Uncle John’s Briefs

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  Husband: One who, having dined, is charged with the care of the plate.

  Meekness: Uncommon patience in planning a revenge that is worthwhile.

  Outcome: A particular type of disappointment.

  Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.

  In an average day, an adult American experiences about 50 stress-related adrenaline rushes.

  FOUNDING FATHERS

  You already know the names. Here’s who they belonged to.

  William Colgate. In the early 1800s, making soap at home was a matter of pride with American housewives: That’s where 75% of U.S. soap was made (although it smelled terrible). In 1806 Colgate opened a soap business and succeeded by offering home delivery, and by adding perfume to his soap.

  Gerhard Mennen. While recovering from malaria in the 1870s, he learned so much about the pharmaceutical trade that he opened his own drug store. He made his own remedies, including Mennen’s Borated Talcum Infant Powder—America’s first talcum powder.

  Dr. William Erastus Upjohn. Until Upjohn invented a process for manufacturing soft pills, prescription pills were literally hard as a rock—you couldn’t smash them with a hammer, and they often passed through a person’s system without being absorbed by the body. Upjohn’s new process changed all that.

  John Michael Kohler. A Wisconsin foundry owner in the 1880s. One of his big sellers was an enameled iron water trough for farm animals. In 1883, convinced that demand for household plumbing fixtures was growing, he made four cast-iron feet, welded them to the animal trough, and began selling it as a bathtub.

  William Boeing. When he wasn’t working for his father, a timber and iron baron, Boeing and a friend named Conrad Westervelt built seaplanes as a hobby. In 1916 the pair founded Pacific Aero Products. When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, the Navy bought 50 of his planes. He never worked for his father again.

  William Rand and Andrew McNally. Rand and McNally printed railroad tickets and timetables. In 1872 they added maps to their line. Other companies used wood or metal engravings for their maps; Rand McNally used wax engravings, allowing them to update and correct maps at a fraction of the cost. By the early 1900s, Rand McNally was one of the largest map-makers in the country.

  Michael Jordan had a specific clause in his contract that permitted him to play basketball anytime in the off-season. It’s known as a “love-of-the-game clause.”

  NAME THAT COUNTRY

  See if you can guess the name of the country before

  reading all the clues. (Answers on page 286.)

  SAVED

  1. It was originally inhabited by the Pipil tribe.

  2. The Pipil are believed to be direct descendants of the Aztecs.

  3. The Pipil were defeated by Spanish explorers looking for gold.

  4. The Christian Spaniards named it in honor of Jesus.

  Name the country.

  NOTHING TO IT

  1. The local Nama people call it “an area where there is nothing.”

  2. The name describes the coastal desert area of the country.

  3. It has been governed at different times by the British, the Germans, and the South Africans.

  4. It gained independence in 1990 from South Africa.

  Name the country.

  THE NAMELESS NAME

  1. It got its European name long before Europeans knew it existed.

  2. Early geographers insisted it must be there—if not, the Earth would “wobble.”

  3. The early name was Latin for “The Unknown Southern Land.”

  4. Captain James Cook “discovered” it in 1770.

  Name the country.

  OVER THERE WHERE THE SUN COMES UP

  1. Our word for this country originally comes from China.

  2. It combines the words “sun” and “east.”

  3. Portuguese traders learned the name from Malaysians in the 1500s.

  4. Inhabitants of this country call it Nippon.

  Name the country.

  GRECIAN FORMULA

  1. Early inhabitants called themselves the Pritani.

  2. The Greek sailor Pytheas named it after the inhabitants in 300 B.C.

  3. When enemy tribes attacked in the 400s, many inhabitants fled this island, taking the name with them to the mainland.

  4. To differentiate between the new “lesser” settlement on the mainland, the word “Greater” was added to the name of the island.

  Name the island.

  ACUTE COUNTRY, BUT A BIT OBTUSE

  1. This country, when grouped with two other countries, is known by another name.

  2. When grouped with three other countries, it’s known by another name.

  3. The name comes from a Germanic tribe that invaded the country about 1,500 years ago.

  4. It is believed that the tribe’s name referred to their homeland in present-day Germany, which was shaped like a fishhook.

  Name the country.

  WHY DON’T THEY SPEAK GERMAN?

  1. This country was also named after an invading Germanic tribe.

  2. The tribe’s name came from a Latin word meaning “masculine.”

  3. Their allegiance with Rome, and use of its written Latin language, are two reasons why their language is so different from German.

  4. They controlled so much of Europe at one point that the Arabic and Persian words for “European” are based on their name.

  Name the country.

  OVERCOATIA

  1. This country was named by the Portuguese in the 1470s.

  2. The name comes from the Portuguese word for an overcoat, Gabao.

  3. The French gained control of this equatorial country in the late 1800s and helped to end its slave trade.

  4. It’s in western Africa.

  Name the country.

  It can take as little as 20 seconds for a child to drown.

  LOCAL HERO:

  LEROY GORHAM

  Here’s the story of a man who suffered a family

  tragedy and then went on a mission to save

  other families from the same fate.

  TERRIBLE LOSS

  In the summer of 1946 a fire broke out in LeRoy and Lillian Gorham’s house in The Bottom neighborhood of Chapel Oaks, Maryland. It took firefighters a very long time to arrive. Too long. By the time they put out the fire, all three of the Gorhams’ children—Ruth, 4, Jean, 3, and LeRoy Earl, 2—had perished in the blaze.

  There’s no way to know if the Gorham children could have been saved had the fire department arrived sooner, and for that matter, no one knows exactly why it took the fire department so long to get there. But The Bottom is a black community, and residents there claim that the all-white fire departments of surrounding communities were always slow to respond to emergencies in black neighborhoods…if they came at all.

  “It’s just the way it was,” said resident Luther Crutchfield. “If they got a call for a fire in a black neighborhood, they either came or they didn’t. Sometimes they came, but they took their time.” Further complicating matters, The Bottom didn’t have running water in the 1940s, so even when firefighters did respond, there was no place to hook up their hoses. Fires were fought with bucket brigades, using water drawn from nearby wells and streams.

  A NEW BEGINNING

  Gorham was devastated by the loss of his children. He wanted to do anything he could to see to it that no other families in his neighborhood or the surrounding communities ever had to suffer the same fate. So he and a group of his friends decided to found the Chapel Oaks Volunteer Fire Department, the first all-black volunteer fire company in the state of Maryland.

  Tennis balls are mentioned in Shakespeare’s Henry V.

  Less than a year after the fire, the department opened its doors. It wasn’t easy—the organizers didn’t receive any funding from Prince George’s County, so they took up a collection in the surrounding black community and used these funds to buy an old pumper, which they kept in an old garage that served as the fire station. There w
asn’t enough money for proper firefighting gear, so the Chapel Oaks firefighters made do with surplus helmets, coats, and boots they got from the U.S. military. They had no breathing equipment, either—if the men had to enter burning buildings, they simply held their breath or tied wet handkerchiefs over their mouths. Since they didn’t have access to professional training, the volunteers trained themselves by setting fires in abandoned buildings and putting them out.

  “We weren’t in the county fire association, because they had a white male–only clause,” remembers Crutchfield, who joined the department in 1949. And the discrimination continued even when firefighters battled a blaze. “The white firefighters would take our lines out and put theirs in,” Crutchfield says. “They wouldn’t recognize the authority of our chief on the scene. But we wouldn’t play those games. We were professional men who were there to save lives, and that’s what we did.”

  HEALING

  Change came slowly in the decades that followed. When a fire destroyed the garage that served as Chapel Oak’s first fire station, the volunteers raised enough money from the community to build their first proper fire station nearby and laid the bricks themselves. The county fire association eventually dropped its whites-only clause and Chapel Oaks joined in 1960; then, in 1979, the county built them a new fire station.

  Gorham and his wife had three more children. He was a volunteer with the department for 54 years, serving as chief for 17 of those. And when he wasn’t at the station, he was listening to his radio scanner. “The only time his scanner wasn’t on was when he was at church,” his daughter Tanya said.

  Even when he became too old to fight fires, Gorham continued to visit the fire station every day, and did so until the day before he died in July 2000. “LeRoy wanted to be sure,” his friend and fellow firefighter Roy Lee Jordan remembers, “that no other children died like his did.”

  A fresh lemon left at room temperature will lose 20% of its Vitamin C in 8 hours.

  TEARING DOWN

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  The White House wasn’t always a national treasure. A number of

  presidents once seriously considered demolishing it or turning it

  into a museum and building a new residence somewhere else.

  But today, that’s unthinkable. Here’s why.

  NOT ENOUGH SPACE

  At first, most Americans didn’t think there was anything particularly special about the White House. Few had ever seen it or had any idea what it looked like, and even the families who lived there found it completely inadequate.

  When it was built, the White House was the largest house in the country (and it remained so until after the Civil War). But it served so many different purposes that little of it was available for First Families to actually live in. The first floor, or “State Floor,” was made up entirely of public rooms; and half of the second floor was taken up by the president’s offices, which where staffed by as many as 30 employees. The First Family had to get by with the eight—or fewer—second-floor rooms that were left.

  By Lincoln’s time, the situation was intolerable. Kenneth Leish writes in The White House, “The lack of privacy was appalling. The White House was open to visitors daily, and office seekers, cranks, and the merely curious had no difficulty making their way upstairs from the official rooms on the first floor.”

  THE LINCOLN WHITE HOUSE

  Lincoln was so uncomfortable with the situation that he had a private corridor (since removed) constructed. This at least allowed him to get from the family quarters to his office without having to pass through the reception room, where throngs of strangers were usually waiting to see him.

  He also received a $20,000 appropriation to improve the furnishings of the White House, which had become, as one visitor put it, “bare, worn and spoiled,” like “a deserted farmstead,” with holes in the carpets and paint peeling off of the walls in the state rooms.

  The barbiturate sodium thiopental is also known as truth serum.

  Lincoln was busy with the Civil War, so he turned the matter over to his wife, who spent every penny and went $6,700 over budget. Lincoln was furious, and refused to ask Congress to cover the balance. “It would stink in the nostrils of the American people,” he fumed, “to have it said that the President of the United States had approved a bill overrunning an appropriate [amount] for flub dubs for this damned old house, when the soldiers cannot have blankets.”

  The new furnishings didn’t last for more than a few years. When Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, the White House fell into disarray. “Apparently,” writes The White House Historical Society, “no one really supervised the White House during the five weeks Mrs. Lincoln lay mourning in her room, and vandals helped themselves.”

  SAVING THE HOUSE

  Ironically, at the same time the White House was being ransacked, it was gaining a new respect with Americans, attaining an almost shrine-like status.

  National tragedy turned the presidential residence into a national monument. It wasn’t just the White House anymore—it was the place where the great fallen hero, Lincoln, had lived. Photography had only been invented about 30 years earlier. Now for the first time, photos of the White House circulated around the country. It became a symbol of the presidency…and America.

  The Founding Fathers had assumed that future presidents would add to, or even demolish and rebuild the official residence as they saw fit. But after 1865, no president would have dared to suggest tearing it down.

  HOME, BLEAK HOME

  “I’ll be glad to be going—this is the loneliest place in the world.”

  —President William Howard Taft,

  on leaving the White House

  Actress Geena Davis reached the semi-finals in the 1999 U.S. Olympic Archery tryouts.

  THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

  If English is your first language, thank your lucky stars

  that you didn’t have to learn it as a second language.

  “Any language where the unassuming word ‘fly’ signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman’s apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.”

  —Bill Bryson

  “It’s a strange language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.”

  —Franklin P. Jones

  “English has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.”

  —Paul Tillich

  “Not only does the English language borrow words from other languages, it sometimes chases them down dark alleys, hits them over the head, and goes through their pockets.”

  —Eddy Peters

  “Introducing ‘Lite’—the new way to spell ‘Light’, but with twenty percent fewer letters.”

  —Jerry Seinfeld

  “When I read some of the rules for writing the English language correctly, I think any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.”

  —Henry David Thoreau

  “If the English language made any sense, ‘lackadaisical’ would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.”

  —Doug Larson

  “The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.”

  —Cyril Connolly

  “Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?”

  —Clarence Darrow

  “Do not compute the totality of your poultry population until all the manifestations of incubation have been entirely completed.”

  —William Jennings Bryan

  The metal loop that a lampshade sits on is technically known as a “harp.”

  OOPS!

  It’s comforting to know that other people are screwing

  up even worse than we are. So go ahead and

  feel superior for a few minutes.

  LIGHT M
Y FIRE

  JERUSALEM—“It was, to say the least, a very unfortunate mistake. German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder accidentally extinguished Israel’s eternal memorial flame for the six million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust.

  “At a somber ceremony in Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, Schroeder turned a handle that was supposed to make the flame rise. It went out instead. Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak stepped forward to try to help, but was unsuccessful. Finally, a technician used a gas lighter to bring the flame to life again, but by then the damage had been done.”

  —Reuters

  REAL-LIFE LESSON

  “A Grand Rapids, Minnesota, SWAT team, scheduled a drill at a local high school with actors and actresses playing the part of terrorists. But they mistakenly stormed another school next door. One of the teachers terrorized in the ‘raid’ said she was sure she was about to be killed as she was led from the building at gunpoint by the officers, who never identified themselves.”

  —Bonehead of the Day

  SANTA CROOK

  PHILADELPHIA—“Construction workers recently did a ‘chimney sweep’ of a vacant building and found the remains of a serial burglar who had tried to rob the place several years ago. According to Detective Romonita King, workers were knocking down the chimney Saturday when they smelled a foul odor. On closer inspection, they noticed a pair of sneakers, jeans, a Phillies cap, and what appeared to be human remains. The medical examiner’s office tentatively listed the cause of death as accidental compression asphyxia. It was reported that the remains could be at least five years old and it was not known how long the business—ironically, a theft-prevention business—was closed.”

  —Bizarre News

  Only musical instrument that’s played without being touched: the theremin.

  THREE STRIKES, YOU’RE OUT

  “Lorenzo Trippi, a lifeguard in Ravenna, Italy, lost his job when three people drowned after he hit them with life preservers. Police said his aim was too accurate.”