My Favorite Martian
“You can’t let a job stifle your mind, buddy boy. You’ve got to keep yourself free for cultural pursuits, you know....Good reading, good music...bowling.”
—Mike Stone,
The Streets of
San Francisco
Famous but forgotten superstition: People with dimpled chins never commit murder.
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: Joe “Mule” Sprinz, a professional baseball player from 1922 to 1948
THE HEADLINE: “Ouch! Blimp Ball Takes Bad Bounce”
WHAT HAPPENED: In 1939, Sprinz, 37-year-old catcher for the San Francisco Seals, caught five baseballs dropped from the Tower of the Sun (450 feet) at the San Francisco World’s Fair. The Seals’ publicity agent was impressed and asked Sprinz if he’d catch a ball dropped 1,200 feet from a Goodyear Blimp, which would break the world record of 555 feet, 5 inches. “You’ll become famous!” the agent promised.
Two teammates stood alongside Sprinz as the first baseball was dropped, but when they saw it break a bleacher seat...and then saw the second ball “bury itself in the ground,” they backed off and let him make the third attempt by himself. “So the third one came down and I saw that one all the way. But nobody told me how fast it would be coming down,” Sprinz later recalled. Traveling at a speed of 150 miles per hour, the ball bounced off Sprinz’s glove and slammed into his face just below the nose, smashing his upper jaw, tearing his lips, and knocking out four teeth.
THE AFTERMATH: Sprinz spent three months in the hospital (and suffered headaches for more than five years), but recovered fully and continued his baseball career, retiring in 1948. He never made it into the Hall of Fame...but did earn a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for the highest baseball catch “ever attempted.” Sprinz passed away in January 1994 at the age of 91.
THE STARS: Officer Bob Geary of the San Francisco Police Department and his sidekick, Officer Brendan O’Smarty
THE HEADLINE: “Ventriloquist Vindicated in Vote”
WHAT HAPPENED: In 1992, Geary, an amateur ventriloquist, began taking “Officer Brendan O’Smarty”—a dummy dressed as a police officer—on his rounds in the city’s North Beach area.
Birds do fly south for the winter, but not to get warm. They do it for food.
When the popular O’Smarty started to get some publicity, Geary’s captain told him to leave the dummy at home; he said it made the department “look stupid.”
Geary not only refused, he used $10,000 of his own money to finance an “initiative” that put the “O’Smarty issue” on the ballot in San Francisco’s 1993 municipal elections. The result: Voters overwhelmingly supported O’Smarty.
THE AFTERMATH: The pro-dummy election was reported in newspapers all over the country. O’Smarty kept his “job”...and Geary made his money back when he sold the movie rights to his story.
THE STAR: Dallas Malloy, a 16-year-old girl from Bellingham, Washington
THE HEADLINE: “Woman TKOs Boxing Association in Court ...and Opponent in Ring”
WHAT HAPPENED: In 1992, Malloy set out on an amateur boxing career...but learned that the U.S. Amateur Boxing Association had a bylaw banning females from boxing in sanctioned bouts. She contacted the ACLU and together they sued, claiming that the bylaw violated Washington State’s antidiscrimination laws.
Malloy won the suit, and on October 30, 1993, she squared off in the ring against 21-year-old Heather Poyner. A crowd of about 1,200 turned out to watch Malloy batter Poyner for three two-minute rounds. Malloy won in a unanimous decision. “It was great to get in the ring,” she told reporters afterward. “The only thing I would change is that I would knock her out the next time. I really wanted to knock her out.”
THE AFTERMATH: Malloy abandoned her career two months later. “After [the fight] I kind of lost interest,” she told the Associated Press. Her boxing career had lasted 14 months.
THE STAR: Andrew Martinez, a University of California, Berkeley, college sophomore
At one point, 74% of Pepsi drinkers said they’d switch to Coke “if it contained oat bran.”
THE HEADLINE: “No Nudes Is Good Nudes? Naked Guy Nixed”
WHAT HAPPENED: In September 1992, Martinez began attending classes completely in the buff, calling his nudity a form of free speech. The university did nothing until they received numerous complaints from students and employees.
But what could they do? There weren’t any university regulations banning public nudity, so the school updated its student conduct regulations to forbid indecent exposure, public nakedness, and “sexually offensive conduct.” Martinez was then suspended for two weeks when he gave a nude interview to a (clothed) reporter. When he showed up nude at an administrative hearing to protest the charges, he was permanently expelled from school for failing to wear “proper attire.” “I didn’t think this was so controversial,” Martinez told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I was surprised they gave me the boot.”
THE AFTERMATH: Martinez became a mini-celebrity, featured in magazine and newspaper stories all over the world and appearing on several TV talk shows. His expulsion didn’t stop him from waging his lone crusade. In March 1993, he was arrested near the campus for distributing free beer to the homeless while shouting the slogan, “Drink for the Revolution.” He was, course, nude, and was quickly arrested on suspicion of drinking in public, for being a minor in possession of alcohol, and for resisting an officer.
THE STAR: Charlie Shaw, owner of a London, Ohio, deli shop
THE HEADLINE: “Clinton Burger Bites Back”
WHAT HAPPENED: When President Bill Clinton visited Shaw’s deli in February 1994, Shaw served him a “Clinton Burger”—a beef pattie with bacon, cheese, mushrooms, onions, and a secret “Clinton sauce.” Shaw and his Clinton Burger made headlines across the nation.
THE AFTERMATH: Unfortunately for Shaw, he also caught the attention of state government officials. They discovered he was operating his business while collecting disability benefits from a previous job-injury claim, a violation of state law. Authorities also discovered that he didn’t have a food-service permit—which is also illegal. He was indicted on state fraud charges.
Survey result: Most males blame their partner after bad sex; most females blame themselves.
MAMA MIA!
Here’s a look at five famous American mothers. You’ll never guess who gave Uncle John the idea for this page.
ELIZABETH FOSTER GOOSE
Known as: Mother Goose
Background: In the 1750s, Boston printer Thomas Fleet heard his mother-in-law, Elizabeth Goose, singing nursery rhymes to her grandson—including “Hickory Dickory Dock,” “Humpty Dumpty,” and “Little Bo-peep.” Fleet began writing them down, and in 1765 published them in a book called Mother Goose’s Melodies for Children.
MARY HARRIS JONES
Known as: Mother Jones
Background: Mary Harris was a schoolteacher in Monroe, Michigan, in the 1850s. She married George Jones in 1861, moved to Chicago, and started a dressmaking business. But the great Chicago fire of 1871 wiped her out. Soon afterward she became active in the U.S. labor movement, and for the next 50 years traveled all over the country organizing workers in steel mills, railroads, coal mines, and the garment industry. She remained an active organizer until shortly before her death in 1930 at the age of 100.
FREDERIKA MANDELBAUM
Known as: “Marm” Mandelbaum (aka “Ma Crime”)
Background: She’s almost forgotten now, but Frederika Mandelbaum was one of the earliest, most famous, and most successful organized crime figures in American history. She was nicknamed “Marm,” but if she were alive today, she might be known as “the Godmother.” The Encyclopedia of American Crime describes her as “the leading criminal
in America during the latter part of the 19th century.”
Marm got her start as the wife of an honest dry goods store owner in New York City. She eventually took over the business and began fencing stolen property. Operating from warehouses scattered all over town, Mandelbaum bought and sold stolen property from heists up and down the East Coast. In little more than a decade she built her enterprise into one of the largest criminal organizations in the city’s history, an empire she kept afloat by paying tens of thousands of dollars in bribes to the police. She retained Howe and Hummel, one of New York’s most prestigious criminal law firms, to keep her and her friends out of jail.
Just a kid at heart: George Washington loved to play marbles.
She was finally caught in possession of stolen property that had been secretly marked by Pinkerton detectives (the New York D.A. thought the police were too corrupt to be trusted for the job) and was thrown in jail. A reporter later described what the detectives found when they stormed Marm’s house to put her under arrest:
It did not seem possible that so much wealth could be assembled in one spot. There seemed to be enough clothes to supply an army. There were trunks filled with precious gems and silverware. Antique furniture was stacked against a wall and bars of gold from melted jewelry settings were stacked under newspapers.
Mandelbaum and her son Julius posted $21,000 in bail the next day...and escaped to Canada with an estimated $1 million in cash. She died a free, very wealthy woman 10 years later at the age of 76.
ANNA WHISTLER
Known as: Whistler’s Mother
Background: In October 1871, James Whistler decided to paint a portrait of his mother. “I want you to stand for a picture,” he said. Mrs. Whistler agreed. “I stood bravely two or three days—I stood still as a statue!” she told a friend. But in the end she was too frail to stand for the long hours the portrait required. So Whistler painted her sitting down instead. Today the painting, officially called Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother, is the 2nd most recognizable portrait in the world...after the Mona Lisa.
KATE BARKER
Known as: “Ma” Barker
Background: She was the mother of Freddy, Herman, Lloyd, and “Doc”—“the Barker Brothers,” four of the most famous gangsters of the 1930s. She not only encouraged her boys to become criminals, she actually masterminded many of their bank heists, post-office robberies, and other crimes—including the kidnapping and $100,000 ransom of Brewery magnate William A. Hamm, Jr. in 1933. She and Freddy were killed in a shootout with the FBI at their Florida hideout in 1935.
Just like chocolate today: It was a sin to eat woodpeckers in ancient Rome.
THE PENCIL
Ever wonder how the pencil got its lead? We did too.
IS THERE REALLY LEAD IN A PENCIL?
Not anymore. The ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians used small lead disks for drawing guidelines on papyrus before writing with brushes and ink, and artists in Europe used metallic rods of lead, silver, and zinc to make very light drawings centuries ago. But all that changed in 1564, when a graphite deposit was unearthed in Borrowdlae, England.
Using graphite for writing wasn’t new; the Aztecs did it long before the arrival of Columbus. But it was new to the Europeans. They discovered that the soft graphite—a form of carbon—made rich, dark lines. They began carving pointed “marking stones” out of it and using the stones to write with.
The problem was that the stones marked the writer’s hands as much as the paper. Eventually, people figured out that they could wrap a string around the stick to keep their hands clean, unwinding the string as the graphite wore down. That was the first version of the modern pencil.
HOW THEY GET THE “LEAD” INTO THE PENCIL
Now, of course, the graphite comes in a wood casing. But how does it get in there?
• First the graphite is ground up and mixed with fine clay. The more clay added, the harder the lead.
• Then the mixture is forced through an “extruder” to make a long, thin rod.
• The rod is fired at a temperature of 2200° F to harden it and then treated with wax for smooth writing.
• The wood is sawed into small boards that are the length of one pencil, the width of seven pencils, and the thickness of half a pencil.
• Seven tiny grooves are cut lengthwise. Then the lead is laid into each of them, and an identical board is glued on top. A machine cuts the boards into seven individual pencils.
• Last step: They’re painted with nontoxic paint.
An adult crocodile exerts a force of 1,540 lbs. between its jaws. Humans exert 40 to 80 lbs.
THE FINGERPRINT FILE
It seems like law enforcement agencies have been catching criminals using fingerprints for ages...but actually the practice is less than a century old. Here’s a little background on one of the most important crimefighting techniques of the 20th century.
WHERE THERE’S A WILL...
In 1903 a convicted criminal named Will West was being processed for entry into Leavenworth penitentiary when prison officials realized that they already had a man matching his name and description at the prison. After double-checking their records (including a photograph of the inmate), they confirmed that the man being processed was the same Will West who was supposedly already behind bars. What was he doing on the outside?
Prison officials assumed he had escaped without anyone noticing ... until they checked Will West’s cell and found he was still in it. The men looked like twins.
At the time, the standard method for criminal identification was the “Bertillon System,” a system based on physical descriptions and anatomical measurements. Robert Liston describes the theory behind it in his book, Great Detectives:
If one measurement was taken of a man, his height, for example, the chance of another man having exactly the same height was four to one. If a second measurement was added, his head circumference, say, the chances increased to 16 to 1. If eleven meausurements were taken, the odds against a duplication were 4,191,304 to 1. If fourteen measurements were kept, the odds were 286,435,456 to 1.
It seemed foolproof. But now the Wests had proved it fallible. They resembled each other so closely that the system concluded they were the same individual.
WHAT HAPPENED
Left with no alternative, prison officials turned to a new system being developed by England’s Scotland Yard. They fingerprinted the men and discovered that, although the men appeared to be identical, their fingerprints had almost nothing in common.
Yum yum! Americans eat 500 million boxes of Jell-O every year.
FINGERPRINT HISTORY
In 1858 William Herschel, an English civil servant working in India, began collecting his friends’ fingerprints as a hobby. Carefully studying the prints over the years, he made two discoveries: No two fingerprints were the same, and each subject’s fingerprints remained identical throughout their life. He brought his hobby to work with him: Put in charge of paying out pensions to Indian subjects, Herschel—a bigot who thought all Indians looked alike—required each Indian to place their thumbprint on the payroll next to their signature. He figured he could more easily spot fraudulent claimants if he took their fingerprints.
In 1880 Dr. Henry Faulds, a Scottish missionary in Japan, published an article describing how the Japanese had been signing legal documents with their fingerprints for generations. He reported another important discovery: Even when their fingers were perfectly clean, people left fingerprints on every surface they touched. Faulds called on British law enforcement agencies to make fingerprint searches a standard part of police investigations; Scotland Yard finally took his advice in 1901.
FINGERPRINT FACTS
• The FBI didn’t begin fingerprinting until the 1920s; but by the late 1980s it had more than 140 million sets of prints on file, including those of every government employee and member of the military. An estimated 2,700 criminals per month are identified using the FBI’s files.
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br /> • It is possible to have your fingerprints removed, but it’s painful and pretty pointless. Even if you do burn or slice off your prints, the scars that are left behind are as unique as the prints they replaced. There is no known case of a criminal successfully concealing his identity by mutilating their fingertips.
• It’s just about impossible to get a set of fingerprints from a handgun; experts place the odds as low as 1 in 1,000. All that stuff you see in movies about cops picking up guns by inserting a pencil under a trigger guard are hooey—there simply aren’t enough smooth, flat surfaces on most handguns to get a good print.
• No one fingerprint is necessarily unique; scientists figure there’s a 1 in 2 quadrillion (about 1 million times the Earth’s population) chance that someone on Earth has the same fingerprint you do.
Give that man a log! Mickey Rooney’s real name is Joe Yule, Jr.
DEMOCRACY
IN ACTION
“It’s the worst form of government,” said Mark Twain, “except for every other form of government.” Or something like that. Or maybe it wasn’t Twain. In any case, it was a good point. So here’s the BRI election news.
ABSENTEE BALLOTS
“What if they held an election and no one voted? It happened in Centerville, Miss....Denny James looked like a sure thing for the board of aldermen—he was the only candidate. But no one voted for him. State law says a candidate must get at least one vote before being declared the winner of an election.
“The moral of the story: Don’t take anything for granted. Everyone in town assumed the neighbors would be voting. When the polls closed early, even James—who worked late that day—was shut out. But another election was held, and James got 45 votes.”
—Parade magazine, January 2, 1994
MAKING AN ASS OF VOTERS
In 1936, Kenneth Simmons, mayor of Milton, Washington, placed a candidate named Boston Curtis on the ballot for the Republican precinct committee. Curtis ran as a “dark horse”...and although he gave no speeches and made no promises, he won.
Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader Page 52