Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  • 1893: The pro-annexation Committee of Public Safety, led by American Ambassador John L. Stevens, calls in 200 troops to intimidate Liliuokalani. It works; she relinquishes all control. On February 1, Hawaii becomes a protectorate of the United States.

  • 1898: Under the direct order of President William McKinley (the same McKinley of the McKinley Tariff), the U.S. annexes Hawaii and the white aristocracy runs it as a dependent republic.

  • 1900: Congress passes the Hawaii Organic Act, reclassifying the protectorate as a territory. Citizenship—and the right to vote for a local legislature—is given to all adult males. Hawaii gets a nonvoting delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives.

  • 1903: The Hawaii legislature passes a resolution to petition

  Congress for the right to draw up a state constitution, the first step to statehood. Congress denies the request.

  • 1919: Congressional delegate Prince Kalanianaole (son of King Kalakaua) introduces the first of many statehood bills. All fail when members of Congress express fear that the islands might fall under the control of the increasingly imperialistic Japanese.

  • 1934: In a move to boost the mainland sugar industry in the middle of the Depression, Congress passes the Jones-Costigan Act, which severely limits foreign sugar imports. Hawaii is classified as a foreign importer, crippling the sugar trade there. White plantation owners quickly form a statehood exploratory committee.

  • 1937: Congress holds statehood hearings in Hawaii and recommends that it be put to a local vote. Hawaiians approve the referendum in 1940 by a two-to-one margin.

  • 1941: The naval base at Pearl Harbor is bombed by the Japanese, and the U.S. enters World War II. The drive for statehood is postponed; Hawaii is placed under martial law until 1944.

  • 1947: Based on the pre-war statehood vote, statehood is put to a vote on the House floor. It passes, 196 to 133.

  • 1948: Sen. Hugh Butler, chairman of the Rules Committee, which oversees new statehood proposals, kills a Hawaii statehood bill in committee because he believes the Hawaiian Democratic Party has been infiltrated by Communists.

  • 1949: To demonstrate to Congress that it is ready for democracy (and is not Communist), the territorial legislature writes a state constitution, hoping to lead Congress into granting statehood.

  • 1953: Hawaii delegate Joseph Farrington proposes another statehood bill. It passes the House. The Senate approves it in 1954 but joins it to a pending Alaskan statehood bill. Back to the House for approval, it dies there, as Speaker Joseph Martin favors statehood for Hawaii alone and not Alaska.

  • 1959: Shortly after Alaska is admitted as the 49th state, the Senate passes the Hawaii Statehood Bill. More than 94 percent of Hawaiian voters approve. On August 21, President Dwight Eisenhower signs a proclamation making Hawaii the 50th state.

  A REAL-LIFE GHOST STORY, PART II

  How many ghost stories get written up in medical journals? This one

  made it into the American Journal of Ophthalmology in 1921.

  Read on…if you dare. (Part I starts on page 110.)

  WHO’S THERE?

  According to Dr. William Wilmer’s account, everyone in the H family had heard unexplainable noises and sensed eerie presences, but no one had actually seen any ghosts… until January 1913. Mrs. H saw them first: “On one occasion, in the middle of the morning, as I passed from the drawing room into the dining room, I was surprised to see at the further end of the drawing room, coming towards me, a strange woman, dark haired and dressed in black. As I walked steadily on into the dining room to meet her, she disappeared,” she wrote. “This happened three different times.” Another night one of the servants awoke to see an old man and a young woman sitting at the foot of her bed, staring at her. She lay in bed paralyzed until an unseen hand tapped her shoulder and she was suddenly able to sit up. But as she did so, the man and woman vanished.

  One night Mr. and Mrs. H went to the opera, leaving their children in the care of the servants. That evening at about 8:30, the H’s young son was awakened by the ghost of a “big, fat man” that sent him screaming from his room. The boy spent the rest of the night sleeping fitfully in the nanny’s room, and when he awoke the following morning he complained that someone or something heavy—perhaps the fat man?—had sat on his chest the entire night, making it difficult for him to breathe.

  FROM BED TO WORSE

  Mr. and Mrs. H fared no better: After they returned home from the opera and went to bed, Mr. H was awakened by the sensation of ghostly fingers grabbing his throat and trying to strangle him. He still heard ringing bells at night, and now they were complemented by the sounds of people moving through the house. He assumed the noises were made by burglars, but every time he got up to confront the intruders, they were nowhere to be seen. And, Mrs. H wrote,“it was about this time my houseplants died.”

  YOU ARE NOT ALONE

  If only one person had seen or heard unusual things in the house, they could easily have been dismissed as the figments of an overactive imagination. But everyone in the house was now seeing, hearing, and even feeling things. And besides: You can’t kill houseplants with figments of someone’s imagination.

  Whatever was happening in the house, it was very real. When they contacted the home’s previous residents, the H’s learned that the bizarre events had been going on for many years. “The last occupants we found had exactly the same experiences as ourselves,” Mrs. H wrote, “with the exception that some of them had seen visions clad in purple and white crawling around their beds. Going back still further, we learned that almost everyone had felt ill and had been under the doctor’s care, although nothing very definite had been found the matter with them.”

  SOMETHING IN THE AIR

  The first hint of what might really be happening came in late January, after Mr. H described the terrifying goings-on to his brother. Brother H remembered an article he’d read years before, describing a family that had been tormented by the same kinds of sounds and visions that his brother described. Brother H suggested that perhaps Mr. H and his family were being poisoned.

  Poisoned? Now, on top of everything else, the ghosts were poisoning them? No, Brother H explained: The article he’d read said the family in question had had a faulty heater that released large quantities of carbon monoxide gas into the home, and that all of the symptoms the family experienced—depression, fatigue, illness, strange noises and visions, the feeling of being watched and even touched by unseen people, even dead houseplants—were entirely consistent with carbon monoxide poisoning. Brother H suggested they contact a doctor.

  In those days doctors still made house calls, so the following day when the physician came by to examine the H family, he also took a look around their home. As soon as he examined the old furnace in the basement, his suspicions—and those of Brother H—were confirmed. “He found the furnace in very bad condition, the combustion being imperfect, the fumes, instead of going up the chimney, were pouring gases of carbon monoxide into our rooms,” Mrs. H reported. “He advised us not to let the children sleep in the house another night. If they did, he said we might find in the morning that some of them would never wake again.”

  WHAT’S UP, DOC?

  Unlike most ghost stories, this one ends with the family living happily ever after. Mr. and Mrs. H took the doctor’s advice and moved out of the house until the furnace could be repaired. When they moved back in, the eerie sights and sounds…were gone.

  A lot has changed since 1912, but one thing hasn’t: Carbon monoxide poisoning is still the leading cause of accidental poisoning deaths in North America. The reason it’s so deadly is that carbon monoxide is odorless and tasteless, and it doesn’t irritate your airways when you breathe it. That makes it very difficult to detect, and a concentration of as little as 400 parts per million can be fatal. Often the first sign that something is wrong with the air is when someone loses consciousness.

  The good news: Hardware stores now sell carbon monoxide detectors (
similar to smoke detectors) for about $40. If you have a gas furnace, clothes dryer, or other appliance, or if you have a fireplace or a wood-burning stove, investing in a carbon monoxide detector can mean the difference between life and death…or ghosts and no ghosts.

  DÉJÀ VIEW

  From time to time, modern carbon monoxide ghost stories still find their way into print. An article in a 2005 issue of the American Journal of Emergency Medicine, for example, describes the case of a 23-year-old woman who collapsed while taking a shower after she saw what she thought was a ghost. The problem was traced to a new gas water heater, which had not been properly installed and was leaking carbon monoxide into her home.

  THE FIRST AMERICAN…

  Everyone knows George Washington was the first American

  President. Here are a few less-familiar firsts.

  PENITENTIARY

  Jails and prisons have been around since early colonial times. But there were no such things as penitentiaries—prisons designed to reform people convicted of major crimes, not just punish them—until the first one opened in Philadelphia in 1790. The concept of long-term confinement for rehabilitation originated with Quakers in Pennsylvania in the late 1700s. The first actual penitentiary was a small building with rows of cells built at the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia in 1790, the original idea being to keep prisoners in solitary confinement so they could be reformed through spiritual contemplation.

  NATIVE-BORN GORILLA

  In early 1956, Millie and Baron Macombo, a pair of western lowland gorillas at the Columbus Zoo in Ohio, successfully mated, and on December 22 Millie gave birth to a baby girl, who was named Colo. She was the first gorilla of any species to be born in the U.S. and the first born in captivity anywhere, even Africa. Colo has since given birth to three infants herself and still lives at the Columbus Zoo, making her the oldest captive gorilla in the world. (And in 2003 she became a great-great-grandmother.)

  BOOK

  Around 1638 Stephen Daye and his family emigrated from London to the the newly founded town of Cambridge in Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was under contract to the Reverend Joseph Glover, who was also on the journey and who had paid for the Daye family’s passage. To repay that debt, Daye was to set up a printing press, which had been brought along on the ocean voyage and would be the first press in the colonies. Glover died during the voyage, but Daye still owed the work to Glover’s widow, so he set up the press in her house. In 1639 he published America’s first broadsheet—a single sheet of paper meant for public posting. Then he printed the first almanac, written by celebrated colonial sea captain William Pierce. And in 1640, he printed 1,700 copies of The Bay Psalm Book, a new version of the Book of Psalms translated directly from Hebrew by several local ministers. The book, the first published in North America, became very popular—it went through numerous editions and was even distributed back in Britain. Extra: Most historians believe that Stephen Daye may have had some printing experience, but that he was actually a locksmith by trade. His works were riddled with spelling and punctuation errors, leading one colonial historian to call him “an exceedingly illiterate printer.”

  CRICKET MATCH

  Cricket was invented in southern England in the 1500s and was spread across the world by British colonists. The earliest recorded match in the United States was played in 1751 between teams called New York and London XI in the area of Manhattan that later became the Fulton Fish Market. The game took a long time to catch on in the states, but actually became quite popular in the mid-1800s…until it was eclipsed by baseball.

  BABY BOOM

  In 2005 Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel, an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, studied 62 prehistoric burial grounds located in various regions of North America. He discovered that for a period of about 700 years, beginning 2,800 years ago, progressively more and more young people were being buried. Why? Bocquet-Appel says it had a lot to do with a baby boom. The era coincides with the shift from hunting and gathering to farming in North America. That resulted, as it did at different times in different locations all over the world, in permanent dwellings being built, and food supplies becoming more secure, which resulted in a rapid increase in population—and more people, paradoxically, meant more people dying young.

  WINE

  The oldest continuously inhabited city in the continental United States is St. Augustine, Florida, founded by the Spanish in 1565. When those settlers arrived, they were pleased to discover wild muscadine grapes, which they used to create the first wine ever made in North America. (Native Americans didn’t make wine.) Sometime over the next few decades, the first cultivation of grapes began, resulting in several varieties, the best known being the Scuppernong, or Big White Grape, still found in the Southeast today. Scuppernongs were used to make some of the most popular wines in the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and they’re making a comeback today. According to the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, muscadine grapes contain more resveratrol—a natural compound that lowers cholesterol levels—than other grapes.

  KOREAN

  Seo Jae-pil was born in Korea in 1864. While still a teenager, he joined a reform movement working for equality, and in 1884 he took part in the Kapsin Coup, a bloody attempt to take over the country. Seo’s entire family was killed in the three-day melee, but Seo escaped and fled to Japan, where, in 1885, he boarded a ship for San Francisco, changing his name to Philip Jaisohn along the way. In 1890 he became a naturalized American citizen—the very first Korean to do so. He was also the first Korean to receive a college degree in the United States (a medical degree from George Washington University in 1892); founded The Independent, the first Korean newspaper in America; and in 1945 became the first Korean-born American to receive a medal from Congress, for his service as a physician during World War II. He died at his home in Norristown, Pennsylvania, in 1951. A statue of Jaisohn stands in front of the South Korean embassy in Washington, D.C.

  PUBLICLY FUNDED ART PROJECT

  Swedish-American painter Gustavus Hesselius (1682–1755) was one of the New World’s first professional (and first widely acclaimed) portrait painters. On September 21, 1721, he received a £17 commission from St. Barnabas Church in Prince George’s County, Maryland, for a painting of “our Beloved Saviour and ye Twelve Apostles at ye last supper.”

  Hesselius’s The Last Supper is the first known instance of a public art commission in American history. The painting was lost when the church was rebuilt in 1773 and wasn’t rediscovered until 1914. Since then it has been displayed at various museums, but today is back at St. Barnabas, where it hangs in the choir gallery.

  …CAR RACE

  In 1895 Herman H. Kohlsaat, editor of the Chicago Times-Herald, heard about an 1894 “horseless carriage” race from Paris to Rouen, France. It had been sponsored by the newspaper Le Petit Journal, so Kohlsaat decided to sponsor a similar race. He placed an ad promising $2,000 to the winner, and at 8:55 a.m. on a snowy Thanksgiving Day in 1895, six automobiles left Jackson Park in downtown Chicago on a 54-mile race to the town of Evanston and back. Three were Benz automobiles imported from Germany, and three were American-made, two of them electric-powered. The winner: J. Frank Duryea, who with his brother Charles had founded the first American company formed for the sole purpose of making cars: the Duryea Motor Wagon Company of Springfield, Massachusetts. Duryea covered the distance in 7 hours 53 minutes, averaging a rip-roaring 7.3 mph along the way. The win was a boon for the company, which sold 13 vehicles the next year. The Duryea brothers went their separate ways some years later, and although Charles continued to form car companies, he had only limited success, and the Duryeas ended up a footnote in automotive history, disappearing in the shadow of the juggernaut that was the Ford Motor Company. (But at least they’ll always be known as the winners of America’s first automobile race.)

  ALWAYS CHECK YOUR LINKS

  In 2009 a political battle took place in Minnesota between the Democratic Party an
d Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty. After the governor made a speech criticizing President Obama, the Democrats sent out an online press release denouncing the remarks. At the bottom of the release was a link that was supposed to have gone to a YouTube video of Pawlenty’s speech, but instead went to one called “Chinese Grandma Learns English,” which featured a kid tricking his grandmother into saying several swear words. The Democrats blamed the goof on an “outside researcher” and promised to double-check their press releases in the future.

  WHY ARE THEY CALLED “GREEN HORN S” ?

  On page 21 you can find the origin of the word “tank.”

  (Tanks!) Here are a few more interesting word

  and phrase origins. (You’re welcome!)