Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  • McTeague’s backstory, showing his early life, growing up in mining towns, and how he learned dentistry.

  • Two old people who live in an apartment near McTeague’s. They fall in love over the course of the film—a counterpoint to the slow destruction of McTeague and Trina’s relationship.

  • A subplot concerning Maria, a greedy junk collector who sells Trina the fateful lottery ticket. Her boyfriend, Zerkow, marries her because he believes she has a secret stash of gold dishes worth a fortune. When Zerkow discovers they are made of tin, he kills Maria and then kills himself by jumping into San Francisco Bay. (The actor playing Zerkow actually jumped into the San Francisco Bay during filming and contracted pneumonia.)

  REEL TRAGEDY

  Contractually obligated to screen it somewhere, Mayer debuted the film in a single New York theater during the Christmas season of 1924. A blunt tragedy about the dark side of humanity is not the kind of movie people want to see at Christmas and, predictably, Greed bombed at the box office. For tax purposes, MGM wrote off the production costs—$500,000—as a total loss.

  But was the full nine-hour Greed ever smuggled out of MGM? Later in his life, von Stroheim claimed that he’d screened it personally in Argentina during World War II, and that he’d given a print to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. And there’s a rumor that David Shepard of the American Film Institute supposedly found it in a garage several decades later, but it’s untrue—the uncut Greed is on the AFI’s list of most wanted lost films.

  As for von Stroheim, he made an interesting comeback. In the 1930s, after the Greed debacle and a few more box-office bombs, he moved to France, where he starred in Jean Renoir’s 1937 classic, La Grande Illusion. Then, in 1950, director Billy Wilder cast him in Sunset Boulevard, which reflects on the broken careers of giants of the silent film era. Von Stroheim portrayed Max von Mayerling, one of “the three great silent film directors” next to Cecil B. DeMille and D. W. Griffith, now reduced to working as the butler for his ex-wife, silent film star Norma Desmond. He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his work in Sunset Boulevard, and appeared in seven more films before he died in 1957 at the age of 72.

  IN PIECES

  As far as anyone knows, the nine-hour Greed—more specifically, the seven hours of cut footage—really is gone. Irving Thalberg later told reporters that the missing footage was melted down for its valuable silver content (photographic film contains tiny silver salt crystals). There probably was only one print of the full version—von Stroheim’s working copy. MGM certainly wouldn’t have paid for duplicates if Mayer had no intention of ever using them.

  Von Stroheim’s masterpiece did eventually see the light of day…sort of. In 1999 film preservationist Rick Schmidlin set out to restore and recreate Greed as much as possible. Taking the existing footage and 650 surviving production stills, with von Stroheim’s screenplay as a guide, Schmidlin constructed a four-hour version believed to be, based on Stroheim’s production and editing notes, very close to the director’s four-hour cut. It aired on Turner Classic Movies in December 1999. If you didn’t see it then, you may never see it. Jut as the nine-hour and four-hour versions are lost forever, Schmidlin’s take is not available on DVD.

  AN EPITAPH

  Here lies a man named Zeke,

  Second-fastest draw in Cripple Creek.

  INDIANA BASKETBALL: OSCAR ROBERTSON

  The Crispus Attucks Tigers had become the first all-black team to reach

  the Indiana High School Basketball Finals. What could they do for an

  encore? Change the entire look of basketball—with the help of

  one phenomenal player. (Part II starts on page 284.)

  THE CHANGING OF THE GUARD

  When Oscar Robertson first started playing basketball in his hometown of Indianapolis, he was known as “Li’l Flap,” after his big brother, Bailey “Flap” Robertson (named for how his wrist turned after a shot). Oscar honed his skills playing against older, taller Crispus Attucks stars like Flap and Hallie Bryant, and he practiced constantly, perfecting a one-handed jump shot, behind-the-back passes, and “fakes”—moving one way and then the other to put the defender off guard. He was quick and agile, and by the time he made the varsity squad at Crispus Attucks as a sophomore in 1953, he was 6’2”. When he scored 15 points as a substitute in the team’s first game (a win), Coach Ray Crowe made him a starter. And after he almost single-handedly won a game against Shortridge High in double overtime, people stopped calling him Li’l Flap.

  It’s not an understatement to say that, between Coach Crowe’s aggressive game plan and Robertson’s size and talent, they revolutionized high school basketball. Instead of scoring 50 or 60 points a game, the Attucks team scored 80 or 90. Robertson didn’t have to rely on holding the ball for minutes at a time or passing from corner to corner, hoping for an opening. Because he was bigger and faster than most players, he could dribble past his defender and either shoot a basket or pass it to a teammate who had a wide-open shot because the other defenders had moved to cover Robertson. As Willie Merriweather, who played forward with Robertson, put it, “Their team would be in disarray, and then we would start to run.”

  THAT CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON

  In 1955, with an older, taller Oscar Robertson (he’d grown to 6’4” since losing to Milan the previous year), the Tigers were practically unstoppable. The city of Indianapolis had never won a State Championship, and everyone—black and white—started rooting for them. Ticket demand was so high that many of their home games were moved to the 15,000-seat Butler Fieldhouse (the basketball arena of nearby Butler University). The team went 21–1 in the regular season. Their only loss that year was in the dead of winter to a small-town team whose gym floor was laid over a frozen swimming pool…and that was the last time an Attucks team with Oscar Robertson would ever lose a game.

  ROLLING THUNDER

  Having beaten their playoff opponents by an average of 28 points, they cruised to the 1955 State Championship Final game in front of 15,000 fans at the now-familiar Butler Fieldhouse. Their opponent: Gary Roosevelt High, another all-black segregated school. That made it the first time in Indiana history that two all-black schools faced off in the State Final. Gary Roosevelt had an excellent team, including a 6’6” center named Jake Eison, who was named Indiana’s “Mr. Basketball” that year, and Dick Barnett, a future NBA star. But Attucks ran away with the game, winning 97–74.

  Crispus Attucks’s first State Championship, the first Championship for an all-black school in Indiana or anywhere else in the United States, was also the long-awaited first Championship for the city of Indianapolis. Fans both black and white celebrated. Robertson later said, “I remember that night they called us Indianapolis Attucks, not Crispus Attucks. To me, that meant we’d arrived. They just wanted you to win; they didn’t care what color you were.”

  THE REAL HOOSIERS

  In 1956, led by Oscar Robertson as a senior, the Crispus Attucks Tigers had their best season yet. Robertson broke the city scoring record twice, once with 45 points, then later with 62 points—still an Indianapolis record—and the Attucks team drew huge crowds wherever they played, at home or on the road.

  They rolled through the 1956 regular season and playoffs, and other teams seemed to stand still as the Tigers ran past them. Lafayette Jefferson High School, the team they faced in the 1956 Championship Finals, played an old-fashioned game, similar to Milan’s—they held the ball and controlled the pace of the game with multiple passes. They even shot their free throws underhand. Needless to say, they were overmatched. Robertson scored 39 points despite being double- and triple-teamed all night, and Crispus Attucks won 79–57. With that win, they became Indiana’s first undefeated State Basketball Champions.

  The build-up to that moment had been remarkable. The Tigers had gone 30–1 back in 1955 and 31–0 in 1956, setting a state record with 45 consecutive wins over two seasons. And over the course of just two years, they had changed everythi
ng—not just the way the game of Indiana basketball was played, but its color, too. The 1954 Championship Game had three black players; the next year, the Championship Game was contested by two all-black high schools. Now, in 1956, an all-black team was the best that had ever been—the state’s first undefeated state championship team. Over the next few years, high schools in Indianapolis and around the state started recruiting black students who once would have been segregated in schools like Crispus Attucks and Gary Roosevelt.

  OVERTIME

  The renowned winner-take-all Indiana High School State Championship Tournament no longer exists; the state went to a four-class system in 1998. Crispus Attucks itself was integrated in 1970 under court-ordered desegregation. Because of declining enrollment, it was converted to a junior high school in 1986 and then later to a middle school. In 2006 it became a high school again—a magnet school for students preparing to become medical professionals. And in 2008, more than 50 years after they won their first State Championship, the Crispus Attucks Tigers returned to playing varsity basketball.

  SMALL-TOWN NEWS

  “Police responded to a report of two dogs running loose and attacking ducks last Sunday. The officer cited a resident for the loose dogs. The ducks refused medical treatment and left the area, according to police.”

  —Ashland (Oregon) Daily Tidings

  GOURMET FOOD: HUMBLE ORIGINS

  Most people’s first encounters with fancy foods make them say ��Eww.”

  Corn fungus, pickled cactus, weird mushrooms, and the like actually

  do seem pretty unappetizing, even if they taste good. Turns out

  that many were first consumed out of hardship and necessity.

  LOBSTER

  Lobster may taste like shellfish (crab, shrimp), but it looks like an insect. And technically, it’s an arthropod—more closely related to spiders than to anything from the sea. Lobsters are abundant off the coast of New England, and from the colonial era until the 19th century, they were treated like insects; fisherman considered them pests that took up room in nets meant for more desirable fish. But fishermen caught them in large quantities and were reluctant to throw them back, especially since they were edible and could be sold (cheaply) for other uses. Those uses: ground up and used as high-protein plant fertilizer or as food for slaves, indentured servants, and prisoners. In fact, during the American Revolution, some British prisoners revolted over being served lobster too often. When the railroads made mass transport of goods possible in the late 1800s, East Coast fisheries realized that they could ship lobster west…where nobody knew it wasn’t an expensive delicacy. In other words, they decided they could make a buck by calling lobster a delicacy. They did, and it worked.

  FOIE GRAS

  Pronounced “fwah-grah,” it’s the extra-fatty, rich-tasting liver of a goose that was force-fed until its liver grew to 10 times normal size. Today, the food is banned in many places because force-feeding the goose is considered by some to be an act of cruelty. Goose liver was a favorite dish of rulers in ancient Egypt. But its popularity died out over time, until Jewish people in the Middle Ages discovered that the fatty liver of the common wild goose was delicious. Not just that, but geese are kosher, meaning they pass the rigorous Jewish dietary guidelines. By the Renaissance, most of the Jewish population of Rome was confined to ghettos. Word got out to the ruling elite that the Jewish dish of fatty goose liver was pretty good, so the wealthy went into butcher shops in the Jewish ghettos to buy it. Suddenly, fattened goose liver was a fancy food. And as the Roman Empire’s cultural influence spread throughout Europe, the dish became especially popular in what is now France. (Foie gras is French for “fat liver.”)

  OYSTERS

  It’s amazing that anybody ever discovered that oysters are edible. They securely affix themselves to shoreline rock clusters, and they themselves look like rocks—they’re encased in thick, hard-to-crack shells. And then, once you’ve got one open, the edible portion is a slimy, misshapen, gelatinous glob. (Never eat oysters that were open when you found them—they’ll give you a “gut-wrenching” experience.) But people do have to eat, and the lower the income bracket, the more creative the food sources sometimes have to be. The late-19th-century immigration boom created a population explosion, particularly on the east coast of North America, where oysters were abundant at the time. They became a cheap favorite of the working and lower classes. By the 1920s, oysters were overconsumed to the point of scarcity. And things that are scarce tend to become more expensive…and more desirable.

  SNAILS

  They’ve been eaten all around the world for thousands of years, but we know snails, or escargots, as a French dish. Poor French peasants ate snails at least as far back as the 1600s. The most commonly consumed variety: vineyard snails, which are easily caught and found in abundance in (obviously) vineyards. Snails remained a rustic French country dish until the early 20th century. That’s when restaurants became common in the United States and, as is partly still true today, the fanciest restaurants were the French ones. And because French food was considered exotic, American diners didn’t know that when they ordered expensive plates of escargot, they were actually ordering slimy creatures from the yard cooked in the same way they were in the 1600s: baked with inexpensive, easily obtained ingredients—butter, garlic, and parsley.

  THE MARK OF ZORA

  The Corvette may be the quintessential American sports car, but

  the man who made it great was a European immigrant with

  a thick accent and an exotic last name. Here’s Part III

  of our story. (Part II is on page 329.)

  SKIN DEEP

  In January of 1953, a Belgian-born, Russian-Jewish immigrant named Zora Arkus-Duntov paid a visit to the General Motors Motorama auto show at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. There the first Chevrolet Corvette was unveiled to the public, and like so many other people who got their first look at the car, Duntov was struck by its beauty.

  Unlike most of the spectators, Duntov was an automotive engineer who’d spent years working on and around race cars. As he studied the Corvette’s motor and other components, he realized that it would not be able to deliver on the promise of performance that its sporty good looks implied. “Mechanically, it stunk, with its six-cylinder engine and two-speed automatic transmission,” he remembered. “But visually, it was superb.”

  DREAM JOB

  Duntov had been looking for a job with one of the major American automakers for several months. Before Motorama, he wasn’t too particular about which company he went to work for, but after seeing the Corvette, he knew he wanted a job at Chevrolet. This was a car he could work on—this was a car that needed his help. Luckily for Duntov (and for you, if you’re a Corvette fan), Ed Cole, Chevrolet’s chief engineer, was impressed with his credentials and gave him a job. In May 1953, Duntov started as an assistant staff engineer in Chevrolet’s Research & Development department.

  If Duntov thought he was going to be assigned full-time to the Corvette, he was probably disappointed—the car was so new and sold at such low volumes that no employees were assigned to it full-time. People worked on the car on temporary assignment and only when their work on other, more important projects permitted.

  A TOUGH FIT

  Duntov had run his own businesses before, but he’d never worked for a big corporation, and he had a tough time adjusting to life at GM, then the world’s largest. Just a few weeks after landing his job at Chevrolet, he nearly lost it when he insisted on taking a leave of absence to honor a prior commitment and go to France to race at Le Mans, a grueling 24-hour road race. Result: When he (reluctantly) returned to Detroit, he was demoted and reassigned to work on GM trucks and schoolbuses. In December 1953, however, he worked his way back into the good graces of his superiors by drafting a memo titled, “Thoughts Pertaining to Youth, Hot-Rodders and Chevrolet.”

  In his memo, Duntov observed that the hobby of fixing up cars and turning them into hot rods was a rapi
dly growing fad with young men. Currently Fords were the cars of choice for hot-rodders, and Duntov speculated that when these young men outgrew their street racers, they were likely to continue buying Fords. In the Corvette, Duntov saw an opportunity to win some of this business for Chevrolet. But the performance of the standard Corvette had to be improved considerably, and on top of that, Chevy had to begin offering a full line of optional high-performance parts for buyers who wanted their Corvettes to be able to take on all those souped-up Fords.

  THE RIGHT MAN FOR THE JOB

  The 1953 Corvette aside, Chevrolet had a reputation for selling low-priced, underpowered, and unexciting cars to buyers who didn’t have the money to buy the cars they really wanted—hardly the car of choice for hot-rodders. The division’s bargain-basement image had cost it a lot of business in recent years, and that was one of the reasons Cole had wanted the Corvette for Chevrolet. It was also one of the reasons he wanted Duntov for Chevrolet, even after he’d run off to Europe to play with race cars. Duntov may well have been the only engineer at GM who would have known how to play with race cars, and he was certainly one of the few with the insight to write his famous memo about Chevrolet and hot-rodders.

  Remember that, though Chevrolet had been founded by a race car driver, Louis Chevrolet, in 1911, it had been decades since Chevy or any other GM division had built anything resembling a race car (or a sports car). And paradoxically, GM could be a tough place to work for people who were interested in cars. A typical career path for a GM engineer was to start out working on designs for one small part of the car—say, the latch mechanism for the hood—then eventually move on to another, such as engine mounts or trunk lid hinges. A job at GM was steady, high-paying work for people willing to endure years of tedium as they paid their dues, but serious “car guys” who were passionate about hot rods and racing stayed away. Duntov was one of the few who was willing to take a chance at GM. And that was why Cole only banished him to work on trucks and schoolbuses instead of firing him outright.