“Yes, that’s the one! Did you ever hear the payoff on that?”
Everyone was interested.
“Well, it seems the company kept a record of the names of the wives who made the trip. And about six months later they wrote to all of them asking how they had enjoyed their airplane trip. And ninety per cent of the letters came back with the question, ‘What airplane trip?’”
From Marguerite Lyon, And So to Bedlam (1943), pp. 280–81. This story has been published several times in sources ranging from newspaper columns to books concerning business practices, airlines, and even extramarital affairs. Variations on the theme include a story in which a hotel chain sent follow-up letters to the spouses of travelers who had never actually stayed there, and a story in which a university sent inquiries to married people who had stopped attending evening classes. For straying spouses, the moral of the stories is “Maintain your cover story.” For businesses, the moral might be “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
“Redemption Rumors”
Spokane—An old rumor and a cruel hoax has just taken a new turn, Mrs. Marie M. Ferrell, manager of Better Business Bureau of Spokane said Tuesday.
“Thousands of people have been duped into saving useless items in the futile hope of supplying a seeing-eye dog to a blind person,” she said.
First, she said, it was empty match folders, then cellophane strips from cigarette packages.
“More recently it has been tabs off tea bags and empty cigarette packages,” she said. “Now there is a false report going the rounds which started people saving beer can tabs.”
These rumors persist, she said, despite the fact that seeing-eye dogs cannot be obtained through collection of any type of items.
False rumors have plagued the aluminum industry and the national Kidney Foundation for years concerning beverage can pull tabs and kidney dialysis. Across the nation, at various times, word has spread that aluminum can pull tabs could be recycled in exchange for time on a kidney dialysis machine for someone with kidney disease. Many well-intentioned yet misinformed groups and indivuals collected pull tabs only to find that there was no pull tab/kidney dialysis donation program. It never existed. Anywhere.
PULL-TOP PRICE RUMORS DON’T HAVE A RING OF TRUTH
Fort Worth—A gallon jug full of pull tops from aluminum cans is worth:
A) $90 cash?
B) A pint of blood at a blood bank?
C) Free time on a kidney dialysis machine?
D) 46 cents, the going rate at local recycling centers for roughly 2 pounds of aluminum?
The correct answer, of course, is 46 cents.
As odd as the other answers sound, however, dozens of people a day have been calling Texas recycling centers in recent months, saying that they have heard that the pull tops are somehow valuable or special.
“I’ve gotten calls from all kinds of people who have heard these rumors: kids, schoolteachers, individuals old and young alike,” said Susan Dequeant, marketing specialist for Alcoa Recycling Co. in Grand Prairie.
Dequeant said the most common variation of the rumor is that the pull tops are a purer type of aluminum and that a gallon jug filled with them is worth between $80 and $100.
She said the rumor that one can receive medical services for the pull tops might be related to rumors that the tops are made into hypodermic needles. Neither is true….
Teen’s Effort Hits Sour Note
Fort Walton Beach [Florida]—Kerra Hensley was on the verge of tears.
“It’s gotta be true,” the 14-year-old said.
Thursday afternoon, she learned a month’s worth of work would not end as she hoped.
Her goal was to help her 5-year-old neighbor, a blond, blue-eyed little girl who loves to jump on trampolines. The child needs kidney dialysis to stay alive.
Kerra collected 50,000 soda can tabs to exchange for 50,000 free minutes of kidney dialysis at a Gainesville hospital.
But the Daily News, while pursuing a story about Kerra’s good deed, discovered no such program was available.
A hospital spokesman knew nothing of an exchange of tabs for dialysis minutes….
First, a May 19, 1965, story in the Spokane, (Washington) Spokesman-Review; second, “Keep Tabs on Your Cans,” a brochure issued by Reynolds Aluminum and the National Kidney Foundation in 1988; third, an October 30, 1992, article by Thomas Korosec from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram; fourth, a January 3, 1997, article by Teresa Wood from the Fort Walton Beach (Florida) Daily News. Rumors that huge numbers of otherwise useless things can be redeemed for direct health benefits for needy patients have circulated for at least forty years. The companies and hospitals named in the rumors are often perceived as heroes until the falsity of the stories is revealed; then they become the villains. The first article above anticipates the eventual focusing of all such rumors on the opening tabs on aluminum drink cans; as kidney dialysis machines became available in the 1970s, pull-tabs-for-dialysis became the standard version. Despite the development of opening tabs designed to remain attached to cans, and despite the fact that costs of dialysis are largely borne by government programs and health insurance, the rumors persist. Year after year newspapers report individuals and groups that have amassed enormous quantities of pull tabs, believing that they can be exchanged directly for time on dialysis machines. Often these efforts are combined with an elementary-school teacher’s desire to illustrate for a class how a million of something would look. The unintended lesson that all of these collectors learn is that aluminum is worth its weight in…aluminum. It would make more sense to recycle the entire can, or in states with a can deposit, to redeem the cans at collection centers. Complicating this whole picture is the establishment of several genuine pull-tab collection campaigns since 1989 to raise money for various health concerns; but all of these efforts conclude by simply selling the aluminum to recycling centers. Since most of these programs ask people to mail in their pull tabs, it is considered impractical and unsanitary to collect the whole cans. Nobody seems to be bothered by the cost of postage versus the very low value of pull tabs, and nobody seems interested in a program in which donors would recycle their aluminum in their home communities and then simply mail a check to the sponsors. Somehow, pull tabs by the millions and millions seem to have captured people’s imaginations, and many people are willing to believe that doctors will not turn on dialysis machines to save the lives of poor little children until enough pull tabs arrive at the hospital. Question: what do people think the hospitals want with the pull tabs?
“The Body in the Bed”
My aunt told me this story. She said that it really happened to her nephew’s friend. It seems that the friend and her husband were staying in the Excalibur Hotel in Las Vegas. There was a slight but unpleasant odor in the room. They checked the room for rotting food, unflushed toilets and the like, but found nothing. Being that it was in the wee hours of the morning, and they were exhausted, they decided to retire for the night and tell the management in the morning. When they woke up, the stench had become unbearable. They complained to the management. It was then discovered that in the box springs lay the corpse of a prostitute. They had literally slept with a prostitute!
From Curtis Minato of Los Angeles, writing me in August 1991. This was a very popular story in 1991 and ’92; sometimes the body was said to be that of a Mafia hit victim. Most versions ended with the hotel management—at either the Excalibur or the Mirage—cancelling all charges on the room, or even promising the victims a free room for life if they will keep their experience quiet. Both the lingering smell of death and the freebies are reminiscent of the much older “Death Car” urban legend. In 1988 the decomposed body of a murder victim was found under a bed in an Oceanside, New Jersey, motel room, but, except for the report of a bad smell, this case was different from the Las Vegas legend. Instead of being a luxury hotel, the New Jersey business was described in news stories as one that “attracts a ‘transient type’ of clientele who often stay only a few hours at
a time.” According to newspaper reports, in March 1994, after German tourists complained of a bad smell in a motel room near the Miami International Airport, the decomposed body of a woman was found under the bed. Five months later, according to further news stories, another decomposed body was found in a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, motel room by—would you believe?—another group of German tourists. As unlikely as these last two cases seem, I read it in the newspaper, which is better than hearing it on the grapevine. No further body-in-bed urban legends seem to have emerged since 1992.
“The Cabbage Patch Tragedy”
In the Christmas seasons of 1983 and 1984, Cabbage Patch Kids, those moon-faced soft dolls, were the hottest toys of the season. You did not merely buy a Cabbage Patch Kid, you adopted one, and you got the papers to prove it.
Eventually some of the dolls got broken, or run through the wash, or chewed on by the dog. When the doll’s “parent” sent the damaged “kid” back to the factory, she got in return…
A letter of condolence?
A death certificate?
A bill for the funeral?
The “kid’s” remains in a tiny coffin, ready for burial?
A citation for child abuse?
Answer: None of the above. The doll’s manufacturer, Coleco Industries (sometimes misunderstood to be “Conoco”), provided repair services at set fees for their dolls, but no funerals, coffins, death certificates, etc. A spokeswoman in the Cabbage Patch public relations department in Georgia, when contacted by a reporter in November 1984 about the stories, sighed and said, “Has that story surfaced again? I thought we buried it. No pun intended.”
13
The World of Work
There’s a wonderful continuity in certain legends of the workplace. Over and over again through the years—according to the stories—the working stiffs have found ways to one-up and frustrate the bosses. In his 1981 book Land of the Millrats, folklorist Richard M. Dorson collected this classic example in a steel mill of northwestern Indiana in the mid-1970s, calling it “the classic folk legend of mill thievery”:
John was an immigrant laborer from eastern Europe who worked in the mills. And every afternoon when leaving work he trundled out a wheelbarrow with his work tools, covered with straw. The gate guards were suspicious of John, and they always examined the wheelbarrow carefully, poked under the straw, but never found anything except the tools, which clearly belonged to him. So they had to let him go through.
So this went on day after day, year after year. Finally the day came for John’s retirement. He had worked thirty years in the mill. So, as he is leaving on his last day, trundling out his wheelbarrow, the gate guard said to him: “All right, John, we know you have been stealing something. This is your last day; we can’t do anything to you now. Tell us what you have been stealing?”
John said: “Wheelbarrows.”
Forty years earlier, during the Great Depression, a similar story was told about another eastern European worker, this one a Jewish salesman of “pazamentry” named Sam Cohen. (Pazamentry, the storyteller explained, “is the decoration that’s added to a garment”—lace trim, embroidery, ribbons, fancy buttons.) Again the worker is a trickster who gains the last laugh on management just as he’s about to retire. This beautifully elaborated version of the payback story was told by Jack Tepper of Brooklyn to folklorist Steve Zeitlin and appears in Zeitlin’s book Because God Loves Stories (1997).
Well after forty years Sam is going to retire, and he’s talking to another salesman, and he says, “What I really want to do is, there’s a Mr. O’Connell who owns a dress house, and he would never buy anything from me ’cause he hates Jews. And to me, the high-light of my career, is before I retire I could sell him an order.”
So he goes to Mr. O’Connell to sell him an order. Mr. O’Connell looks at him and says very sardonically, “I hear you’re retiring, Cohen. You’ve been bothering me for years, and you know I don’t deal with Hebes. But, okay, you want an order, I’ll give you an order—token order.” He says, “You have any red ribbon?”
Cohen says, “Sure we got red ribbon. What width?”
He says, “Half inch.”
“We got half-inch ribbon.”
“You got it.”
“How much you need?”
“All you need is an order, right? Just to show you sold me. I want a ribbon that will reach from your belly button to the tip of your penis. That’s as big a piece of ribbon as I want.” And Mr. O’Connell throws him out of his factory.
Six weeks later, Mr. O’Connell goes to open up his factory, and in front of his door are five trailer trucks. And they are unloading thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of yards of ribbon. He runs upstairs, gets on the phone, and says, “Cohen, you miserable animal, what the hell did you send me?”
He says, “Look Mr. O’Connell. Exactly what you asked me is what I sent you. My belly button, everybody knows where it is. You said till it reaches the tip of my penis. Fifty-five years ago I was circumcised in a little town outside of Warsaw, Poland….”
Legends like these portray the bad old days in the world of work, and sets of strict rules purporting to prove the bad side of the “good old days” are also passed around as anonymous photocopied folklore. These rule lists, like urban legends, have many variations. Usually the lists are claimed to date from the 1860s or ’70s; however, every copy I have seen of “The Good Old Days” is printed or typed in a modern format and never reported directly from an authentic century-old source. Most of them are claimed to be guidelines for the office workers in a “carriage shop.” Some of the lists have as many as a dozen entries, but here is a typical example with six items from Robert Ellis Smith’s 1983 book Workrights:
Working hours shall be 7:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M. every evening but the Sabbath. On the Sabbath, everyone is expected to be in the Lord’s House.
It is expected that each employee shall participate in the activities of the church and contribute liberally to the Lord’s work.
All employees must show themselves worthy of their hire.
All employees are expected to be in bed by 10:00 P.M. Except:
Each male employee may be given one evening a week for courting purposes and two evenings a week in the Lord’s House.
It is the bounden duty of each employee to put away at least 10% of his wages for his declining years, so that he will not become a burden upon the charity of his betters.
Smith credited the New York Times for these rules, which sounded impressive, so I looked up the referenced November 17, 1974, issue. All I found was the list itself, appended to a Times article about privacy; the list was credited to “a New York Carriage Shop, 1878.” The Times was probably merely reprinting as a sidebar a piece of contemporary photocopy lore, just as the Boston Globe once did with a similar list credited to “a carriage works in Boston” from 1872. I have further versions of “The Good Old Days” on file that modify the rules slightly to fit the jobs of warehouse workers, furniture-store employees, nurses, and teachers. Every one of them requires workers to save part of their wages so as not to be a burden to society and/or to their “betters.” And, curiously, most lists, whatever the occupation involved, make some reference to employees having to “whittle nibs” for their pens and bring some coal for the office stove. Is it possible that so many different businesses a century ago in scattered locations had parallel sets of strict rules? If so, then where are the specimens of actual dated documents listing these rules?
Not surprisingly, stories about the modern-day workplace are no easier to verify than are the stories claimed to be from the past. Take the story told to me a few years ago in Portland, Oregon. This time the venue is a jet airliner:
Supposedly, George Shearing, the blind jazz pianist, was flying from Los Angeles to Seattle. The flight made a brief stop in San Francisco. The pilot, a big jazz fan, went back to meet Shearing during the stopover. When the pilot offered to provide any service or assistance that the pianist might
require, Shearing said that he’d appreciate it if someone would take his Seeing Eye dog out for a brief walk.
The captain himself was happy to oblige. He took Shearing’s guide dog out for a stroll on the tarmac next to the parked jet. When the other passengers saw their pilot walking to and fro with a guide dog, most of them deserted the flight. The plane was nearly empty on the hop to Seattle.
Or take this workers’ story from the contemporary world of computer manufacturing. It’s told among industrial engineers and quality-control specialists:
An American company needed some computer memory chips, so they placed an order with a Japanese company. The Americans specified an acceptance criterion of 0.2 percent defective, and they ordered 1,000 chips.
The order arrived in two packages. The larger package contained 998 perfectly good memory chips. The smaller package contained two defective chips with a note saying that they didn’t know why the company wanted two defective chips, but it was their policy always to meet customer requirements.
Work at any level has its characteristic folklore, usually including a few legends. When a former pizza delivery man told me about the time he delivered a hot pizza to a nude woman on a warm summer night in southern Michigan, I asked him how he knew she was nude, since he mentioned that he had not actually seen her. For two reasons, he replied. First, she had kept the door hooked on the locking chain and made him slip the pizza in vertically through the crack. Second, he had heard many stories from other delivery men about nude customers who had greeted delivery persons working for that company. Indeed, I myself subsequently heard several other accounts of pizza delivery to nude customers, and I was reminded of people in other legends who were said to have been caught at home in the buff by other service personnel—plumbers, meter readers, and carpet layers.
Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends Page 27