Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  JIM BROWN

  Career: Brown was drafted by the NFL’s Cleveland Browns in 1956 after a stellar college career that included baseball, basketball, lacrosse, and track in addition to football. He went on to have one of the most successful careers in any sport in history, breaking dozens of NFL records, including most rushing yards in both a season and a career, most rushing touchdowns, and most seasons leading the league in all-purpose yards, and he is still the only player to average more than 100 yards a game for an entire career.

  Bye-bye: One of the most amazing things about Brown’s record-smashing career is that he completed it in just nine years. He retired in 1965, at the age of only 29, to pursue an acting career and to work on improving race relations in the United States and around the world. He has since made dozens of films, most notably The Dirty Dozen (1967), and founded and worked with numerous social organizations, including the Negro Industrial Economic Union and the Amer-I-Can program. He has still not retired from from either of his “secondary” careers.

  KIM NOVAK

  Career: In the late 1950s, Novak was Hollywood’s premier starlet and one of its top box-office draws, with hits like Picnic (1955), The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). She could literally be in any film she chose, with whatever co-stars she chose.

  Bye-bye: Novak was never comfortable with her “sexpot” image or with stardom in general. In 1966, when she was just 33, she went into semiretirement and became a recluse of sorts. She made just 10 more films over the next 27 years, and in 1991 retired altogether. Today she lives with her veterinarian husband and several animals on a ranch in Oregon. And she still gets offers to do films: In a rare interview in 2004 with Larry King, she said she still had an agent, and he was still bugging her about film roles. She said she may still do another film someday.

  TOM LEHRER

  Career: Lehrer was a classically trained pianist who wrote satirical songs for fun, and in the 1950s he started selling recordings of his music to people at Harvard, where he was studying mathematics. Songs like “Fight Fiercely, Harvard,” “The Wiener Schnitzel Waltz,” and “We All Go Together When We Go,” a darkly humorous song about the “benefits” of all-out nuclear war, became underground hits, and by the end of the 1950s Lehrer was touring the country to sold-out shows. In the early 1960s, he became a songwriter for the American version of the BBC news-satire television show That Was the Week That Was and got a record deal with Reprise Records.

  Bye-bye: Lehrer chose to become a mathematics professor rather than a star, and performed only rarely after the 1960s. Why? In a 2001 interview, Lehrer said he hated performing. “I didn’t relish the prospect of doing the same show night after night,” he said, “any more than a novelist would enjoy reading his book aloud every night.” In 2000 Rhino Records released a box set of all of Lehrer’s songs (there are only 37), titled The Remains of Tom Lehrer. He still has a large cult following all over the world.

  ART BELL

  Career: Radio host Bell landed a five-hour, middle-of-the-night, political talk radio show in Las Vegas in 1989. In 1993 it went national under the name Coast to Coast AM, and soon thereafter switched to its now-famous “all things weird” format, with Bell and his callers talking about UFOs, paranormal events, government corruption, and every conspiracy theory imaginable. By the late 1990s, the show was on more than 500 stations with an audience of more than 15 million listeners.

  Bye-bye, Part 1: On October 13, 1998, Bell abruptly announced that he was retiring from broadcasting for good—effective immediately. Two weeks later he was back on the air, again without explanation. (He later said it had to do with threats to his family.) Bye-bye, Part 2: Citing family problems, in April 2000 Bell retired from broadcasting again, leaving the show to radio host Mike Siegel. Ten months later Bell returned, saying Siegel had taken the show in the “wrong direction.”

  Bye-bye, Part 3: Apparently Bell is the retiring type, because he retired again in late 2002, citing chronic back pain due to a fall from a telephone pole as a kid. (Note to kids: Don’t climb telephone poles.) George Noory took over as host, but Bell still owned the show…and in late 2003 he unretired again, returning to host on weekends.

  Bye-bye, Part 4: In July 2007, Bell, age 62, retired for the very last time. (Really. No kidding.) But stay tuned, because strange things often happen in the middle of the night…

  IT A GRIL!

  Here’s something funny that landed in our in-box the other day—photos of

  real cakes that people ordered that went very, very wrong. What happened?

  Maybe a telephone order was taken too literally, or English wasn’t the

  decorator’s first language. But whatever the reason, it ruined

  the cake…and made it better at the same time.

  Write “Welcome” on it

  Congradelations!

  Happy Brian Day!

  Best Wishes Susan

  Under Neat That

  We Will Miss You!

  Welcome Little Swetty

  I Think Your Sweet

  It a Gril!

  Congratulations Three Times

  Welcome Baby In Pink

  Happy Birfday!

  Congradulations!

  60 miles you did!

  Happe Holidaye’s

  Merrychrist Mas

  Let It’s Snow!

  OH OH OH

  We Love Freymoto

  Put heart in place of love

  Farewel 6th Grades

  God Luck, Don!

  Happy Patricks Jamie

  Vote OBMOA 08!

  Wee Your 3!

  I Want Sprinkles

  Go Steelrs!

  Happy Fater’s Doty!

  Congratulations on your weeding

  Happy Bitrdhay!

  My eyes cry to see you.

  My lips to kiss you.

  My arms to huge you.

  Happy Sping!

  1 # Dad

  Contragulations Ian

  Last Daz of School

  FAST FOOD

  In 2008 the Tehran (Iran) Women’s Committee set out to beat the record for building the world’s largest sandwich. The previous record was 1,378 meters, set in Italy. The Iranian women brought together more than 1,000 cooks with a goal of building a 1,500-meter sandwich—about 5,000 feet long. The event drew a crowd, but even with 1,000 cooks, the sandwich took several hours to make. Finally, the crowd got too hungry to wait, stormed past the cooks, and ate the sandwich before the cooks could finish assembling it.

  A SPORTS CAR IS BORN

  One measure of the desirability of a sports car is whether or not it has

  teenagers drooling over it before they’re even old enough to drive. Here’s

  the story of one of the most drool-worthy cars in auto history. (See

  how long it takes you to guess which car we’re talking about.)

  THINKING SMALL

  In the early 1950s, Harley Earl, the legendary head of General Motors’ Styling department, began to notice an uptick in interest in small, imported sports cars. The soldiers who fought in World War II had taken a liking to the Fiats, Triumphs, Jaguars, Morgans, and other convertible roadsters they had seen in Europe, and they’d been buying modest numbers of them from import auto dealers ever since. When Earl went to auto races, he was struck by the affection that drivers had for their little sports cars, and now even his own employees were beginning to drive them to work.

  Earl had devoted his entire working life to making GM’s cars ever longer, wider, lower, more powerful, more streamlined, and more fanciful, as his automobile designs drew inspiration from everything from locomotives to bombers to rocket ships. He’d worked on plenty of cars that might be considered sporty, but he’d never really designed a sports car, at least not one that had found its way into dealer showrooms. Sports cars may have looked pretty and been fun to drive, but they didn’t sell very well. Of the more than 4.6 million vehicles sold in the U.S. in 1952, barely 11,
000 of them were sports cars. That’s less than ¼ of one percent.

  BUY AMERICAN

  It had been years since any of the major American auto companies bothered to make any kind of a two-seater, let alone a sports car, and this was undoubtedly one of the things that crossed Earl’s mind. How can consumers be expected to buy many roadsters if there aren’t any on the market? Remember, the auto industry was a lot different in the 1950s: Together, GM’s five automobile divisions (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac) manufactured roughly half of all the automobiles sold in the United States each year. Ford, Chrysler, and a handful of other small U.S. companies sold nearly all the rest. Few Americans had ever owned a foreign-made car or would have considered making such a purchase—the image and perceived superiority of the American automakers was that dominant in those days. But with no domestic sports cars available, customers who wanted to buy one had to get it from a foreign automaker or go without.

  Earl didn’t know if sports cars would ever be a major segment of the U.S. auto industry, but he did understand that they had a great deal of appeal with young people. GM was a big company and made big profits year after year. Why not spend a tiny fraction of that money on an American sports car that would appeal to the kids who bought MGs and Triumphs? Once they were in the GM fold, Earl figured, when the time came for them to trade up to a four-seater, they’d be much more likely to buy it from GM.

  TOP SECRET

  Harley Earl’s innovative design work played a major role in GM’s postwar dominance, and the company’s other executives knew it. So when he hired a young engineer named Bob McLean, paired him with another young stylist named Duane Bohnstedt, and hid the two of them on the third floor of an obscure old GM building with instructions to work on something called “Project Opel,” few executives had the gall to ask what Project Opel was all about.

  What it was all about, of course, was a two-seater convertible sports car. Working from Earl’s rough outline, McLean and Bohnstedt came up with a design for the car’s body that appears to have been inspired by an Italian roadster called the Cisitalia 202. In those days, most sports cars had long engine compartments that narrowed almost to a point at the front end of the car, with broad, flowing fenders that were a separate and quite distinct element of the car’s design. Not so with the new GM roadster: Like the Cisitalia 202, it was a low, flat, wide, almost square box with fenders that were integrated into the rest of the body. Today the integrated-fender look is standard—it’s so common that it’s difficult to even remember what cars looked like when their fenders were separate from the rest of the engine compartment. But to see that look on a roadster in the 1950s was not only novel, it was stunning.

  THE ROADSTER FINDS A HOME…

  When McLean and Bohnstedt were finished with their design, they made a full-size model out of clay, and then Earl invited executives from GM’s five different divisions to take a look at it and see if they wanted it for their division. Cadillac passed. So did Buick and Oldsmobile. Pontiac wasn’t interested, either.

  The story might have ended right there, were it not for the fact that Chevrolet, GM’s high-volume, low-cost, no-frills division, was having a bad year. As recently as 1950, it had sold more cars than Ford, but its sales had slipped considerably since then. Tom Keating, Chevrolet’s general manager, and Ed Cole, its chief engineer, were looking for ways to freshen up the division’s dowdy image. A V-8 engine was in the works to replace Chevy’s lackluster six-cylinder motor, but it was still a couple of years off. Harley Earl’s secret roadster seemed like just the ticket to excite interest in Chevrolet right away. Even if the car didn’t sell in great numbers, its sporty image would give the entire division a lift. And who knows? Maybe people who came to Chevy dealers to gawk at the roadster might stick around to buy a car.

  …AND A NAME

  But what should the roadster be called? Chevrolet executives got together with the company’s advertising agency and mulled over a list of more than 300 names, none of which seemed to really fit the car. It wasn’t until after the meeting that an assistant advertising manager named Myron Scott—whose other claim to fame is founding the American Soap Box Derby—suggested naming it after a class of small, highly maneuverable warships that had been used on coastal patrols and to escort convoys of merchant ships across the North Atlantic during World War II.

  In a sense, then, credit for giving the roadster its name can be indirectly attributed to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. For when a British naval designer named William Reed drew up plans for this new class of small warships in the late 1930s, it was Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, who suggested naming them after a type of small sailing ship that had served a similar purpose during the Age of Sail. The name: Corvette.

  Did you guess correctly? Part II of our story is on page 329.

  WHAT A DOLL!

  Barbie is one of the most popular—and versatile—toys ever made. More

  than 2,000 different Barbies have been released since 1959, most

  of them special editions for collectors. Here are some odd but

  real Barbie dolls you probably won’t find at Toys “R” Us.

  Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds Barbie (2008). Dressed in a green skirt-suit like Tippi Hedren in the movie, the doll has three black birds attached, posed in perpetual attack.

  Pooper Scooper Barbie (2008). This Barbie comes with a golden retriever doll named Tanner, who eats dog biscuits and then ejects them out the other end. (Really.) Barbie has a shovel and pail to clean them up.

  Barbie Loves McDonald’s (1982). How did Barbie get the money for all those Dream Houses and pink convertibles? She earned it by working the McDonald’s drive-through. This doll wears a red and yellow McDonald’s uniform and includes a headset.

  Marie Antoinette Barbie (2003). She comes in an elaborate 18th-century gown. (Unfortunately, the head is not detachable.)

  Cabaret Dancer Barbie (2007). While not specifically from the movie Cabaret, this Barbie in a see-through body stocking and fishnet tights would still fit in there.

  I Love Lucy’s Santa Barbie (2006). Based on a 1956 episode of I Love Lucy, Barbie is dressed as Ethel Mertz (Vivian Vance), dressed as Santa Claus.

  Lingerie Barbie (2000). It sounds scandalous (and it was briefly debated on Fox News in 2007), but this Barbie is fairly modest in her choice of underwear—large, full-coverage underwear and a matching half-slip. The Goldie Hawn Barbie has fewer clothes.

  George Washington Barbie (1997). Shouldn’t they have dressed Ken as George? No—Barbie is far more powerful. Here she’s depicted as the father of her country…if his Revolutionary War uniform had been hot pink.

  NBA Barbie (1996). This doll was available wearing the uniform of most NBA teams, including the Pistons, Lakers, Celtics, and Bulls. Curiously, there’s never been a WNBA Barbie.

  X Files Barbie (1998). Along with a Ken doll dressed as David Duchovny’s X Files character Fox Mulder, Barbie is dressed in a pantsuit, as Gillian Anderson’s character Dana Scully, the skeptical investigator of mysterious phenomena.

  Goldie Hawn Barbie (2009). Which of Goldie’s many roles is memorialized by Barbie? The bikini-clad go-go-dancer Hawn played on the 1960s series Laugh-In.

  Harley-Davidson Barbie (1998). Barbie as a biker chick, in head-to-toe leather.

  Other real Barbies:

  • Civil War Nurse Barbie

  • Gay Parisienne Barbie

  • French Maid Barbie

  • Lady of the Unicorns Barbie

  • Urban Hipster Barbie

  • Flintstones Barbie

  • John Deere Barbie

  • Star Trek’s Lt. Uhura Barbie

  • Titanic Barbie

  • NASCAR Barbie

  • Bowling Champ Barbie

  • Queen Elizabeth I Barbie

  • Barbie and Ken as The Munsters

  • Pepsi Barbie and Coca-Cola Barbie

  A LAUGHING MATTER

  Veteran st
and-up comic Buddy Hackett once told film critic Roger Ebert one of the secrets of show business. “Buddy was a student of the science of comedy,” recalled Ebert. “His favorite Las Vegas stage was at the Sahara. ‘I was offered twice the dough to move to a certain hotel,’ he told me, ‘but nothing doing. Comics who work that room always flop. There’s a physical reason for that. The stage is above the eye lines of too much of the audience. At the Sahara, the seats are banked and most of the audience is looking down at the stage. Everybody in the business knows: Up for singers, down for comics. The people want to idealize a singer. They want to feel superior to a comic. You’re trying to make them laugh. They can’t laugh at someone they’re looking up to.’ ”

  FADS

  Here’s a look at the origins of some of the most