“You won’t get any doubletalk from me. I’m either for something or against it.”
“This is your fight. I am only waking you up to the fact that this is your fight. You better get out and help me win this fight, or you’re going to be the loser, not I.”
“I hope you will join me in my crusade to keep the country from going to the dogs.”
“Some of the presidents were great, and some weren’t. I can say that because I wasn’t one of the great presidents, but I had a good time trying.”
“I don’t believe in anti-anything. A man has to have a program; you have to be for something, otherwise you will never get anywhere.”
“My favorite animal is the mule. He has more sense than a horse. He knows when to stop eating—and when to stop working.”
There were 16 contestants in the 1996 Arkansas Mosquito Cook-Off.
LET’S ROCK!
We’ll bet you didn’t know your favorite rock singers could talk, too. Here’s some of the profound things they have to say, from The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Quote Book, by Merrit Malloy.
“I’d rather have ten years of super-hypermost than live to be seventy by sitting in some goddamn chair watching TV.”
—Janis Joplin
“When you’re as rich as I am, you don’t have to be political.”
—Sting
“People used to throw rocks at me for my clothes. Now they wanna know where I buy them.”
—Cyndi Lauper
“I’d rather be dead than singing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m forty-five.”
—Mick Jagger
“People have this obsession: They want you to be like you were in 1969. They want you to, because otherwise their youth goes with you, you know?”
—Mick Jagger
“Nobody loves me but my mother, and she could be jivin’, too.”
—B. B. King
“Rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.”
—Frank Zappa
“There are no more political statements. The only thing rock fans have in common is their music.”
—Bob Pittman,
Vice President, MTV
“Some American kid recognized who I was and he says, ‘Your dad eats cow’s heads/ My daughter says, ‘You don’t, Daddy. I’ve never seen you eat a cow’s head.’ I thought that was kind of sweet.”
—Ozzy Osbourne
“I would think nothing of tipping over a table with a whole long spread on it just because there was turkey roll on the table and I had explicitly said, ‘No turkey roll.’”
—Steven Tyler,
Aerosmith
“Mainly, I helped wipe out the sixties.”
—Iggy Pop
Twenty thousand silver teaspoons are stolen from the Washington, D.C., Hilton each year.
OH, FRANKIE!
You might be surprised at the role that trickery played in helping an up-and-coming singer get the “lucky break” he needed.
BACKGROUND
In 1942 a young singer named Frank Sinatra gave a performance at New York’s Paramount Theater. Until then, his career had gotten little attention. But that night was different—Sinatra played to a packed house and gave such a powerful performance that about 30 bobby-soxers passed out and had to be taken away in an ambulance. The publicity that the incident generated helped catapult Sinatra to superstardom in less than a year
BEHIND THE SCENES
The decisive moment in Sinatra’s career actually came a few weeks before the Paramount show, when his press agent, George Evans, saw a teenage girl throw a rose on stage while Sinatra was singing. “I figured if I could pack the theater with a bunch of girls screaming, ‘Oh, Frankie,’ I’d really have something,” he recounted later.
So Evans paid a dozen teenage girls $5 each to sit in the front rows during the performance and swoon. Rehearsing with them in the basement of the Paramount, he taught some of them to faint in the aisles during the slow songs, and taught others to scream ‘Oh, Daddy,’ when Sinatra sang “Embraceable You.” He made sure the theater was full by giving away free passes to schoolkids on vacation. He even rented the ambulance that waited in front of the theater to take the girls away.
MASS HYSTERIA
Evans paid only 12 girls, but in a classic moment of mass psychosis, hundreds of others got caught up in the “excitement.” About 20 girls who hadn’t been paid to pass out fainted…and the whole crowd went crazy. The next time he played the Paramount, recalls a promoter, “they threw more than roses. They threw their panties and their brassieres. They went nuts, absolutely nuts.” Sinatramania was born. Ol’ Blue Eyes went on to become the most popular singer of his generation. But Evans wasn’t around to enjoy it. Sinatra fired him a few years later in a dispute over money.
Experts say: If you don’t remove an avocado’s pit, it won’t turn black, even when you peel it.
WHAT HAPPENED AT ROSWELL?
The “incident at Roswell” is probably the biggest UFO story in history. Was it a military balloon…or an alien spacecraft? You be the judge…
THE FIRST FLYING SAUCERS
In 1947, a U.S. Forest Service pilot named Kenneth Arnold was flying over the Cascade Mountains in Washington State in search of a missing plane when he spotted what he claimed were nine “disc-shaped craft.” He calculated them to be moving at speeds of 1,200 miles per hour, far faster than any human-built aircraft of the 1940s could manage.
When he talked to reporters after the flight, Arnold said the crafts moved “like a saucer skipping over water,” and a newspaper editor, hearing the description, called the objects “flying saucers.” Thus, the expression “flying saucer” entered the English language, and a UFO craze much like the one that followed Orson Welles’s 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds swept the country. “Almost instantly,” Dava Sobel writes in his article The Truth About Roswell, “believable witnesses from other states and several countries reported similar sightings, enlivening wire-service dispatches for days.”
THE ROSWELL DISCOVERY
It was in this atmosphere that William “Mac” Brazel made an unusual discovery. On July 8, 1947, while riding across his ranch 26 miles outside of Roswell, New Mexico, he came across some mysterious wreckage—sticks, foil paper, tape, and other debris. Brazel had never seen anything like it, but UFOs were on his mind. He’d read about Arnold’s sighting in the newspaper and had heard about a national contest offering $3,000 to anyone who recovered a flying saucer. He wondered if he’d stumbled across just the kind of evidence the contest organizers were looking for.
Brazel gathered a few pieces of the stuff and showed it to his neighbors, Floyd and Loretta Proctor. The Proctors didn’t know what it was, either. And neither did George Wilcox, the county sheriff. So Brazel contacted officials at the nearby Roswell Army Air Force base to see if they could help.
Charles Darwin’s cousin invented the IQ test.
The next day, an Army Intelligence Officer named Jesse Marcel went out to Brazel’s ranch to have a look. He was as baffled as everyone else. “I saw…small bits of metal,” he recalled to reporters years later, “but mostly we found some material that’s hard to describe.” Some of it “looked very much like parchment” and some of it consisted of square sticks as much as four feet long. Much was metallic.
The stuff was also surprisingly light—Brazel later estimated that all the scraps together didn’t weigh more than five pounds. Marcel and his assistant had no trouble loading all the debris into their cars and driving it back to the Roswell base. The next day, Marcel took it to another base, in Fort Worth, Texas, where it was examined further.
SUSPICIOUS FACTS
Was the Wreckage from Outer Space?
• Brazel and the Proctors examined some of the debris before surrendering it to the military. Although it seemed flimsy at first, it was extremely resilient. “We tried to burn it, but it wouldn’t ignite,” Loretta recalls. “We tried to cut it
and scrape at it, but a knife wouldn’t touch it….It looked like wood or plastic, but back then we didn’t have plastic. Back then, we figured it doesn’t look like a weather balloon. I don’t think it was something from this Earth.”
The Military’s About-Face
• The morning after the military took possession of the wreckage, the media relations officer at Roswell hand-delivered a news release to the two radio stations and newspapers in town. The release stated that the object found in Brazel’s field was a “flying disc,” which in the 1940s was synonymous with “flying saucer.” It was the first time in history that the U.S. military had ever made such a claim.
• A few hours later, though, the military changed its story: It issued a new press release claiming that the wreckage was that of a weather balloon carrying a radar target, not a “flying disc.” But it was too late—the newspaper deadline had already passed. They ran the first news release on the front page, under the headline
AIR FORCE CAPTURES FLYING SAUCER
ON RANCH IN ROSWELL REGION
Kangaroos are lactose-intolerant.
Other newspapers picked up the story and ran it as well; within 24 hours, news of the military’s “capture” spread around the globe.
• Interest in the story was so great that the next day, Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey, commander of the U.S. Eighth Air Force, had to hold a press conference in Fort Worth in which he again stated that the recovered object was only a weather balloon and a radar target that was suspended from it. He even displayed the wreckage for reporters and allowed them to photograph it.
Mr. Brazel’s Unusual Behavior
• Mac Brazel refused to talk about the incident for the rest of his life, even with members of his immediate family, except to say that “whatever the wreckage was, it wasn’t any type of balloon.” Why the silence? His son Bill explains: “The Air Force asked him to take an oath that he wouldn’t tell anybody in detail about it. My dad was such a guy that he went to his grave and he never told anyone.”
• Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt, authors of UFO Crash at Roswell, claim that shortly after Brazel made his famous discovery, “His neighbors noticed a change in his lifestyle….He suddenly seemed to have more money….When he returned, he drove a new pickup truck…he also had the money to buy a new house in Tularosa, New Mexico, and a meat locker in Las Cruces.” Randle and Schmitt believe the military may have paid Brazel for his silence.
TRUST ME
Today, if the government announced it had captured a UFO—even if it was mistaken—and tried to change its story a few hours later by claiming it was really a weather balloon, nobody would buy it. But people were more trusting in the years just following World War II. Amazingly, the story died away. As Dava Sobel writes:
The Army’s announcement of the “weather balloon” explanation ended the flying saucer excitement. All mention of the craft dropped from the newspapers, from military records, from the national consciousness, and even from the talk of the town in Roswell.
Even the Roswell Daily Record—which broke the story in the first place—was satisfied with the military’s explanation. A few days later, it ran a headline that was even bigger than the first one:
GENERAL RAMEY EMPTIES ROSWELL SAUCER
And that was the end of it,…or was it? See page 401 for more.
In the 1800s, you could buy ketchup flavored with lobster, walnuts, oysters, or anchovies.
LEGENDARY TV FLOPS
There are plenty of bombs in TV history, but these three shows are legends.
MELBA.
A CBS sitcom starring singer Melba Moore as Melba Patterson, a single mother who ran “the Manhattan Visitors’ Center.” Premiered as a mid-season replacement on January 28, 1986—the day the Challenger space shuttle exploded. Drew the worst ratings of the 1985-86 season and was cancelled immediately. In August, CBS aired the other episodes it had commissioned. The night of its return was CBS’s lowest-rated prime-time evening in the network’s history.
TURN ON!
A half-hour of skits and jokes that was supposed to be “the second coming of ‘Laugh-In’.” It premiered on February 5, 1969, and turned out to be “just a bunch of stupid sex jokes.” (The longest skit had two actors making faces at each other for several minutes while the word SEX flashed on screen.) Affiliates and sponsors hated it so much that it was cancelled the next day. In fact, the Denver ABC affiliate cancelled it halfway through the premiere, with the message: “The remainder of this show won’t be seen.” How bad was “Turn On!”? We can only speculate. The producers’ settlement with the networks and sponsors stipulates that the “tapes would be locked up and never shown again.”
YOU’RE IN THE PICTURE.
A game show hosted by Jackie Gleason. Four celebrity panelists sat in back of a 7′x10′ picture frame and stuck their heads through porthole cutouts—making them part of a picture they couldn’t see. With clues from Gleason, they tried to guess what the picture was. It debuted January 21, 1961. “Viewers who tuned into the show’s third broadcast,” writes Maxene Fabe in Game Shows, “saw only a bare stage containing an armchair in which Gleason sat. ‘1 apologize for insulting your intelligence,’ he told his astonished viewers. ‘From now on I promise to stick to comedy.’” The program was replaced the following week with “The Jackie Gleason Show.”
Why are boxing rings called rings? Because they used to be round.
MORE STRANGE LAWSUITS
More bizarre lawsuits from contemporary news reports.
THE PLAINTIFF: William H. Folwell, Episcopal bishop of Central Florida
THE DEFENDANT: U.S. government
THE LAWSUIT: The bishop hurt his knee while playing tennis at the Naval Training Center. He claimed the injury “prevented him from genuflecting,” and sued for $200,000. The Feds counter-sued, saying the holy man had been sneaking onto the tennis courts and had no right to be there in the first place. They said he owed them $5,200 for use of the courts over the last five years.
THE VERDICT: Case dismissed. Neither side got any cash.
THE PLAINTIFF: Continental Airlines
THE DEFENDANT: Deborah Loeding, former wife of Continental pilot William Loeding
THE LAWSUIT: In 1994 William Loeding took a random drug test administered by the airline. Marijuana was detected, and Loeding was fired—although he swore he’d never gone near the stuff. He filed grievance after grievance with his union—and finally, during his third hearing, his ex-wife admitted she was responsible. To vent her anger at her ex-husband, she’d put pot in a loaf of rye bread she baked for him. Continental sued her for endangering passengers and causing her ex-hubby “significant distress in his personal and professional life.”
THE VERDICT: Pending.
THE PLAINTIFF: Paul and Nancy Marshall, baseball fans
THE DEFENDANTS: San Diego Padres baseball team
THE LAWSUIT: In 1993, in a cost-cutting move, the Padres began trading high-salaried star players to other teams. When former batting champ Gary Sheffield was traded, the Marshalls filed suit charging the Padres with deceiving season ticket holders. (The team had sent out a letter saying players like Sheffield and Fred McGriff, an all-star first-baseman, “create the core of an excellent team for years to come.”) The Marshalls asked for punitive damages and a promise that the Padres wouldn’t trade McGriff.
Alexander Graham Bell’s father-in-law invented the burglar alarm.
THE VERDICT: Settled out of court. The Padres agreed to a more liberal ticket refund policy, and the Marshalls’ suit was dropped. McGriff was traded to the Atlanta Braves five days later.
THE PLAINTIFF: James Houston
THE DEFENDANT: Northern Arizona University
THE LAWSUIT: According to news reports, Houston “is suing his alma mater because he believes that getting a doctorate was too easy.” He is asking for $1 million.
THE VERDICT: Pending.
THE PLAINTIFF: Ethyln Boese, of Portland, Oregon
THE DEFENDANT
: Restlawn Funeral Home
THE LAWSUIT: On July 25, 1996, a closed-casket funeral was held for Boese’s husband, James. When it was over, Ethyln asked for a last look at the man she’d been married to for 50 years. When the casket was opened, she saw a stranger—in her husband’s suit. At first, the funeral director wouldn’t believe it was the wrong body. Finally he did, and found the right one. The family quickly got a different suit for the corpse, held a new funeral, and filed a lawsuit for $500,000 for “emotional distress.”
THE VERDICT: Unknown
THE PLAINTIFF: Katie Rose Sawyer, age 11
THE DEFENDANT: Cody Finch, age 10
THE LAWSUIT: Fifth-graders Sawyer and Finch were “married” on the school playground in the fall of 1996. Then a few months later, they were “divorced” (another fifth-grader wrote up “Divores” papers). Katie said Cody kept bothering her, so she sued him under the New Mexico Family Violence Protection Act. “My mom told me, ‘Don’t get married again until you’re an adult,’” Katie told reporters.
THE VERDICT: Unknown.
In a single day, a pair of termites can produce as many as 30,000 offspring.
AS SEEN ON TV!
We’ve all seen them—those cheesy TV ads for products no one needs, but millions of people buy. You’ve probably forgotten all about them. Well, heh-heh, we’re here to remind you about…
GLH#9: Hair-in-a-can from the infamous Ron Popeil (GLH stands for “great looking hair.”) A spray can of some sort of powdered pigment that sticks to your head. Just hold a few inches from your bald spot and spray! Comes in nine colors and according to the free brochure, you can use it on your dog!
THE CLAPPER: “Clap on, clap off!” From Joseph Industries, makers of the Chia Pet. “Clap twice and a lamp goes on, clap twice and it goes off. Only $19.95!”
INSIDE THE EGGSHELL SCRAMBLER: A piece of plastic with a curved needle attached. Impale the egg on the needle and it activates a motor. The needle spins inside the shell and scrambles the egg! “Outperforms a fork or whisk in every way! Scrambles the yolk and white of an egg right inside the shell in less than five seconds! You’ll use it a lot and every time you do, you’ll save washing a bowl and fork!”
Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader Page 28