Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (35 page)

Salt Lake City gets more snow than Fairbanks, Alaska.

Thoughts and observations from American entrepreneur Henry Ford.

“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason so few engage in it.”

“Money is like an arm or a leg—use it or lose it.”

“Failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.”

“The man who is too set to change is dead already. The funeral is a mere detail.”

“There are two fools in this world. One is the millionaire who thinks that by hoarding money he can accumulate real power, and the other is the penniless reformer who thinks that by taking the money from one class and giving it to another, all the world’s ills will be cured.”

“If you have an idea, that’s good. If you also have an idea as to how to work it out, that’s better.”

“Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.”

“If you take all the experience and judgment of men over 50 out of the world, there wouldn’t be enough left to run it.”

“Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re right!”

“Every piece of work in the shops moves. Save 10 steps a day for each of the 12,000 employees, and you will have saved 50 miles of wasted motion and misspent energy.”—On
the theory of the assembly line

“Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement.”

“New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government. Everybody thinks differently, acts differently. They just don’t know what the hell the rest of the United States is.”

“Paying attention to little things that most men neglect makes a few men rich.”

Bilingual: Woodrow Wilson’s typewriter could be altered to print in either English or Greek.

Think your heroes will go down in history for something they’ve done? Don’t count on it. These folks were VIPs in their time…but they’re forgotten now. They’ve been swept into the Dustbin of History.

F
ORGOTTEN FIGURE:
Vaughn Meader, a comedian and impersonator in the early 1960s

CLAIM TO FAME:
In 1961 Meader mimicked President John F. Kennedy while kidding around with friends. His impersonation was so good that they encouraged him to incorporate it into his act. So Meader put a five-minute “press conference” at the end of his routine, taking questions from the audience and responding in Kennedy’s Boston accent. The JFK shtick got him a mention in
Life
magazine, which helped him land a contract to record
The First Family,
an entire album of his Kennedy parodies.

The First Family
sold more than 10 million copies, making it at the time the most successful record in history. Meader became a superstar overnight. When he appeared in Las Vegas, he pulled in $22,000 a week—not bad for a guy who’d been making $7.50 a night just a few months earlier.

Then on November 22, 1963, a year after
The First Family
made him the biggest name in comedy, Meader climbed into a taxicab in Milwaukee. The driver asked him if he’d heard about Kennedy’s trip to Dallas. “No, how’s it go?” Meader replied, thinking the driver was setting up a joke. No joke—in an instant Meader went from being one of the most popular acts in show business to being a pariah. No one could bear to watch him perform, even after he stopped doing JFK, the memories were just too painful.

INTO THE DUSTBIN:
Meader’s career never recovered; by 1965 he was broke. “That was it,” Meader told a reporter in 1997. “One year, November to November. Then boom. It was all over.”

FORGOTTEN FIGURE:
Lucy Stone, mid-19th-century feminist, suffragist, and abolitionist

Most wild birds live only 10% of their potential lifespan.

CLAIM TO FAME:
When Stone married abolitionist Henry Blackwell in 1855, she became the first woman in U.S. history to keep her own surname. Not a big deal these days, but in 1855 it was shocking. In those days, marriage laws in many states effectively awarded “custody of the wife’s person” to the husband, as well as giving him sole control over the wife’s property and their children. Stone and Blackwell intended the gesture as a protest against these laws, declaring that “marriage should be an equal partnership, and so recognized by law,” not an institution in which “the legal existence of the wife is suspended.”

Stone consulted several lawyers before taking the step; they all assured her there was no law specifically requiring her to take her husband’s name. But the move was highly controversial, and in 1879 it cost Stone the thing she had fought for years to obtain: her right to vote. That year the state of Massachusetts allowed women to vote in school board elections for the first time, but the registrar refused to register her as anything other than “Mrs. Blackwell.” Rather than surrender on principle, Stone chose not to vote.

INTO THE DUSTBIN:
Stone died in 1893, 27 years before passage of the 19th Amendment guaranteed women’s suffrage.

FORGOTTEN FIGURES:
The Dionne quintuplets

CLAIM TO FAME:
Born on May 28th, 1934, Yvonne, Annette, Emilie, Cecile, and Marie Dionne became world-famous as the first documented quintuplets. Their miraculous birth and survival, coming in the depths of the Great Depression, captivated the public and provided a welcome distraction from the economic troubles of the day.

What’s not as well known is that the “quints” were also five of the most cruelly exploited children of the 20th century. Born to an impoverished French Canadian farm couple who already had six children, the girls were taken from their parents within weeks of birth and made wards of the government under the care of Dr. Alan Dafoe, the doctor who had delivered them. He raised them in “Quintland,” a specially constructed “hospital” that was little more than a zoo with five tiny human residents.

Over the next nine years, more than four million tourists—up to 6,000 a day—visited Quintland to view the children from
behind two-way mirrors, pumping $500 million into the Ontario economy and turning Dafoe into one of the most famous doctors in the world. The only people who were discouraged from visiting were parents Oliva and Elzire Dionne; they weren’t even allowed to photograph their own children because the rights to their image had been sold off and used to advertise products like Puretest Cod Liver Oil, Lysol, and Palmolive.

How did hammocks get their name? They were first made from the fibers of the
hamack
tree.

INTO THE DUSTBIN:
In 1954 one of the quints, Emilie, died during an epileptic seizure. Four surviving quints weren’t nearly as interesting as a complete set of five, so their fame began to fade. In 1997 the surviving women wrote an open letter to the parents of the newborn McCaughey septuplets pleading with them not to make the same mistakes.

“Multiple births should not be confused with entertainment, nor should they be an opportunity to sell products,” the letter read. “Our lives have been ruined by the exploitation we suffered.”

THE STAR:
A blind cod living in a fjord in Norway

THE HEADLINE:
For
Blind Fish, A Light At End Of Tunnel

WHAT HAPPENED:
In March 2000, Norwegian fisherman Harald Hauso caught a cod in one of the nets he uses to catch crabs and starfish. When Hauso saw that the cod was blind, he let it go out of pity.

A week later the cod was back. He let it go again, but it came back again and again…and again: Hauso estimates that the cod came back and deliberately got himself caught in the net on 35 different occasions. “He’s found an easy place to find food,” Hauso told reporters. “And he knows I let him go every time.” As word of the cod’s story spread, he became a local celebrity.

THE AFTERMATH:
In January 2001, a marine park in Aalesund, Norway, learned of the cod’s plight and gave it a home in their aquarium. Bad news, though: After two months of luxurious aquarium living, the cod suddenly and inexplicably rolled over and died.

Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, had six fingers on her left hand.

We at the BRI are always on the lookout for great urban legends. For years the tale of the Exploding Whale has floated around the Internet. But it’s
not
an urban legend
—
it’s 100% true. Here’s the story:

How do you get rid of a 45-foot-long stinking dead whale? That was the bizarre question George Thornton had to answer on the morning of November 12, 1970. A few days earlier, an eight-ton rotting sperm whale carcass had washed ashore on a Florence, Oregon, beach, and the responsibility fell on Thornton—assistant highway engineer for the Oregon State Highway Division—to remove it. His options were limited. He couldn’t bury the rapidly decomposing corpse on site because the tides would soon uncover it, creating a health hazard for beachgoers. And because of the whale’s overpowering stench, his workers refused to cut it up and transport it elsewhere. He also couldn’t burn it. So what could he do? Thornton came up with an unbelievable solution: blow the whale up with dynamite.

Thornton’s expectation was that the whale’s body would be nearly disintegrated by the explosion, and he assumed that if any small chunks of whale landed on the beach, scavengers like seagulls and crabs would consume them. Indeed, many seagulls had been hovering around the corpse all week.

Thornton had the dynamite placed on the leeward side of the whale, so that the blast would hopefully propel the whale pieces toward the water. Thorton said, “Well, I’m confident that it’ll work. The only thing is we’re not sure how much explosives it’ll take to disintegrate the thing.” He settled on 20 cases—half a ton of dynamite.

As workers piled case upon case of explosives underneath the
whale, spectators swarmed around it to have their pictures taken—upwind, of course—in front of the immense carcass, right near a massive gash where someone had hacked away the beast’s lower jaw. Even after officials herded the crowds a full quarter of a mile away for safety, about 75 stubborn spectators stuck around, most of them equipped with binoculars and telephoto lenses. After almost two hours of installing explosives, Thornton and his crew were finally ready to blow up a whale. He gave the signal to push in the plunger.

A typical 100-ton blue whale eats its own weight in microscopic krill every month.

The amazing events that followed are best described through the eye of a local TV news camera that captured the episode on tape. The whale suddenly erupts into a 100-foot-tall plume of sand and blubber. “Oohs” and “aahs” are heard from the bystanders as whale fragments scatter in the air. Then, a woman’s voice breaks out of the crowd’s chattering: “Here come pieces of…
WHALE
!” Splattering noises of whale chunks hitting the ground grew louder, as onlookers scream and scurry out of the way. In the words of Paul Linnman, a Portland TV reporter on the scene, “The humor of the entire situation suddenly gave way to a run for survival as huge chunks of whale blubber fell everywhere.”

For several minutes after the blast, it rained blubber particles. Fortunately, no one was hurt by the falling chunks, but everyone—and everything—on the scene was coated with foul-smelling, vaporized whale. The primary victim of the blubber was an Oldsmobile owned by Springfield businessman Walter Umenhofer, parked well over a quarter of a mile away from the explosion. The car’s roof was completely caved in by a large slab of blubber. As he watched a highway worker remove the three-by-five foot hunk with a shovel, a stunned Umenhofer remarked, “My insurance company’s never going to believe this.”

Down at the blast site, the only thing the dynamite had gotten rid of were the seagulls. They were either scared away by the blast or repulsed by the awful stench, which didn’t matter because most of the pieces of blubber lying around were far too large for them to eat. The beach was littered with huge chunks of ripe whale, including the whale’s entire tail and a giant slab of mangled whale meat
that never left the blast site. And the smell was actually worse than before.