Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader (63 page)

The tests were scheduled to begin in June, which gave Mitchell and his pilots barely six months to teach themselves how to bomb warships from the air. They didn’t have any real ships to practice on, so they traced the outline of a 600-foot battleship in a marsh and attacked it with dummy bombs made of concrete. Mitchell believed that the best way to sink a ship was to drop a bomb in the water next to it, causing a “water hammer” effect that would damage the hull below the waterline and make the ship more likely to sink than if the bomb landed on the deck. When Mitchell’s men got good at that, they moved to the Chesapeake Bay and practiced bombing runs on wrecked ships that were visible on the bottom.

In Charleston, South Carolina, prisoners may be charged $1 for the ride to jail.

Meanwhile, bomb makers at the Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia began welding tail fins and steel nose cones onto converted torpedo tubes and filling them with TNT. When finished, the bombs weighed 2,000 and 4,000 pounds apiece, making them the heaviest ever built. By the time June rolled around, Mitchell was so sure of success that he arranged for 18 planes filled with photographers to film the tests. “I want newsreels of those sinking ships in every theater in the country,” he said. The military was so certain he would fail that they let him do it.

MOMENTS OF TRUTH

The first test, on the German submarine
U-117
, took place on June 21, 1921. The tests were structured to assess the effectiveness of different sizes of bombs, so the first attack was made with Navy seaplanes carrying 165-pound bombs. As VIPs on the troopship
Henderson
observed from a safe distance, bombers hit the sub three times and sank it in 16 minutes. The officers onboard the
Henderson
shrugged off the sinking as meaningless—submarines have thin skins, they explained to observers.

The second test took place on July 13. This time the target was the German destroyer
G-102
. In a wave of attacks, Mitchell’s pilots hit the ship with machine gun fire, then with 25-pound, 100-pound, and finally, 600-pound bombs. The 600-pounders did the trick—the
G-102
broke in half and sank in 19 minutes. Once again, military observers dismissed the results. And they did the same thing five days later, when Mitchell’s pilots sank the German cruiser
Frankfurt
, again with 600-pound bombs. Destroyers and cruisers weren’t battleships, the officers explained to anyone who would listen. Just wait until Mitchell’s pilots came up against the
Ostfriesland—
then he’d meet his match.

Faster than they look: Squid can swim at speeds of up to 35 mph.

FINAL TEST

The attack on the
Ostfriesland
began on July 19. Mitchell’s planes attacked the “unsinkable” battleship with 250- and 600-pound bombs, which did some damage, until an approaching storm forced the test to be postponed.

When the attacks resumed the next day, Mitchell’s pilots hit the
Ostfriesland
with three 1,100-pound bombs. Then the attack was called off so that Navy observers could examine the damage. Then, at the last minute, the Navy tried to change the rules, and told Mitchell that he could drop only three 2,000-pound bombs on the
Ostfriesland
—instead of as many as it took to score two direct hits, as had originally been agreed. Mitchell ignored the change and ordered seven bombers, each loaded with a 2,000-pound bomb, to attack the
Ostfriesland.

THAT SINKING FEELING

The first bomb hit 100 feet off the starboard (right) side of the ship, close enough to do plenty of visible damage. The second bomb hit the water in front of the ship, and the third hit so close to the starboard side that it blasted a giant hole in the hull. The fourth hit near the port (left) side and so did the fifth, exploding just 25 feet away and striking the ship with so much force that it lifted the bow out of the water. By now the battleship had received so much damage that it was clearly going to sink, but Mitchell’s pilots kept bombing.

The sixth bomb was the coup de grâce: It hit near the stern, the bow lifted farther, and the ship rolled over and sank. Mitchell never did get a chance to drop the 4,000-pound bombs.

The officers and other observers onboard the
Henderson
were stunned into silence. “No one spoke,” Douglas Waller writes in his biography of Mitchell,
A Question of Loyalty. “
Politicians, many of whom had staked their careers on funding the battleships, looked as if they had just witnessed a murder. Some admirals sobbed like babies.”

Billy Mitchell’s success made him a hero, right? To find out, turn to Part III of the story, on
page 485
.

Scarier than a ghost: There are an estimated 5,435 calories in the average trick-or-treater’s bag.

THE DOCTOR IS OUT (OF HIS MIND)

Some news that might make you sick…and might make you never want to get sick again.

B
EDSIDE HAMMER
A doctor in Japan was reprimanded after performing an operation during which the elderly female patient started wiggling and yelled, “Please stop the operation!” The improper administration of anesthesia wasn’t why the doctor was reprimanded, though—it was his reaction to the distressed woman’s cries: He smacked her on the forehead and told her to shut up. Hospital reports say that the doctor was punished, and that the patient’s operation was completed three weeks later…by another doctor.

FIRST, DO NO HARM

Dr. Brian Boughton of Devon, England, does not like seagulls. So much so that he founded DAGAS, the Dartmouth Action Group Against Seagulls. And on a May afternoon in 2006, he showed everyone just how much he didn’t like them when he shot one in his backyard and hung its corpse from an apple tree. “The purpose,” he said, “is to scare off other seagulls and avoid me having to shoot any more.” He went on to explain that while his family was dining in their yard, that particular gull had deposited some droppings in his wife’s salad. “I believe the risk to my family was extreme,” Dr. Boughton said. He was convicted of violating the Wildlife and Countryside Act and fined £400.

WEED IT AND WEEP

Dr. Totada Shanthaveerappa, 70, of Atlanta, was arrested in 2005, accused of treating patients with unauthorized drugs and filing false insurance claims. The drugs: several not yet approved by the FDA, including dinitrophenol—a commercial weedkiller and insecticide—which Shanthaveerappa was injecting into patients. The strangest part, though, was that prosecutors couldn’t claim that anybody was actually harmed by the treatments. Several people came forward and said that the doctor—who faces 87 counts in federal court—had actually saved their lives.

Gotcha! Robber flies eat spiders.

STING OPERATION

Health officials on the island of Crete in Greece ordered an immediate investigation after the inspection of an operating room found a live scorpion. It came just a few weeks after a rat tail was found in a bowl of soup in another hospital, and renewed a national debate about the quality of healthcare. Greek newspapers reported that a similar incident had occurred in 2002 in the city of Salonika, when a cat was found in an operating room.

DR. NO

In 2006 Dr. John Veltman, 52, of Martinsburg, West Virginia, was charged with driving under the influence, battery on an officer, obstructing an officer, and refusing to be fingerprinted. The doctor had been driving a backhoe in his yard while intoxicated, and drove it through a fence protecting a gas main, then backed up and hit a building, then went forward again and ran into a neighbor’s garage door, then drove through another neighbor’s yard and into a tree. When police tried to give him a sobriety test, Veltman became abusive and struck an officer. When they tried to fingerprint him, he said “I am a [expletive surgically removed] doctor and you are below me!” He faces 18 months in prison.

*        *        *

WORDPLAY WITH YOGI BERRA

Interviewer:
Alright Yogi, we are going to play Word Association.

Yogi:
What’s that?

Interviewer:
I’m going to say a word and you give me the first word that comes to your mind when I say it. Okay?

Yogi:
Sure.

Interviewer:
Are you ready?

Yogi:
Okay.

Interviewer:
Mickey Mantle.

Yogi:
What about him?

In 5 of 6 Gallup polls, nurses were chosen as the “most honest and ethical workers” in the U.S.

ROLLER DERBY

What sport was popular in the 1930s
and
the 1970s, helped make TV popular, and helped set the rules for televised sports? No, it’s not badminton. Here’s the story of a strange sport that will not go away.

R
ACE ACROSS AMERICA
Along with other bizarre fads, such as flagpole sitting and goldfish swallowing, “marathon” entertainments were popular in the 1920s. Depression-era audiences seemed to enjoy watching other people suffer as they danced for 20 hours, bicycled for six days, or walked around a track until they dropped. But by 1935 the fad was pretty much over, and a dance-marathon promoter from Portland, Oregon, named Leo Seltzer had to find another way to make a living. He’d read in a magazine that 97% of Americans had roller skated at some point in their lives, and that gave him the idea to switch from dance marathons to roller-skating marathons.

He held the first one on August 13, 1935, in the Chicago Coliseum. A large, flat oval track was constructed in the center of the arena; 18 laps equaled a mile. The rules were simple: Teams of one man and one woman raced to skate 57,000 laps—about 4,000 miles. They would skate 11 hours a day every day for a month. The skaters earned $25 a week, good money at a time when jobs, if they could be found, paid about $12 a week.

THE RACE IS ON

The event drew 20,000 people. It was so successful that Seltzer decided to select the best 20 skaters and take the show on the road, calling it the “Transcontinental Roller Derby Association.” He added a few flourishes, such as a giant map of the 4,000-mile New York–to–Los Angeles trip with lights along Route 66 indicating the skaters’ “progress.” He also created “sprints,” special periods in which skaters could earn bonus points for lapping other skaters. Fast-paced and competitive, sprints were a crowd favorite. But despite the urge to push other skaters out of the way, physical contact and fighting were strictly forbidden.

Seltzer continued to tweak the contest format, ultimately turning the marathon into a game. In the middle of the national tour, he changed the troupe of 20 skaters from 10 pairs of players to two 10-person teams of five men and five women each. That change increased the instances of what the audience loved most: lapping. The Route 66 map was eliminated in favor of a pass-for-points system. They got a point every time they lapped an opponent.

Acid rock, country rock, and hard rock were all geological terms before they were music genres.

RACING TO VIOLENCE

Two events would permanently alter the tone of the game.

• At a race in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1936, skater Joe Laurey passed two opponents and purposely smashed into them. As they lost their balance, he threw them over the railing. Laurey was immediately kicked out of the game, and as he stormed out of the arena and threw his skates on the track, the crowd went wild.

• In Miami in 1937, some of the faster—and skinnier—skaters tried to break through a pack of slower, more muscular opponents and steal laps. The larger skaters pushed back, elbowing and shoving. But when the referees moved in to break up the tussle, the audience booed. They loved the violence.

Seltzer decided to lift the ban on physical contact. Not only did he make it part of the game, it soon became a vital part of the scoring process. Sprints became “jams” (the crush of skaters resembled a traffic jam), and that became the final element of the roller derby: A skater could earn one point for his or her team by passing another skater, even if it involved beating them up to do it.

GOING IN CIRCLES

Roller derby grew steadily in popularity as it toured from town to town around the United States. By 1940, the league had expanded from two squads to eight traveling teams, the same year roller derby events attracted four million people. It looked like the sport would continue to grow, but when America entered World War II in 1941, most of the male skaters were drafted into military service, reducing the league back to two teams. The squads kept playing the circuit, cheering up wartime crowds the way early skating marathons had entertained Depression-era audiences. But with only two teams touring, there were fewer derby events, and by the late 1940s, the sport’s popularity dwindled. With more pressing world issues going on, the sport seemed silly and old fashioned.

Air brakes: From a 100 mph dive, an African eagle can come to a complete halt in 18 feet.

But Leo Seltzer wasn’t about to give up. He had invested his life—and his life savings—in roller derby. And, fortunately, there was a new tool at his disposal: television. Seltzer theorized that if the derby could be beamed all over the country, it would draw paying customers to the live events. CBS agreed to run derby matches once a week for 13 weeks in 1947. (The same two teams, the New York Chiefs and Brooklyn Red Devils, played each other every time.) The idea paid off: After five weeks of TV exposure, the derby was a top 10 show and the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City sold out all 5,300 of its seats for the event.