Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader (72 page)

Conlon:
What did they shoot you for?

Schultz:
I don’t know, sir. Honestly I don’t. I don’t even know who was with me, honestly. I went to the toilet and when I reached the…the the boy came at me.

Conlon:
The big fellow gave it to you?

Schultz:
Yes, he gave it to me.

Conlon:
Do you know who the big fellow was?

Schultz:
No. See, George, if we wanted to break the ring. No, please I get a month. They did it. Come on. (
Unintelligible
) cut me off and says you are not to be the beneficiary of this will. I will be checked and double-checked and please pull for me. Will you pull? How many good ones and how many bad ones? Please! I had nothing with him. He was a cowboy in one of the seven days a week fight. No business; no hangout; no friends; nothing; just what you pick up and what you need. I don’t know who shot me. Don’t put anyone near this check—you might have—oh, please, please do it for me. Let me get up, sir, heh? In the olden days they waited and they waited. Please give me a shot. It is from the factory. Sure, that is a bad. Well, oh good ahead that happens for crying. I don’t want harmony. I want harmony. Oh, mama, mama! Who give it to him? Who give it to him? Let me in the district-fire-factory that he was nowhere near. It smoldered. No, no. There are only ten of us and there are ten million fighting somewhere in front of you, so get your onions up and we will throw up the truce flag. Oh, please let me up. Please shift me. Police are here. Communistic…strike… baloney. Please, honestly this is a habit I get; sometimes I give it and sometimes I don’t. Oh, I am all in. That settles it. Are you sure? Please let me get in and eat. Let him harass himself to you and then bother you. Please don’t ask me to go there. I don’t want to. I still don’t want him in the path. It is no need to stage a riot. The sidewalk was in trouble and the bears were in trouble and I broke it up. Please put me in that room. Please keep him in control. My gilt-edged stuff and those dirty rats have tuned in. Please mother, don’t tear, don’t rip; that is something that shouldn’t be spoken about. Please get me up, my friends. Please, look out. The shooting is a bit wild, and that kind of shooting saved a man’s life. No payrolls. No walls. No coupons. That would be entirely out. Pardon me, I forgot I am a plaintiff and not defendant. Look out. Look out for him. Please. He owes me money; he owes everyone money. Why can’t he just pull out and give me control? Please, mother, you pick me up now. Please, you know me. No. Don’t you scare me. My friends think I do a better job. Police are looking for you all over. Be instrumental in letting us know. They are Englishmen and they are a type I don’t know who is best, they or us. Oh, sir, get the doll a roofing. You can play jacks and girls do that with a softball and do tricks with it. I may take all events into consideration. No. No. And it is no. It is confused and its says no. A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kin. Did you hear me?

In 1908 New York City passed a law forbidding women to smoke in public.

Conlon:
Who shot you?

Schultz:
I don’t know.

Conlon:
How many shots were fired?

Schultz:
I don’t know. None.

Conlon:
How many?

Schultz:
Two thousand. Come on, get some money in that treasury. We need it. Come on, please get it. I can’t tell you to. That is not what you have in the book. Oh, please warden. What am I going to do for money? Please put me up on my feet at once. You are a hard-boiled man. Did you hear me? I would hear it, the Circuit Court would hear it, and the Supreme Court might hear it. If that ain’t the payoff. Please crack down on the Chinaman’s friends and Hitler’s commander. I am sore and I am going to give you honey if I can. Mother is the best bet and don’t let Satan draw you too fast.

Turkish turkeys don’t gobble—they say
gloo-gloo
.

Conlon:
What did the big fellow shoot you for?

Schultz:
Him? John? Over a million, five million dollars.

Conlon:
John shot you, we will take care of John.

Schultz:
That is what caused the trouble. Look out. Please get me up. If you do this, you can go on and jump right here in the lake. I know who they are. They are French people. All right. Look out, look out. Oh, my memory is gone. A work relief police. Who gets it? I don’t know and I don’t want to know, but look out. It can be traced. He changed for the worse. Please look out; my fortunes have changed and come back and went back since that. It was desperate. I am wobbly. You ain’t got nothing on him but we got it on his helper.

Conlon:
Control yourself.

Schultz:
But I am dying.

Conlon:
No, you are not.

Schultz:
Move on, Mick and mama. All right, dear, you have got to get it.

(
Schultz’s wife, Francis, arrives
.)

Mrs. Schultz:
This is Francis.

Schultz:
Then pull me out. I am half crazy. They won’t let me get up. They dyed my shoes. Open those shoes. Give me something. I am so sick. Give me some water, the only thing that I want. Open this up and break it so I can touch you. Dennie, please get me in the car.

Conlon:
Who shot you?

Schultz:
I don’t know. I didn’t even get a look. I don’t know who can have done it. Anybody. Kindly take my shoes off.
(They’re already off.)
No. There is a handcuff on them. The Baron does these things. I know what I am doing here with my collection of papers. It isn’t worth a nickel to two guys like you or me but to a collector it is worth a fortune. It is priceless. I am going to turn it over to—turn you back to me, please Henry. I am so sick now. The police are getting many complaints. Look out. I want that G-note. Look out for Jimmy Valentine for he is an old pal of mine. Come on, Jim, come on. Okay, okay, I am all through. Can’t do another thing. Look out mama, look out for her. You can’t beat him. Police, mama, Helen, mother, please take me out. I will settle the indictment. Come on, open the soap duckets. The chimney sweeps. Talk to the sword. Shut up, you got a big mouth! Please come help me up, Henry. Max, come over here. French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone.

Schultz died two hours later, without saying another word.

NASDAQ is short for National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations.

“THE GREATEST CANADIAN”

Today, Canada has free universal health care. The man who made it happen: former Saskatchewan premier Tommy Douglas. Here’s his story.

L
IFE AND DEATH
In 1910, when Tommy Douglas was six years old, he injured his leg and it never healed properly. Four years later he developed a life-threatening bone infection, and because his family couldn’t afford a specialist to treat it, the doctors wanted to amputate the leg to stop the infection from spreading. Tommy’s leg was saved only by chance—a teaching surgeon took an interest in the case and offered to operate on Tommy for free, provided that his students could watch the procedure and learn from it.

Tommy never forgot the experience. A medical crisis could affect anyone—what would happen to the people who weren’t as lucky as he had been? His situation wasn’t at all unusual in the early 20th century. In most industrialized nations, there were few options if you were poor and happened to get sick. Hospitals would occasionally admit “charity cases,” but only rarely. For the most part, if you needed life-saving surgery and couldn’t pay for it, you died.

HUMAN RIGHTS

After spending his teens at a variety of jobs (printer, whiskey distiller, actor, boxer), Douglas became a Baptist minister and in 1930 took a job as a preacher at Calvary Baptist Church in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. The rural, blue-collar town was devastated by both a drought and the Great Depression. Even if families had money for food, there was none left over for medicine. It reminded Douglas of his own near-tragedy from childhood. “I buried two young men in their 30s with young families who died because there was no doctor readily available and they hadn’t the money to get proper care,” he wrote. Douglas came to believe that medical care was a basic human right and should be available to everyone.

In 1934 Douglas realized that he could do more for the poor in politics than he could at a small-town church, and joined the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. Like Douglas, they advocated health care access. (The party also agitated for social reforms to end the Depression, including workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance.) Douglas ran on the CCF ticket for the Saskatchewan legislature in 1934…and lost. But in 1935, he won a seat in the national legislature, the House of Commons.

The year on a bottle of wine refers to when the grapes were picked, not when the wine was bottled.

WINS AND LOSSES

Douglas served in the House for nine years but never got the support he needed to institute health care on the national level. The CCF wasn’t well regarded in mainstream Canadian politics; their idea of tax-supported, government-run medicine was too reminiscent of the complete state control of the Soviet Union. But Douglas was no communist, and had no interest in totalitarian government. He just wanted universal health care.

Frustrated with the lack of progress at the national level, Douglas resigned from the House in 1944, returned to Saskatchewan, and tried to get his health care plan going on the provincial level. The voters were with him: In the 1944 election, the CCF won 47 of the 52 seats in the Saskatchewan legislature. And since Douglas was the head of the Saskatchewan CCF, the election landslide made him the premier (governor) at age 39. Now he’d have a chance to prove to the rest of Canada that his social welfare programs, especially universal health care, could succeed.

PRESCRIPTION FOR SUCCESS

Douglas’s entire plan for governing was built around the idea of universal health care, or “medicare.” Seventy percent of the 1944 budget was allocated to health, welfare, and education. That year, Douglas’s government passed 72 social and economic reform laws, most of them directly or indirectly related to health care:

• Douglas ordered the University of Saskatchewan to expand to include a medical school to create and train more doctors.

• Utilities, lumber, fisheries, and other corporations became state-run, generating substantial revenue to pay for health care.

• Douglas and his cabinet took a 28% pay cut.

• Retirees were immediately given free medical, hospital, and dental coverage. Treatment of cancer, tuberculosis, mental illness, and venereal disease were made free to everyone in Saskatchewan.

By 1947, Saskatchewan had one of the strongest economies in Canada. After just three years as premier, Douglas made the province financially stable enough to introduce universal hospitalization for all residents of Saskatchewan for an annual fee of $5.

Q: What’s special about the 1964 Olympics? A: It was…

Free hospitalization and surgery were in place, but drugs and doctors visits were not. There just wasn’t enough money. Still, the rest of Canada was beginning to see how well Douglas’s program was working and warmed to the idea. When new prime minister John Diefenbaker—a conservative—was elected in 1958, he offered matching federal funds to any province that started a free hospitalization program. The following year, Saskatchewan had a budget surplus, and in 1959, after 15 years of work, Douglas was finally able to introduce complete universal health care to the province.

JUST THE BEGINNING

Seeing how well Saskatchewan did with health care, legislation began in 1961 to expand it to all of Canada, and by 1966 it was in place, paid for by the provincial and federal governments, each contributing 50%. His goal reached, Douglas returned to national politics in the early 1960s. He led the New Democratic Party, a new version of the CCF, and held seats in the House of Commons off and on before retiring from politics in 1979. In 1988 he was elected to the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. He’s one of the few non-doctors honored, but without Douglas’s efforts, the Canadian medical—and social—landscape would be far different today.

Some other Tommy Douglas facts:

• In a 2004 poll conducted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canadians were asked to name “the greatest Canadian.” Tommy Douglas was voted #1.

• Douglas’s daughter, Shirley Douglas, was arrested in 1969 for ties to the Black Panthers—they had helped Douglas organize a free breakfast program for African-American children living in poor sections of Los Angeles. Following her arrest, Tommy Douglas said “I’m proud that my daughter believes that hungry children should be fed, whether they are Black Panthers or white Republicans.”

• Actor Kiefer Sutherland is the grandson of Tommy Douglas. (His mother is Shirley Douglas.) As a boy, Sutherland asked his grandfather what defined a Canadian. Douglas’s response: the harsh winters and Medicare.

…the last time performance-enhancing drugs were legal.

THE NIAGARA FALLS MUMMY

Canada has never had a king or queen of its own…but did it have a pharaoh? Here’s the story of a famous missing mummy.

W
HO’S THAT GIRL?
Have you ever heard of Nefertiti? After Cleopatra, she’s probably the most famous queen of ancient Egypt. Nefertiti was the wife of Akhenaton, who ruled from 1353 to 1336 B.C. A famous limestone bust of her is on display at the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, and because of this she is a popular historical figure in Germany.