a) Threatened a lawsuit to stop the record.
b) Helped the group become the first rock artists with their own TV show.
c) Tried to get them to record three songs she’d written.
5. Chuck Berry is one of the fathers of rock ’n’ roll. He had more than a dozen hits…but only one of them hit #1 on Billboard’s charts. It was…
a) “Johnny B. Goode”
b) “Roll Over Beethoven”
c) “My Ding-a-Ling”
6. Jerry Lee Lewis was one of the wildmen of early rock ’n’ roll. His first hit, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” (1957), was banned from the radio because…
a) His line, “All you gotta do is stand in one place and wiggle your hips,” was considered obscene.
b) It was creating riots. Whenever it played on the radio—even in school—teenagers would jump up and start doing a new dance they called “The Shake.”
c) A fundamentalist minister claimed he’d played it backward and heard satanic messages—the first time anyone ever said that.
7. Another crazy man of 1950s rock ’n’ roll was Little Richard, who recorded classics like “Tutti Frutti” and “Rip It Up.” When he recorded “Long Tall Sally,” he had one particular thing in mind. What was it?
a) He sang it as fast as he could, so censors wouldn’t be able to distinguish the “dirty” lyrics.
b) He sang it as fast as he could, so Pat Boone wouldn’t be able to do a cover version of it.
c) He sang it as fast as he could, because he had to go to the bathroom.
Moscow is closer to Washington, D.C. than Honolulu is.
FORGOTTEN HISTORY
A few tidbits of obscure history from Keep Up with the World, a 1941 book by Freling Foster.
X-RAY-PROOF UNDERWEAR
“A short time after X-rays were discovered in 1895 and news of their penetrating power had spread throughout the world, the women of England believed—and were horrified by—the rumor that a British firm was about to make X-ray spectacles that would enable the wearer to look right through clothing. Within a few months, a manufacturer and a London department store made a small fortune with their new ‘X-ray-proof underwear.’”
APE HANGED AS A FRENCH SPY
“In 1705, during Queen Anne’s War between France and England, a small vessel was wrecked in the North Sea off the English coast village of West Hartlepool and the sole survivor, a pet ape belonging to the crew, was washed ashore on a plank and captured by fishermen. The villagers had never before seen such a peculiar character, but they were not to be fooled by his hairy disguise and outlandish chatter. The following day, the monkey was tried by court martial, found guilty and hanged as a French spy.”
THE FIRST MOVIE STAR
“The first film star was John Bunny of New York City, who made approximately 100 one-reel comedies for the Vitagraph Company between 1911 and his death in 1915. As his pictures were shown in numerous countries, Bunny’s short fat figure soon became more widely known than that of any other living individual. When he went on a world tour in 1913, he became the first movie star ever to be recognized and surrounded by huge crowds in every city he visited.”
THE AMPERSAND
“The oldest symbol representing a word is “&,” known as the ampersand. Originally, it was one of the 5,000 signs in the world’s first shorthand system, invented by Marcus Tiro in Rome in 63 B.C.”
Average annual income in the United States at the start of World War II: $1,070.
THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE
If you want to know something important, ask a kid. These quotes about love were submitted by BRI member Alan Reder, who got them from the Internet and e-mailed them to us.
HOW DO TWO PEOPLE WIND UP FALLING IN LOVE?
Andrew, age 6: “One of the people has freckles and so he finds somebody else who has freckles too.”
Mae, age 9: “No one is sure why it happens, but I heard it has something to do with how you smell….That’s why perfume and deodorant are so popular.”
Manuel, age 8: “I think you’re supposed to get shot with an arrow or something, but the rest of it isn’t supposed to be so painful.”
WHAT IS FALLING IN LOVE LIKE?
John, age 9: “Like an avalanche where you have to run for your life.”
Glenn, age 7: “If falling in love is anything like learning how to spell, I don’t want to do it. It takes too long.”
HOW IMPORTANT IS BEAUTY IN LOVE?
Anita, age 8: “If you want to be loved by somebody who isn’t already in your family, it doesn’t hurt to be beautiful.”
Brian, age 7: “It isn’t always just how you look. Look at me. I’m handsome like anything and I haven’t got anybody to marry me yet.”
Christine, age 9: “Beauty is skin deep. But how rich you are can last a long time.”
Pontius Pilate was born in Scotland.
WHY DO LOVERS HOLD HANDS?
Gavin, age 8: “They want to make sure their rings don’t fall off because they paid good money for them.”
John, age 9: “They are just practicing for when they might have to walk down the aisle someday and do the matchimony thing.”
WHAT’S YOUR PERSONAL OPINION ABOUT LOVE?
Jill, age 6: “I’m in favor of love as long as it doesn’t happen when Dinosaurs is on television.”
Floyd, age 9: “Love is foolish…but I still might try it sometime.”
Dave, age 8: “Love will find you, even if you are trying to hide from it. I been trying to hide from it since I was five, but the girls keep finding me.”
Regina, age 10: “I’m not rushing into being in love. I’m finding the fourth grade hard enough.”
WHAT’S A SUREFIRE WAY TO MAKE A PERSON FALL IN LOVE WITH YOU?
Del, age 6: “Tell them that you own a whole bunch of candy stores.”
Camille, age 9: “Shake your hips and hope for the best.”
Carey, age 7: “Yesterday I kissed a girl in a private place….We were behind a tree.”
REFLECTIONS ON THE NATURE OF LOVE
Greg, age 8: “Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good, too.”
***
“To love a thing means wanting it to live.”
—Confucius
A shark’s teeth are nearly as hard as steel.
McREVENGE!
Don’t let all that happy Ronald McDonald stuff fool you—from the beginning, McDonald’s has played hardball in the burger business. Not even the company’s namesakes, the McDonald brothers, were exempt. Here’s a classic revenge story on a sesame seed bun.
SETTING THE STAGE
In 1949, Dick and Mac McDonald opened a drive-in restaurant in San Bernardino, California. By 1954, it was so popular that a salesman named Ray Kroc made a deal to turn it into a national chain and pay the brothers a part of every dollar earned.
That’s how McDonald’s got started.
Six years later, Kroc offered to buy the brothers out for $1 million apiece. They said yes, but there was a misunderstanding: Kroc thought he was getting the original San Bernardino restaurant as part of the agreement; the McDonalds insisted it wasn’t part of the deal.
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
Kroc was furious. He had counted on the cash flow the restaurant would bring. “I closed the door to my office and paced up and down the floor calling the [McDonald brothers] every kind of son of a bitch there was,” Kroc recalled. “I hated their guts.” Privately, he told co-workers: “I’m not a vindictive man, but this time I’m going to get those sons of bitches.” According to John Love in McDonald’s Behind the Arches, that’s exactly what he did.
The moment the deal was completed, Kroc…hopped on a plane to Los Angeles, bought a piece of property [in San Bernardino] one block away from the brothers’ original fast-food drive-in—and ordered the construction of a brand-new McDonald’s store. It had only one purpose: to put the McDonald brothers’ drive-in out of business.
THE BIG M SI
NKS
The brothers had already been forced to take down their “McDonald’s” sign, because Kroc’s company now owned their trade name. They renamed it “The Big M,” but in every other way it was the same as it always had been. The problem was, Kroc’s restaurant also looked like the Big M…but his had the McDonald’s name. Customers were a little confused, but figured that the original restaurant had been moved; they took their business to the new McDonald’s. Sales at the Big M plummeted. In 1968, the McDonald brothers finally gave up. They sold their drive-in to a local restauranteur. But he couldn’t make it work either. In 1970, Kroc had his final revenge: the birthplace of the fast food industry closed for good.
Short people have fewer back problems than tall people do.
ANIMAL REVENGE
“An ice fisherman in Edwardsburg, Michigan, hauled a 4-pound beauty out of the lake, cleanly removed the hook from the fish’s mouth and placed it on the ice to re-bait his line. The thrashing fish flung itself in the air, locked its teeth on the fisherman’s leg and had to be pried loose by two men. The bite required a doctor’s attention.”
—Oops,
by Richard Smith
“In Missouri, Larry Lands was showing off a turkey he had shot and put in his trunk when the not-yet-dead bird started thrashing around and pulled the trigger of Lands’s gun, also in the trunk. Lands was shot in the leg. The turkeys are fighting back,’ said county sheriff Ron Skiles.”
—News from the Fringe,
by John Kohut & Roland Sweet
CONTINENTAL DRIFT
“In revenge for England’s closing of the Libyan embassy in London, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi ordered that England be deleted from all Libyan maps in the mid-1980s. In its place was put a new arm of the North Sea, bordered by Scotland and Wales.”
—More News of the Weird
The longest-surviving Civil War veteran died in 1959.
THE BIRTH OF “THE TONIGHT SHOW,” PART I
“The Tonight Show” is a television institution that’s been around longer than a lot of you Bathroom readers. It’s also the forerunner of most of today’s TV talk shows—and it’s got a fascinating history. So we’ve decided to include parts of it throughout the book. Tune it in one day at a time, the way you might watch the show.
GOODNIGHT, AMERICA
If you flip through the TV channels between 11:30 p.m. and 1:00 a.m., you’ll see a lot of talk shows.
But it wasn’t always that way. Before 1950, there weren’t many TV shows of any kind on that late. Networks ended their programming at 11:00 p.m., and many affiliate stations went off the air, too. If they didn’t, chances are they played old movies—bad ones. Hollywood, threatened by the inroads TV was making into their business, refused to give them anything good.
Bad movies and test patterns—no wonder hardly anyone was watching.
LEAVE IT TO WEAVER
In 1950, an NBC executive named Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, who’d successfully launched the “The Today Show” and “Your Show of Shows” (a 90-minute variety show starring comic Sid Caesar) turned his attention to late-evening programming.
Weaver (whose daughter, by the way, is actress Sigourney Weaver) figured that a program like “Your Show of Shows,” with vaudeville or Broadway review acts, would be successful between 11:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m.—especially since there was so little competition. He passed around a memo outlining his idea to other NBC executives. It would be called “Broadway Open House,” he wrote, and would be “zany, light-hearted…for people in the mood for staying up.…It would have the glitter and excitement of Broadway, but the backstage ambience of a party.” Through the medium of television, viewers could hobnob with the rich and famous.
At Old English weddings, guests threw shoes at the groom.
Some NBC executives thought it was the dumbest idea they’d ever heard.
“Late night?” one of them supposedly asked at a meeting. “Eleven thirty? At that hour, people are either sleeping or f——.”
“Most people aren’t that lucky,” another NBC exec said, to which Weaver replied: “Let’s do something for ‘most people.’”
HOST OF PROBLEMS
Finding the right host has always been a problem for talk shows—even from the beginning. “Your Show of Shows” had done well with a comedian for a host, and Weaver thought it would work again with “Broadway Open House.” His first choice was a night-club comic named Jan Murray…but Murray decided to emcee a TV game show instead.
Second choice was Don “Creesh” Hornsby, a cross between Robin Williams and PeeWee Herman. On his own L.A. show, he performed magic tricks, played the piano, ran around the stage shouting “Creesh! Creesh!,” and pulled brassieres out of women’s blouses. “His stuff was really wild,” Weaver remembered years later. “We reasoned, ‘What the hell, it’ll be late at night and who cares?’”
Creesh took the job, moved his family to New York…and then died suddenly the weekend before “Broadway Open House” was to premiere. NBC executives were shocked by his death, but weren’t completely unprepared: his act was so weird that they’d already thought about replacements in case he bombed.
“Broadway Open House” went on the air May 22,1950, hosted by Tex and Jinx, a husband-and-wife team with their own radio interview show. They were terrible. So Weaver quickly replaced them with comic actor Wally Cox (Mr. Peepers)…who lasted only a few days. Then he tried Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. They were better, but were so overbooked that they couldn’t work as regular hosts.
Weaver’s next choice was a comedian named Jerry Lester. He took the job…but would only agree to work three nights a week—Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays. So NBC hired Morey Amsterdam (who later became famous on “The Dick Van Dyke Show”) to fill in on Tuesdays and Thursdays. A young Neil Simon was hired as a writer.
Educational toy: The Mongols taught their children to ride horses by starting them out on goats.
KEEPING ABREAST
Today, the “sidekick” is a standard part of late-night talk shows. But in 1950, it was a new idea. Few people recall that the first side-kick was Dagmar, a beautiful blonde woman with huge breasts.
Dagmar had an even smaller job on the show than Ed McMahon had on “The Tonight Show”—all she had to do was look stupid on camera. She didn’t even talk. “For the first two or three months,” Robert Metz writes in The Tonight Show, “Dagmar sat on a stool right in front of the band with an off-the-shoulder dress and an enormous overhang that may have influenced the wit who dubbed television the boob tube. Dagmar seemed to fit that phrase on both counts. She was a stereotypical dumb blonde. A large sign under the stool read, ‘Girl Singer,’ but she never opened her mouth and never sang.”
BOOM…AND BUST
“Broadway Open House” quickly built a following. Within two months, Jerry and Dagmar were national celebrities. When the show made a trip to Cleveland, 45,000 people turned out to watch the taping, paying $2.50 apiece for the privilege.
But NBC still had problems with the show: Morey Amsterdam’s performance didn’t measure up to Lester’s, and in November 1950, he quit. Lester still refused to work more than three days a week, so NBC had to find someone to fill in on the other days. They tried a number of young comics, but none of them caught on.
Then Lester and Dagmar—who turned out to have true comic talent—began feuding. The fight got so bad that Lester added a second, less threatening blonde named Agathon to the show to help with the magic tricks.
“Open House” became increasingly stale. Critics who’d lauded it a few months before started attacking it. Finally, in May 1951, Lester quit. The show limped along for three more months as NBC searched frantically for another host…but they never found one. It went off the air on August 23, 1951. Three more years would pass before NBC would attempt another late-night show.
That’s just the beginning. See page 133 for Part II.
Clams can live as long as 150 years.
CURSES!
Even if yo
u’re not superstitious, it’s hard to resist tales of “cursed” ships, tombs, and so on. Who knows—maybe there’s something to them. Here are some of our favorites.
THE CURSE OF JAMES DEAN’S PORSCHE
Curse: Disaster may be ahead for anyone connected with James Dean’s “death car.” It seems to attack people at random.
Origin: In 1955, Dean smashed his red Porsche into a another car and was killed. The wreckage was bought by George Barris, a friend of Dean’s (and the man who customized cars like the Munsters’ coffin-mobile for Hollywood). But as one writer put it, “the car proved deadly even after it was dismantled.” Barris noticed weird things happening immediately.
Among Its Victims:
• The car slipped while being unloaded from the truck that delivered it to Barris, and broke a mechanic’s legs.
• Barris put its engine into a race car. It crashed in the race, killing the driver. A second car in the same race was equipped with the Porsche’s drive shaft—it overturned and injured its driver.
• The shell of the Porsche was being used in a Highway Safety display in San Francisco. It fell off its pedestal and broke a teenager’s hip. Later, a truck carrying the display to another demonstration was involved in an accident. “The truck driver,” says one account, “was thrown out of the cab of the truck and killed when the Porsche shell rolled off the back of the truck and crushed him”
Status: The Porsche finally vanished in 1960, while on a train en route to Los Angeles.
THE PRESIDENTIAL DEATH CYCLE
Curse: Between 1840 and 1960, every U.S. president elected in a year ending in a zero either died in office of natural causes or was assassinated. By contrast: Since 1840, of the 29 presidents who were not elected in the 20-year cycle, only one has died in office and not one has been assassinated.
Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader Page 5