To Wrong Way Corrigan!”).

The first Allied bomb dropped on Berlin in WWII killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.

THE TRUTH

So what really happened? It’s no secret that Corrigan’s dream was to fly solo across the Atlantic. He got his start in the airplane business in 1927 working for the company that built Lindbergh’s
Spirit of St. Louis
. Corrigan helped assemble the wing and install the instrument panel on the famous plane. His greatest honor was meeting Lindbergh. (“Even more than if I had met Abraham Lincoln himself!”) After Lindbergh made the first solo transatlantic flight in 1927, Corrigan vowed to follow in his footsteps.

He spent the early 1930s barnstorming the country, landing near small towns and charging for airplane rides to pay for gas. In 1933 he bought a secondhand Curtiss Robin J-6 monoplane for $310, which he named
Sunshine
, and began overhauling it for a trip across the ocean. In 1936 and again in 1937, Federal Aviation officials denied Corrigan’s requests to attempt the Atlantic flight.

So it’s unlikely that when Corrigan took off from New York in 1938, he didn’t know where he was going. Not only was he an accomplished pilot and navigator who had a history of flying without the proper paperwork, but he’d been working 10 straight years toward his dream of flying nonstop to Europe. Wrong Way Corrigan knew one end of a compass from the other.

COME ON, JUST ADMIT IT

For the rest of his life (he died in 1995), people tried to get Corrigan to come clean—but he never did, not even in his autobiography. In 1988 Corrigan took
Sunshine
on a national tour to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his famous flight. He was continually asked the same question: “Were you
really
trying to fly to California?” “Sure,” he answered. “Well, at least I’ve told that story so many times that now I believe it myself.”

Seattle drivers spend an average 59 hours per year stuck in traffic.

FAMILY REUNIONS

You know how strange it seems when you find out you have an unexpected connection to someone. But what if the person were closely related to you? These stories are almost too weird for words, but they’re all true
.

W
HO:
James Austin and Yvette Richardson, brother and sister
SEPARATION:
When James was seven months old and Yvette was three, their father and mother separated. The father took James; the mother took Yvette. That was the last time the siblings saw or heard of each other.

TOGETHER AGAIN:
James went to school in Philadelphia and got a job at the main post office. He worked the 4 p.m. shift, along with 4,100 other people. One day in 1995, he was talking to his shop steward, Barrie Bowens, about his life. As the
Boston Globe
reported:

Austin told her that his father died young and that he never knew his mother. Bowens asked his mother’s name and realized it was the same name as another employee’s mother. For two years, James and Yvette had worked side by side, shooting the breeze but never prying into each other’s personal life….Now they discovered they were brother and sister.

They were stunned. “Working in the same department for two years,” the 34-year-old Richardson said, shaking her head. “The same place, the same time, every day. What are the odds of that?”

WHO:
John Garcia and Nueng Garcia, father and son
SEPARATION:
During the late 1960s, John Garcia was stationed in Thailand with the U.S. Air Force. He lived with a woman named Pratom Semon, and in 1969, they had a son, whom they named Nueng. Three months later, Garcia was shipped back to the United States; he wanted to take Semon, but she refused to go. For two years, Garcia regularly wrote and sent checks to support his son. Then Semon started seeing another man and told Garcia to end his correspondence. Garcia lost touch with his son. Although he tried to find him, even sending
letters to the Thai government requesting an address, he was unsuccessful. He reluctantly gave up.

The guillotine was used as a method of execution in France until 1977.

TOGETHER AGAIN:
In 1996 Garcia, now living in Colorado, was driving through Colorado Springs when he decided to stop at a gas station. He filled up and bought two lottery tickets, then handed the clerk a check for $18. According to news reports, when the clerk saw the name on the check, the conversation went like this: “Are you John Garcia?” “Yes.” “Were you ever in the Air Force?” “Yes.” “Were you ever in Thailand?” “Yes.” “Did you ever have a son?”

“With that question,” writes the
San Francisco Chronicle
, “the two stared at each other and realized at the same moment that they were the father and son who had been separated 27 years ago and half a world away.” Nueng’s mother, it turned out, had married an American and moved to Colorado in 1971.

Incredibly, Garcia had never been to that gas station before and wasn’t even particularly low on fuel. “I don’t even know why I stopped for gas,” he admitted on
Good Morning America
. “I started thinking—this couldn’t be. I was totally shocked.”

WHO:
Tim Henderson and Mark Knight, half-brothers
SEPARATION:
When Mark Knight was a year old, his parents divorced. His father remarried and had a son named Tim. His mother remarried, too, and Mark took his stepfather’s last name. The brothers met once, when Mark was five and Tim three, but the families fought and never saw each other again.

TOGETHER AGAIN:
In February 1996, 29-year-old Henderson needed to travel from Newcastle, England, to London. He couldn’t afford the train fare, so he called the Freewheelers Lift Share Agency, which matches hitchhikers and drivers. Out of the 16,000 names on file, the name they gave him was Mark Knight.

According to a report in the
Guardian:
“As they drove, they started talking about friends and relatives. ‘There was a moment of complete silence as we both stared at each other in disbelief,’ said Mr. Henderson. ‘Then one of us said, “You must be my brother.” It was pretty mind-blowing. I always knew I had a half-brother but never thought we would meet.’”

According to scientists, octopuses do not have eight legs. They have six arms and two legs.