Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader
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ACID TEST
Meaning: A test of whether something is true or valuable.
Origin: In the past, gold was traded as currency. To find out if it was genuine, a gold coin could be tested with nitric acid. If the piece was counterfeit, the acid decomposed it. If it was genuine, the gold remained intact.
BUILD A FIRE UNDER SOMEONE
Meaning: Get someone to take action.
Origin: Mules can be stubborn. They sometimes splay all four legs out and refuse to move…and no amount of coaxing or beating will budge them. “When farmers wanted them to move and everything else failed,” explains Nigel Rees in Why You Say It, “a small fire was built under the mule’s belly in hopes that once in action the animal could be guided and kept moving.”
BEFORE YOU CAN SAY “JACK ROBINSON”
Meaning: At once; instantly.
Origin: According to lore, the original Jack Robinson was a gentleman who kept his unannounced visits on his neighbors so short that they hardly had a chance to speak before he was gone. The term appears in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
A FALSEHOOD
Meaning: A lie.
Origin: Before hats came into vogue, men wore hoods of cloth or fur attached to their cloaks. Many professionals—e.g., doctors and priests—wore distinctive hood styles. If a con man wanted to set himself up as a professional in a town where he wasn’t known, all he had to do was put on the right hood. This deception came to be labeled a falsehood.
There is no bread in shortbread. It’s a cookie.
MODERN MYTHOLOGY
These mythobgical characters may be as famous in our culture as Hercules or Pegasus were in ancient Greece. Here’s where they came from.
SNAP!, CRACKLE!, & POP! In 1933, commercial artist Vernon Grant was working at his drawing board when he heard this Rice Krispies ad on the radio:
Listen to the fairy song of health, the merry chorus sung by Kellogg’s Rice Krispies as they merrily snap, crackle and pop in a bowl of milk. If you’ve never heard food talking, now is your chance.
Inspired, he immediately drew three little elves—which he named after the noises the cereal supposedly made. Then he took the sketches to N.W. Ayer, the Philadelphia ad agency that handled Kellogg’s advertising; they bought the cartoons on the spot. They also hired Grant to keep illustrating the little trio for cereal boxes, posters, and ads. He made a good living working for Kellogg’s over the next decade, but wasn’t happy with the arrangement. So he decided to sue Kellogg’s for sole ownership of the characters. Bad move: he lost, Kellogg’s fired him, and Grant never made another cent off the characters he’d created.
THE SUN-MAID RAISIN GIRL. “The sun-bonneted woman…who smiles on every box of Sun-Maid raisins was a real person,” writes Victoria Woeste in Audacity magazine. “Her name was Lorraine Collett and in 1915 she was sitting in her front yard letting her hair dry before participating in Fresno’s first Raisin Day parade. A Sun-Maid executive was passing by and was struck by the sight. He had a photographer come take her picture, then had artist Fanny Scafford paint the picture from it.” All Collett made from it was a $15 modeling fee and a bit part in a 1936 film called Trail of the Lonesome Pine. The original bonnet is now in the Smithsonian.
MR. PEANUT. Amadeo Obici founded the Planters Nut & Chocolate Company in 1906, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Roasted and salted peanuts were still new to most Americans, and the company was an immediate success. As it got bigger, Obici decided he needed a logo. In 1916, he sponsored a contest to find one. The winner: 13-year-old Antonio Gentile, from Suffolk, Virginia, who submitted a drawing of “a little peanut person” and got $5 for it. A commercial artist took Gentile’s sketch, added a hat, cane, and monocle (to lend a touch of class to the lowly legume), and Mr. Peanut was born. The elegant gentle-nut made his debut in 1918, in The Saturday Evening Post.
Poll results: 27% of Americans say broccoli is their favorite veggie.
MCGRUFF THE CRIME DOG. In the late 1970s, the Ad Council made a deal with the U.S. Justice Department to create an anti-crime ad campaign. Their first task: invent a spokes-character (like Smokey the Bear) to deliver the message in commercials. Adman Jack Keil began riding with the New York police to get ideas. He remembers:
We weren’t getting anywhere. Then came a day I was flying home from the West Coast. I was trying to think of a slogan—crunch crime, stomp on crime. And I was thinking of animal symbols—growling at crime, roaring at crime. But which animal? The designated critter had to be trustworthy, honorable, and brave. Then I thought, you can’t crunch crime or defeat it altogether, but you can snap at it, nibble at it—take a bite out of crime. And the animal that takes a bite is a dog.
A bloodhound was the natural choice for a crimefighter, but they still needed a name…so they sponsored a nationwide name-the-dog contest. The most frequent entry was Shure-lock Bones. Others included: Sarg-dog, J. Edgar Dog, and Keystone Kop Dog. The winner was submitted by a New Orleans police officer. In the ads, Keil supplies McGruff’s voice.
TONY THE TIGER. In 1952, Kellogg’s planned to feature a menagerie of animals—one for each letter of the alphabet—on packages of its Sugar Frosted Flakes. They started with K and T: Katy the Kangaroo and Tony the Tiger. But they never got any further. Tony—who walked on all fours and had a much flatter face than today—was so popular that he became the cereal’s official spokes-character. In the first Frosted Flakes commercials, only kids who ate Tony’s cereal could see him. His personality has changed a number of times since then, but his voice hasn’t. It’s Thurl Ravens-croft, an ex-radio star who jokingly claims to have made a career out of just one word: “Grr-reat!”
An adult horse eats 15 pounds of hay and 9 pounds of grain every day.
FAMOUS FOR 15 MINUTES
Here it is again—our feature based on Andy Warhol’s prophetic comment that “in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” Here’s how a few people have been using up their allotted quarter-hour.
THE STAR: Pete Condon, 1989 graduate of the University of Georgia
THE HEADLINE: Case Clothes’d: Job Seeker Wears Resumé, Gets Calls
WHAT HAPPENED: Condon had graduated from college with a 3.5 grade average, but couldn’t get the marketing/advertising job he wanted. Finally, in February 1992, the 25-year-old blew up his resumé, put it on a sandwich board, and stood on an Atlanta street corner during rush hour with a sign saying: “I will work for $25,000 a year.” An Atlanta Constitution reporter spotted him. The next day his photo and story were in newspapers all over the country.
AFTERMATH: In the next two months, Condon got more than 500 job offers from as far away as Japan and Panama. He was the subject of college lectures and term papers, and women sent photos asking to meet him. Condon finally took a job at Dean Witter…at a salary of considerably more than $25,000.
THE STAR: John (or Tom) Helms
THE HEADLINE: Lucky Leaper Lands Lightly on Ledge, Likes Life
WHAT HAPPENED: Just before Christmas in 1977, Helms—a 26-year-old down-and-out artist—decided to commit suicide by jumping off the Empire State Building. He took the elevator to the 86th floor observation deck (more than 1,000 feet up), climbed over the safety rail, and let go. He woke up half an hour later, sitting on a ledge on the 85th floor. Miraculously, a 30-mph wind had blown him back against the building. He knocked on a window, and an astonished engineer in the NBC-TV transmitter room helped him in. “I couldn’t believe it,” the engineer said. “You don’t see a lot of guys coming in through the window of the 85th floor. I poured myself a stiff drink.” The story made national news.
The longest-surviving Civil War widow was still alive in 1997.
AFTERMATH: Helms decided life was okay after all, and got hundreds of offers from families who wanted to take him in for the holidays. Two years later a similar incident occurred. On December 2, 1979, Elvita Adams climbed over the 86th floor’s safety rail and jumped. She fell about 20 feet before she was blown ba
ck onto a 2 1/2-foot ledge, breaking her hip. A guard heard her yelling in pain and rescued her.
THE STAR: Graham Washington Jackson, a Navy musician
THE HEADLINE: Sobbing Soldier Shows Symbolic Sorrow
WHAT HAPPENED: President Franklin D. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, at the “Little White House” in Warm Springs, Georgia. Jackson was there to see FDR’s body taken away. “It seemed like every nail and every pin in the world just stuck in me,” he said later. As tears streamed down his face, he spontaneously began playing a tune called “Goin’ Home” on his accordion. Edward Clark, a photographer, noticed Jackson and snapped a shot that was published in Life magazine. The picture captured the nation’s shock and grief so well that both the photo and Jackson became world-famous.
AFTERMATH: Over the next four decades, Jackson was invited to the White House to play for every president. In fact, Jimmy Carter—who regarded the Life photo as one of the best ever taken—had Jackson named Georgia’s “Official State Musician” when Carter was governor. Jackson died in 1983, at age 79.
THE STAR: Leon Henry Ritzenthaler, possible half-brother of President Bill Clinton
THE HEADLINE: Surprise Sibling Surfaces in Paradise
WHAT HAPPENED: In June 1993, a few months after Clinton took office, The Washington Post announced that Ritzenthaler—a retired janitor in Paradise, California—was the president’s long-lost half-brother.
Clinton’s mother had married William Blythe in 1943. Ritzenthaler’s mother had married Blythe eight years earlier, in 1935. She and Blythe had divorced in 1936, but continued to “visit” after the divorce; Leon was born in 1938, the result—his mother claimed—of one of those visits. The Post spent four months checking, and sure enough, Leon’s birth certificate listed Blythe as his father. But Blythe’s sister insisted that it was another member of the family who was really the father—that Blythe had merely covered for him.
The Ford Motor Co. earned an average of $2 profit on every Model T it manufactured.
Meanwhile, the press camped on Ritzenthaler’s doorstep. Leon said he wanted nothing from the president except their father’s health records, so he could pass them on to his kids. (Although he admitted he wouldn’t mind meeting his brother.) Clinton said he’d comment after talking to Ritzenthaler.
The president did call Leon a few days later; they chatted for 15 minutes. And in August, Clinton sent a note that said, “I look forward to meeting you before too long.”
AFTERMATH: The story simply died. Clinton seems never to have mentioned Ritzenthaler again, and the press apparently lost interest.
Sidelight: In August 1993, a woman named Wanetta Alexander surfaced, swearing to reporters that the William Blythe she’d married in 1941 was the same man who’d fathered Clinton. That would have made her daughter the president’s half-sister…but more interesting, it would have made Clinton “illegitimate.” Alexander hadn’t divorced Blythe until 1944, and Clinton’s mother had married him in 1943. It was apparently never proved.
THE STAR: Ruth Bullis, a waitress at Stanford’s Restaurant in Lake Oswego, Oregon
THE HEADLINE: Tip Tops Charts
WHAT HAPPENED: In November 1995, a customer ordered a gin-and-tonic and a sandwich from Bullis, paid for it with a credit card, and wrote in a $40 dollar tip. Then he ordered another gin-and-tonic and left $100. Four hours later, after a third gin-and-tonic, he left a whopping $1,000 tip. Bullis said he insisted: “I can leave you whatever I want…I’m a big spender.” But she put the tips aside, waiting to see if he’d have second thoughts. A few weeks later, he showed up again…and left $100. She decided it was okay to spend the money. But she was wrong. In February, American Express notified Stanford’s that the customer wanted his money back.
AFTERMATH: When the story was picked up by national news media, the company that owned Stanford’s decided on its own to avoid publicity and refund the tip to the customer. Bullis kept $1,000 and her job.
In the Middle Ages, you were supposed to throw eggs at the bride and groom.
REEL QUOTES
Here are some of our favorite lines from the silver screen.
ON DATING
Allen: “What are you doing Saturday night?”
Diana: “Committing suicide.”
Allen: “What are you doing Friday night?”
—Play It Again, Sam
ON LOVE
Darrow: “You ever been in love, Hornbeck?”
Hornbeck: “Only with the sound of my own voice, thank God.”
—Inherit the Wind
“Jane, since I’ve met you, I’ve noticed things I never knew were there before: birds singing…dew glistening on a newly formed leaf…stoplights…”
—Lt. Frank Drebin, Naked Qun
ON ANATOMY
Nick Charles: “I’m a hero. I was shot twice in the Tribune.”
Nora Charles: “I read where you were shot five times in the tabloids.”
Nick: “It’s not true. They didn’t come anywhere near my tabloids.”
—The Thin Man
ON GOLF
“A golf course is nothing but a poolroom moved outdoors.”
—Barry Fitzgerald, Qoing My Way
ON RELIGION
Sonja: “Of course there’s a God. We’re made in his image.”
Boris: “You think I was made in God’s image? Take a look at me. Do you think he wears glasses?”
Sonja: “Not with those frames…Boris, we must believe in God.”
Boris: “If I could just see a miracle. Just one miracle. If I could see a burning bush, or the seas part, or my Uncle Sasha pick up a check.”
—Woody Allen’s Love and Death
ON BEING CLEAR
Ted Striker: “Surely, you can’t be serious.”
Dr. Rumack: “I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley.”
—Airplane!
Ollie: “You never met my wife, did you?”
Stan: “Yes, I never did.”
Helpmates
Snakes can get malaria.
READ ALL ABOUT IT!
We’ve all heard the expression “Don’t believe everything you read.” Here are a few examples of why that’s true.
PLAINFIELD TEACHER’S COLLEGE WINS AGAIN!
(New York Herald Tribune and other papers, 1941)
The Story: In 1941 the Tribune, the New York Post, and a number of other New York papers began reporting the scores of a New Jersey football team called the Plainfield Teachers College Flying Figments as it battled teams like Harmony Teachers College and Appalachia Tech for a coveted invitation to the first-ever “Blackboard Bowl.”
The Reaction: As the season progressed and the Figments remained undefeated, interest in the small college powerhouse grew, and so did the press coverage. Several papers ran feature articles about Johnny Chung, the team’s “stellar Chinese halfback who has accounted for 69 of Plainfield’s 117 points” and who “renewed his amazing strength at halftime by wolfing down wild rice.”
The Truth: Plainfield, the Flying Figments, and its opponents were all invented by a handful of bored New York stockbrokers who were amazed that real teams from places like Slippery Rock got their scores into big-city newspapers. Each Saturday, the brokers phoned in fake scores, then waited for them to appear in the Sunday papers. The hoax lasted nearly the entire season, until Time magazine got wind of it and decided to run a story. In the few days that remained before Time hit the newsstands, the brokers sent in one last story announcing that “because of a rash of flunkings in mid-term examinations, Plainfield was calling off its last two scheduled games of the season.”
PETRIFIED MAN FOUND IN NEVADA CAVE!
(Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, 1862)
The Story: According to the article, a petrified man with a wooden leg was found in a cave in a remote part of Nevada. The man was found in a seated position, with
the right thumb resting against the side of his nose, the left thumb partially supported the chin, the forefin
ger pressing the inner corner of the left eye and drawing it partially open; the right eye was closed, and the fingers of the right hand spread apart.
In Equatorial Guinea, it’s illegal to name your child Monica.
The article claimed the man had been dead for at least 300 years.
The Reaction: The story spread to other newspapers in Nevada, from there to the rest of the country, and from there around the world. The archaeological “find” was even reported in the London scientific journal Lancet.
The Truth: The story was the work of the Territorial Enterprise’s local editor, Samuel Clemens (later known by his pen name, Mark Twain). Clemens figured people would know it was a hoax by the description of the stone man’s hand positions. [Uncle John’s note: Try doing it yourself.] But he was wrong. “I really had no desire to deceive anybody,” he explained later. “I depended on the way the petrified man was sitting to explain to the public that he was a swindle….[It was] a delicate, a very delicate satire. But maybe it was altogether too delicate, for nobody ever perceived the satire part of it at all.”
NOISY GHOST HAUNTS SAN DIEGO BANK BUILDING!
(The San Diego Metropolitan, 1987)
The Story: The article claimed that the Great American Bank Building, one of San Diego’s best-known landmarks, was plagued by mysterious footsteps heard late at night, creepy voices, ghost-like images materializing out of thin air; just about all of the classic ghost clichés. The article even claimed the ghost or ghosts had reduced janitorial costs 25% by helping the building’s custodians do the vacuuming. The article included a photo of the ghost, and quoted a “parapsychologist” calling it “one of the finest examples of spiritual photography I’ve ever seen.”
The Reaction: The public took the story seriously, and when the tenants of the Great American Bank Building learned of the incidents, they began reporting their own sightings—including power failures, carpeting that had been “mysteriously vacuumed,” and cleaning equipment that moved from one floor to another; one electrician even reported seeing his tools float in midair and ghosts walking in the hallway.