Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (58 page)

“About half the 93 members of Portland’s Robert Gray Middle School band and choir said they had to ride in a car with a smoking section and were subjected to rude comments from adults who took their clothes off in a poker game. The students were returning from a music competition in San Jose, California. Amtrak has promised to send the group a refund check for $4,830.”

—AP, June 23, 1993

BACKFIRE

On August 7, 1979, a jet plane in the Spanish Air Force shot itself down when its own gunfire ricocheted off a hillside target, flew back, and hit the plane during field maneuvers.

GOOD LUCK?

“At a dinner party in the late 19th century, French playwright Victolen Sardou spilled a glass of wine. The woman sitting next to him poured salt on the stain, and Sardou picked up some of the salt and threw it over his shoulder for luck. The salt went into the eye of a waiter about to serve him some chicken. The waiter dropped the platter, and the family dog pounced on the chicken. A bone lodged in the dog’s throat, and when the son of the host tried to pull it out, the dog bit him. His finger had to be amputated.”

—John Berendt,
Esquire
magazine

President John Adams regularly referred to George Washington as “an old muttonhead.”

We get all kinds of articles and suggestions from readers, of course...some are very interesting, some are pretty weird...but this one is special. It’s got a little bit of everything we look for in a
Bathroom Reader
piece: an “origin” story, some gossip, pop history, the “gee whiz” factor, and so on. It was written by humorist Leo Rosten, and it’s from his book
The Power of Positive Nonsense.

A
MISCONCEPTION

“Any man who hates dogs and babies can’t be all bad.”
Sure, sure, I know: Umpteen anthologies of quotations credit this to W. C. Fields. But he did not say it. He may have said, “A woman drove me to drink, and I never even wrote to thank her,” or “How do I like children? Boiled,” or “Never give a sucker an even break.” But he did not come up with “Any man who hates dogs and babies can’t be all bad.” The line was uttered
about
Fields.

ROSTEN IN HOLLYWOOD

The place was Hollywood. The time: 1939. I was working on a solemn sociological...study of the movie colony. One day, to my surprise, I received a telegram from the Masquers’ Club, inviting me to be their guest at a banquet in honor of W. C. Fields.

I was delighted. I was transported. I revered Mr. Fields as the funniest misanthrope our land ever produced. And I knew that the Masquer dinners of homage were in fact “roasts” in which celebrated wits eviscerated the guest of honor with sparkling insults... and steamy boudoir revelations which, if uttered on any other occasion, could provide an airtight case for a lawsuit worth millions in damages for character assassination. I accepted the invitation.

THE MASQUERS’ CLUB

I appeared at the Masquers’ with a wide grin and anticipatory chuckles. The lobby was packed with moviedom elite: stars, producers, directors, writers. All male, all famous, all treating me, as I circulated amongst them, the way princes of the blood treat a peasant with anemia. I might have been made of glass, so easily did the
glances of the celebrated go right through me. But I did not mind. I was very young, and felt lucky to be a guest on Parnassus. My heart thumped faster as I recognized noble Spencer Tracy, great Goldwyn, wonderful William Wyler, incomparable Ben Hecht. And was that Errol Flynn holding court in the corner?...I do not know. I was not sure, to tell you the truth, because I was so excited that my vision and my imagination were playing leapfrog.

Q. What’s the #1 reason welfare recipients give for going on welfare? A. Divorce.

TO THE STAGE

Suddenly I heard my name blaring, over and over, from loudspeakers, and an agitated voice pleading that I report to the desk “at once!”...I ploughed through the glittering assemblage to the distant desk, where I was told...that I was “damn late” for one who would be seated “on the dais!” A majordomo swiftly (and sourly) led me backstage. There I beheld Mr. Fields, already red-nosed from fiery waters, surrounded by illustrious roasters: Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, George Burns, Edgar Bergen, Milton Berle....It was they, I assure you, in the flesh.

“Time to line up!” called a praetorian guard.

A hotel Hannibal began to recite name after hallowed name. Mine, unhallowed, was last.

“Proceed to the dais!” blared another....Someone flung heavy red draperies aside.

As we marched through the opening and across the stage, the glittering audience rose to its feet...applauding Marx, Benny, Hope, reaching a crescendo for Fields, hailing Berle, Bergen, Burns—until I appeared, last, certainly least, pale, brave, anonymous. The applause seeped away like sand in a net of gauze.... Amidst the anticlimax of my reception, we all sat down to break bread.

THE NIGHTMARE

The dinner was excellent, the wines ambrosial, the brandy and cigars sublime. Then William Collier, Sr., rose to conduct the festivities. He received an ovation, which he deserved. A renowned M.C and wit, he orated a barrage of dazzling, scathing yet affectionate ribs about our...guest of honor. The audience roared in counterpoint. And to each barbed line, Mr. Fields responded with an evil grin, a leering grunt and another sip of alcoholic disdain.

Jesse James, Jr. played his famous father in two Hollywood films.

Mr. Collier completed his backhanded eulogy. A tornado of applause. Then the masterful M.C. proclaimed: “Our first speaker to ‘honor’ Bill Fields is...” (he consulted his prep sheet and, there is no denying it, winced) “Dr. Leo Boston—no, I guess it’s Rosten.” It would be wrong to say that I could not believe my ears; the full measure of my horror lay in the fact that I did. I sat paralyzed. This could not be. It was a dream. It was a nightmare....It took the elbow of Red Skelton, jabbing into my ribs, to propel me to my feet.

“SAY SOMETHIN!”

The “applause” which had greeted Mr. Collier’s garbled recitation of my name would not have awakened a mouse. Now, my erectness and visibility compounded my shame, for the faces of that auditorium broke into frowns of confusion and the many mouths uttered murmurs seeking enlightenment....I prayed for a trapdoor to open beneath me, or for lightning to strike me dead. Neither happened. Instead, I heard George Burns’s hoarse sotto voice: “Say somethin’!” with unmistakable disgust. I gulped—then someone who was hiding in my throat uttered these words: “The only thing I can say about Mr. W. C. Fields, whom I have admired since the day he advanced upon Baby LeRoy with an icepick, is this: Any man who hates dogs and babies can’t be all bad.”

The appearance of Mae West in a G-string would not have produced a more explosive cachinnation. The laughter was so uproarious, the ovation so deafening, the belly-heavings and table-slapping and shoulder-punchings so vigorous, that I cleverly collapsed onto my chair.

I scarcely remember the rest of that historic night—except that the jokes and gags and needlings of Mr. Fields (who by now resembled a benign Caligula) put all previous celebrity “roasts” to shame. The next morning, the local papers led off their stories about the banquet with my ad lib. The AP and UP flung my remark around the world. CBS and BBC featured the quip on radio. Overnight, I was an international wit.

Alas, God put bitters in the wine of my enflatterment; for ever since then, “Any man who hates dogs and babies can’t be all bad” has been credited to—W. C. Fields. Hardly a week passes in which I do not run across some reference to “Fields’s immortal crack.” But it was mine. Mine, I tell you, mine!

Casanova spent the last 13 years of his life working as a librarian.

Comments from William F. Buckley, one of America’s best-known conservatives:

“I get satisfaction of three kinds. One is creating something, one is being paid for it, and one is the feeling that I haven’t just been sitting on my ass all afternoon.”

“I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would affront your intelligence.”

“Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality the cost becomes prohibitive.”

“I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

“Life can’t be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.”

“I, for one, yearn for the days of the Cold War.”

“One must bear in mind that the expansion of federal activity is a form of eating for politicians.”

“Kennedy, after all, has lots of glamour. Gregory Peck with an atom bomb in his holster.”

“Any sign of weakness by the Free World increases the appetite of the enemy for more war and more conquest as surely as the progressive revelations of the stripteaser increase the appetite of the lecher.”

“All civilized men want peace. And all truly civilized men must despise pacifism.”

“In the wake of yet another disappearance of a teenager into the mortal coils of the flower world in Greenwich Village, where love is exercised through rape made tolerable by drugs and abstract declarations of fellowship with the North Vietnamese, one wonders anew about the pretensions of progress.”

“What has détente done for us except provide a backdrop for the exchange of toasts between American presidents and Communist tyrants?”

Dolly Parton once
lost
a Dolly Parton look-alike contest.

Nothing is sacred in the bathroom—go ahead and admit that you owned a pet rock or a mood ring...we understand...confession is good for the soul And while you’re pondering your follies, we’ll tell you where they came from
.

P
AC-MAN.
A Japanese import that hit American shores in late 1980, Pac-Man got its name from the word
paku
, which means “eat” in Japanese. Arcade players loved the game’s maze-chase format, a radical departure from the “shooting” video games that were popular at the time. In 1982 alone, Americans pumped
$6 billion
in quarters into Pac-Man’s mouth—more than they spent in Las Vegas casinos and movie theatres combined.

MOOD RINGS.
The temperature-sensitive jewelry that supposedly read your emotions, Mood Rings were the brainchild of Joshua Reynolds, a New Age heir to the R. J. Reynolds tobacco fortune. Reynolds envisioned them as “portable biofeedback aids” and managed to sell $1 million worth of them in a three-month period in 1975. Even so, the company went bankrupt—but not before it inspired a hoard of imitators, including “mood panties” (underwear studded with temperature-sensitive plastic hearts).

PET ROCKS.
One night in 1975, an out-of-work advertising executive named Gary Dahl was hanging out in a bar listening to his friends complain about their pets. It gave him an idea for the perfect “pet”: a rock. He spent the next two weeks writing the
Pet Rock Training Manual
, which included instructions for house-training the rock. (“Place it on some old newspapers. The rock will know what the paper is for and will require no further instructions.”) He had a friend design a box shaped like a pet carrying case—complete with air holes and a bed of straw—and then filled them with rocks he bought from a builder’s supply store for a penny apiece. The rock debuted in August 1975 and sold for $3.95; by the end of October Dahl was shipping 10,000 a day. The fad encouraged a host of imitations as well as an entire Pet Rock “service industry,” including dude ranches, “hair-care” products, and burials-at-sea. The fad died out in 1976.

According to recent estimates, 99% of the universe is nothing.

EARTH SHOES.
Earth Shoes were one of the best-selling shoes of the 1970s. Invented by a Danish shoe designer named Anne Kalsø, they were brought to the United States in 1969 by a woman who discovered them on a trip to Europe. She claimed they cured her back pains, but foot experts argued that the shoes—which forced wearers to walk on the backs of their feet—were actually pretty bad for you. One study found that most wearers suffered “severe pain and cramping for the first two weeks of wear”; another expert predicted that the shoes would “cripple everyone who wears them.” Still, they were a counterculture hit and sold thousands of pairs a year in their peak. The original Earth Shoes company went bankrupt in 1977, the victim of cheap knockoffs and changing times.

COATS OF ARMS.
In the ’60s, anyone with $20 could send away for a crest corresponding to their last name. At the fad’s peak in 1969, status-seeking Americans spent $5 million a year displaying them on sport coats, ashtrays, bank checks, etc. Elitists were outraged. “People of good taste,” one blueblood sniffed, “don’t use a coat of arms they’re not entitled to.” But by the early 1970s, just about everyone had a crest—which defeated the purpose of having one in the first place. The fad died out soon afterwards.

SMILEY FACES.
Introduced in 1969 by N. G. Slater, a New York button manufacturer. At first sales were slow, but by the spring of 1971 more than 20 million buttons had been sold—enough for one in every 10 Americans—making it a craze as popular as the Hula Hoop of the 1950s. Pop-culture pundits called it the “peace symbol of the seventies,” and presidential candidate George McGovern adopted it as his campaign logo. The fad died out after about a year, but in the mid-1970s made a comeback—this time colored yellow and bearing the cheerful message, “Have a Happy Day!” By the late 1970s, however, Americans were completely sick of it.

Smiley Face Update

“Attorneys for a convicted killer asked yesterday that his death sentence be overturned because a judge signed the July 15, 1993 execution order with a ‘happy face’ sketch....The judge has said that he always signs his name that way as a symbol of his faith in God and that he does not plan to change it.”

—
The Associated Press