Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader (64 page)

The broadcasts were so successful that after the initial 13-week run a bidding war ensued. Seltzer ultimately signed with ABC. ABC was a brand-new network and needed to fill a lot of airtime cheaply, so it aired roller derby three nights a week and on Saturday afternoons. To meet the demand, Seltzer expanded for the first time in nearly a decade, creating a six-team organization he called the National Roller Derby League, consisting of the two New York teams plus the Jersey Jolters, the Chicago Westerners, the Philadelphia Panthers, and the Washington Jets. It was ABC’s most profitable broadcast. But Seltzer was unhappy: He envisioned the roller derby as a legitimate sport. He wanted to air derby matches for 40 weeks a year with an end-of-season championship game. ABC didn’t see it that way. To them it wasn’t a sport, it was a TV show, and they wanted to air it 52 weeks a year…and ABC got their way.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

Although 82,000 people packed New York’s Madison Square Garden for the 1951 championship game, in 1952 the league didn’t have enough money to pay its skaters. Why? ABC’s 52-week schedule had overexposed the roller derby. The ratings dropped, and by 1952 it was off TV and could barely scrape by without the broadcast and advertising revenue. And like movies and other live entertainment, roller derby saw its attendance diminish as TV became more popular in the early 1950s. Seltzer realized that for the derby to survive, it would have to get back on TV, so he moved the league headquarters from New York to Los Angeles to court the TV industry. But none of the networks were interested.

Something to shout about: 50 gallons of fake blood were used during the filming of
Scream
.

By 1958, Leo Seltzer was tired of struggling to keep the derby going and turned over management duties to his son, Jerry Seltzer, who promptly moved league headquarters to San Francisco. Smart move: The city was in the midst of a professional sports boom. The New York Giants baseball team had just moved to San Francisco, and the 49ers football team had enjoyed their first winning season in 1957. The roller-derby team based in the area, the Bay Bombers, became a local hit. Once again, the derby was about to be pulled out of a financial hole…by television.

REEL CHANGE

But this time games wouldn’t be broadcast live. They were recorded on a new format: videotape. The harsh, fast-moving look of videotape made the games appear, ironically,
more live
. What’s more, there was very little videotaped product in 1959, so this set the derby apart. Local TV stations around the country were looking for inexpensive content to plug the holes in their schedules and by 1963, 120 stations were airing Bay Bombers games. The games were taped according to Jerry Seltzer’s careful specifications. He told cameramen to
not
film all the fights and punches. The crowd would go wild, but the TV audience would hear it, not see it, which Seltzer thought would draw crowds to the live matches. He even made the crowd louder on the broadcasts to increase the air of excitement. Seltzer’s ideas worked. The Bombers went on a national tour in 1962 and sold out everywhere they appeared.

Roller derby was the most popular sport in northern California, too. The Bombers outdrew professional basketball, professional wrestling, professional soccer, hockey (and the Oakland A’s) in the Bay Area from 1962 to 1972. It did well elsewhere, too:

• In 1970, two million tickets were sold for derby races in 100 cities. Eight million people watched weekly on television.

• Fifty thousand people attended a 1972 event in Chicago’s White Sox Park.

• The sports pages of several major newspapers began printing roller derby results in 1972.

• Raquel Welch starred in
Kansas City Bomber
, based on the life of star skater Joan Weston.

Maryland law forbids a wife to go through her husband’s pockets while he is sleeping.

• Until the WNBA started in 1997, the roller derby was the only national, professional, team sport that featured female players.

ROLLING AWAY

For a number of reasons, the derby was in financial trouble again in 1972. The sport’s popularity was waning and attendance was inconsistent. Skaters wanted more money (stars made $50,000 a year, but rookies made $5,000) and went on strike in 1972. The expense of setting up the large skating track, for both home games and road tours, ate into profits. The 1973 oil crisis made travel more expensive. The higher costs forced Seltzer to cancel entire tours. He thought that a massive four-team championship series in May 1973 at New York’s Shea Stadium might put the derby back in the black. Instead, it was a disaster: Because of a computer glitch, only a fraction of the tickets were sold.

In December 1973, Jerry Seltzer announced to his players that the roller derby was folding. The last game was played on December 8, 1973, in Long Island. The game ended not with players punching, shoving, and throwing each other over the railings, but with them joining hands and crying.

RACING BACK?

Since then, several attempts have been made to revive roller derby.

• From 1989 to 1991, a syndicated TV series called
RollerGames
aired. It was more violent than previous derby incarnations and even featured an alligator pit in the middle of the track.

• In 1999 the Nashville Network played down the violence and campiness with a more athletic roller derby called
RollerJam
. But the show’s creators had failed to see that the violence and campiness were what made the roller derby attractive to fans, and
Roller-Jam
also bombed.

• What set the derby apart from other sports in its heyday was that women competed. Today, more than 80 small women-only leagues are reviving roller derby. One is the Texas Rollergirls Rock N’ Roller Derby, a Texas-based league that’s heavy on the theatrics and violence. It began play in 2003, with teams that include the Honky Tonk Heartbreakers, Hotrod Honeys, and the Hell Marys.

One way or another: The band Blondie was originally known as Angel and the Snakes.

THE GREAT DIAMOND HOAX OF 1872, PART II

Here’s the second installment of our tale of what may have been the biggest con job of the 19th century. (Part I is on
page 178
.)

E
MPIRE BUILDER
As Arnold and Slack made their getaway, William Ralston was hard at work putting together a $10 million corporation called the San Francisco and New York Mining and Commercial Company. He’d already lined up 25 initial investors who contributed $80,000 apiece, and now he was preparing to raise another $8 million. New York newspaper publisher Horace Greeley had already bought into the company; so had British financier Baron Ferdinand Rothschild.

A
Rothschild
investing in the diamond field? The house of Rothschild was a world-renowned banking firm and experienced at spotting good investments. With Tiffany and Rothschild involved, the excitement surrounding the diamond field grew to a fever pitch. No one but Arnold and Slack knew where the mine was, but so what? When rumors began spreading that it was somewhere in the Arizona Territory, fortune seekers by the hundreds began making their way there in the hope of finding strikes of their own.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

The stage was now set for the swindle to grow much bigger, which meant that a lot more people would have lost a lot more money. That it didn’t happen was due purely to chance: When Arnold and Slack picked the location of their “diamond field,” they unknowingly chose an area where a team of government geologists had been conducting surveys for five years.

The leader of the geological team was a man named Clarence King. When he learned of the diamond strike, he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He’d been all over the territory and had already filed a report stating that there were no deposits of precious gems of any kind anywhere in the area. If the story were true, he and his team of experts had missed a significant diamond field that two untrained miners had been able to find on their own. His professional reputation was on the line: If there really was a diamond field and word of it got back to Washington, D.C., he would be exposed as incompetent and funds for the survey would be cut off.

Hey, y’all! June 2 is National Bubba Day.

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE?

King arranged to meet the engineer Henry Janin over dinner to get a firsthand account of the diamond field story. As he listened to Janin describe his trip to the site, he started to smell a rat. Janin reported finding diamonds, rubies, and sapphires next to each other, and as a geologist, King knew that was impossible. The natural processes by which diamonds are created are so different from those that create rubies and sapphires that they are never found in the same deposits.

Because Janin had been blindfolded on the trip to the site, he couldn’t tell King where it was. But King was so familiar with the area that after quizzing Janin, he was able to figure out exactly which mesa he was talking about. The next day he and some other members of his team set out to visit the site themselves.

ON THE SPOT

They arrived at the site a few days later. It was fairly late in the day, so they set up camp and then started exploring the area. As had been Janin’s experience, it didn’t take long for them to find raw diamonds, rubies, and other gems. By the time King was ready to turn in for the night, he’d found so many precious stones that even
he
had a touch of diamond fever. He went to bed wondering if the field really was genuine, and maybe even hoping a little that it was. That hope vanished early the next morning.

• Shortly after sunrise, another member of the party found a diamond that was partially cut and polished. Nature is capable of many things, but it takes a jeweller to cut and polish a diamond—the stone had been planted there by human hands.

• King noticed that wherever he found diamonds, he found other precious stones in the same place, and always in roughly the same quantities, something that does not happen in nature.

• Upon close examination, the team also noticed that the crevices in which the gems were found had fresh scratch marks, as if the gems had been shoved into place with tools.

The average American kid spends 900 hours a year in school…and 1,023 hours in front of the TV.

• When precious stones were found in the earth, it was always in places that had been disturbed by foot traffic. When they went to areas that were undisturbed, they never found anything.

DIGGING DEEP

King knew that if the field was real, diamonds would also be found deep in the ground as well as on the surface. As a final test, he and his men went to an undisturbed area where they thought diamonds might occur naturally and dug a trench 10 feet deep. Then they carefully sifted through all of the dirt that had been removed from the trench, and found not a single precious stone in any of it. There was no question about it: the find was a hoax. Arnold and Slack had planted the gems.

As soon as King got to a telegraph station, he sent word to Ralston in San Francisco that he’d been conned. Ralston was shocked and angry. He closed the company and returned the unspent capital to the original 25 investors. Then, because his reputation was on the line, he refunded the rest of their investment out of his own pocket, which cost him about $250,000. It turns out that Ralston's bad judgment wasn’t limited to diamonds: He poured millions into the building of San Francisco’s Palace Hotel and other money-losing schemes, which contributed to the Bank of California’s collapse in 1875. His body was found floating in the San Francisco Bay the following day, though the cause of death remains a mystery.

THE HOAX EXPOSED

The Great Diamond Hoax of 1872, as it came to be known, received widespread newspaper coverage not just in America but also in Europe. As reporters in the United States and abroad researched the story, details of how the hoax had been perpetrated began to emerge:

• Arnold had once been a bookkeeper for the Diamond Drill Company of San Francisco, which used industrial-grade diamonds in the manufacture of drill bits. He apparently stole his first batch of not-so-precious gems from work, then bought cheap, uncut rubies and sapphires from other sources and added them to the mix. None of the people he duped had been able to tell industrial-grade diamonds and second-rate gems from the real thing.

The United Nations ranks Norway #1 in “quality of life.” (Canada came in 3rd, the U.S. 6th.)

• When Ralston and the other early investors paid Slack the first installment of $50,000 for his share of the mine, he and Arnold made the first of two trips to London, where they bought $28,000 worth of additional uncut stones from diamond dealers there. Most of the gems were used to salt the claim in Colorado; the few that were left over were the ones that Tiffany and his assistant had foolishly valued at $150,000.

AFTERMATH

Philip Arnold and John Slack made off with $650,000, which in 1872 should have set them up for life. Neither of them fared very well, though: Arnold moved to Kentucky and bought a 500-acre farm. When the law eventually tracked him down, he paid a reported $150,000 to settle the claims against him, then used the remaining money to start his own bank. Six years after the diamond hoax, he was injured in a shootout with another banker; he died from pneumonia six months later at the age of 49.

Less is known about Slack. He apparently blew through his share of the loot and had to go back to work, first as a coffin maker in Missouri and then as a funeral director in New Mexico. When he died there in 1896 at the age of 76, he left an estate valued at only $1,600.