Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  …THEY WILL COME

  Marta tracked down the town manager and talked him into renting her the hall for $45 a month. Six months later, on February 10, 1968, she gave her first daily performance. There were 12 people in the audience, all of them locals curious to see what the peculiar lady from New York was up to. Occasionally, curious tourists would wander in. Sometimes no one was there at all. Marta always performed no matter what. One night she had just begun her performance to an empty house when four people came in. They sat quietly, applauded politely at the curtain call, and left. Becket thought nothing of it until a few months later, when an article about her appeared in National Geographic magazine. After that, audiences grew. Locals kept coming back; at first they came to gawk and laugh, but left strangely moved by the sight of this intense woman following her muse wherever it led her. Word spread, and soon tour buses were making the newly named Amargosa Opera House a stop on their itineraries. Celebrities would pop over from nearby Las Vegas (comedian Red Skelton was so charmed that he visited four times).

  Hot spot: More than 90% of Egypt is desert.

  PAINT THE WALLS

  Part of the ongoing attraction of the Amargosa is the whimsical, brilliantly colored murals Becket has painted on its walls. Starting in July 1968, driven partly by her loneliness at playing to such small audiences, Marta spent four years covering the walls with a permanent audience. A king and queen hold court in the royal box. Bullfighters sit next to 17th-century Spanish nobility. Monks and nuns stare disapprovingly at the garish prostitutes leering from the opposite wall. The central dome has 16 women playing musical instruments beneath a flight of doves, and there are jugglers, dancing cherubs, dowdy matrons, and little children—whatever took Marta’s fancy. The result is an arts institution unlike any other. The town of Death Valley Junction (now owned by the Amargosa Opera House) was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.

  CURTAIN CALL

  Becket’s husband wasn’t as dedicated to the venture—he left in 1983. But Becket soldiered on, assisted by Tom Willett, who started out as her stage manager and became her emcee and partner. Willett died in 2005, but Becket has no intention of retiring. Although age has forced her to cut back the number of performances she gives each week (she only performs on weekends now) she still begins promptly at 8:15 p.m.

  “I am grateful,” she says, “to have found the place where I can fulfill my dreams and share them with the passing scene…for as long as I can.”

  First animated cartoon character: Gertie the Trained Dinosaur (1910).

  IT’S RADIOACTIVE!

  Look around your house. Feeling all safe and comfy? Now check out this list of common household RADIOACTIVE items. It’s enough to make your hair glow green.

  Item: Smoke detectors

  Radioactive Element: Americium-241

  Explanation: Americium is used to ionize the air between two electrically charged plates inside a smoke detector, causing a current to flow between them. When smoke enters the detector, it blocks the americium particles, lowering the electrical current between the two plates and setting off the alarm. Though the radiation is safely contained inside the smoke detector, radiation levels near the americium element can be quite high.

  Item: Glow-in-the-dark clock hands

  Radioactive Element: Tritium

  Explanation: At one time, radium was painted on watch and clock dials to make them glow in the dark. Many of the workers who painted the radium onto the clock parts contracted radiation poisoning because they would set the tips of their brushes by licking them. (Today we know that’s not a good idea.) Radium was later replaced by tritium, which emits radiation, but not enough to penetrate the glass or plastic cover of a clock or watch. Some compasses, glow-in-the-dark key chains, and exit signs also contain tritium.

  Item: Pottery

  Radioactive Element: Uranium oxide

  Explanation: Some types of old pottery were glazed using uranium oxide to give them that desirable glossy finish. The most common was the Homer Laughlin China Company’s brightly colored Fiesta ware made between 1936 and 1943. Vintage Fiesta ware is considered collectible and can still be found in many homes and antique stores. Fiesta ware collectors are commonly advised not to eat from the orange dishes, especially acidic foods such as tomato soup, which tend to leach the uranium out of the glaze. (Fiesta was reissued in the 1980s without the uranium oxide.)

  Ka-boom! There have been 2,036 known nuclear-bomb explosions since World War II.

  Item: Salt substitute

  Radioactive Element: Potassium-40

  Explanation: Most salt substitutes contain potassium chloride instead of sodium chloride. But many also contain potassium-40, a radioactive isotope that makes up a small amount of the potassium found naturally in foodstuffs. Unfortunately for anyone hoping to use salt substitute to get rid of unwanted houseguests, the amount of potassium-40 found in the condiment is not enough to do harm.

  Item: Lantern mantels

  Radioactive Element: Thorium

  Explanation: To make lantern mantels more luminescent, the radioactive element thorium is commonly added. Although Coleman, the largest lantern-mantel manufacturer, recently traded in thorium for the more stable yttrium oxide, many generic mantels still contain thorium. Just a few good whiffs of the mantel dust might be enough to make you a much less happy camper: It can cause cancer and liver disease.

  Item: Jewelry

  Radioactive Element: Radium

  Explanation: Some jewelry manufacturers use X-rays and radium to irradiate certain gemstones, a process that enhances their color. Sometimes the gemstones can remain radioactive for years after the treatment. Also, cloisonné jewelry is enameled using uranium oxide.

  OTHER RADIOACTIVE ITEMS

  Vaseline glass, thoriated welding rods, spark plugs from the 1940s, some old vacuum tubes, yellow Leica camera lenses, jewelry polish, anti-static brushes, neon lights, dental crowns, LCD wristwatches, old eyeglasses, microwaves, TVs, and topaz gemstones.

  * * *

  “The atomic age is here to stay…but are we?”

  —Bennett Cerf

  When Kuwait’s first McDonald’s opened in 1994, the drive-through line was 7 miles long.

  BETTY FREEMAN’S DAY IN COURT

  Eighty years before the Emancipation Proclamation freed American slaves, a Massachusetts woman helped free the slaves of that state…just by going to court.

  BRAVE WORDS

  In 1773 the leading citizens of Sheffield, Massachusetts, met in the home of Colonel John Ashley and drafted the document that some historians have called America’s first Declaration of Independence, the Sheffield Declaration. “Mankind in a state of nature are equal, free, and independent of each other,” it stated, “and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty and property.”

  Ironically, as the men toiled over the document, which protested English tyranny, they were waited on by Betty Freeman (also called Elizabeth, or Bett), Colonel Ashley’s slave. He’d bought several slaves when they were only babies, and they’d been held in involuntary servitude ever since.

  Freeman overheard the repeated talk of liberty as the men drafted the Sheffield Declaration. She heard more of the same three years later, when Ashley and his associates discussed the Declaration of Independence, which stated, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” She got another earful in 1780, when Ashley and his friends mulled over the new Massachusetts constitution, which proclaimed that “all men are born free and equal, and have the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties.”

  ALL TALK

  These were noble words, but none of them were meant to apply to Freeman—not even after her husband, also a slave, gave his life fighting on the American side during the Revolutionary War. Born into slavery, Betty, her sister, and
all their descendants would live in slavery forever if Colonel Ashley and others like him had their way.

  Frogs croak, bark, cluck, click, grunt, snore, squawk, chirp, whistle, trill, and yap.

  THE “LADY” OF THE HOUSE

  As deeply as she resented her lack of freedom, Betty got along with Colonel Ashley. Not so with his wife, Hannah, a petty tyrant who cruelly beat her slaves over the tiniest transgression. Once, when she had caught Betty’s sister, Lizzie, eating leftover scraps of bread dough, Mrs. Ashley accused her of “stealing” food and swung at her with a hot shovel pulled from the fireplace. Betty blocked the blow intended for her sister and received a gash on her arm that cut all the way to the bone. She carried that scar for the rest of her life.

  It wasn’t long after that incident that Freeman happened to visit the village meeting house while the Declaration of Independence was being read aloud. Maybe it was the fresh wound on her arm, maybe it was hearing the words of equality and freedom spoken one more time…whatever it was, something clicked inside her. The next day, she left the Ashleys and walked over to the offices of Theodore Sedgwick, a lawyer and vocal opponent of slavery. Freeman knew him because he was one of the people who had helped draft the Sheffield Declaration.

  “Sir,” she asked, “I heard that paper read yesterday, that says all men are born equal, and that every man has a right to freedom. I am not a dumb critter; won’t the law give me my freedom?”

  EQUAL = EQUAL

  Wouldn’t it? How could a state that proclaimed “all men are born free and equal,” and was part of a country that believed “all men are created equal” reconcile these statements with the institution of slavery? Sedgwick agreed with Freeman: It couldn’t. He decided to help her by filing a lawsuit to win her freedom, on the grounds that the language of the new state constitution made slavery illegal.

  The laws of Massachusetts at the end of the 18th century were quite peculiar by modern standards: They defined slaves as property, but also recognized that they were human beings, which meant that they had legal standing in state courts and could file lawsuits. In recent years a number of slaves had sued for their freedom and won, but not by challenging the legality of slavery directly. If a slave could prove that their mother had been born free, they could regain their freedom. Likewise, if a slave owner had made a promise to free a slave and then reneged, the slave could sue on grounds of breach of promise. Freeman’s lawsuit was different: It would be the first to challenge the legality of slavery itself.

  Heavy fact: A cloud measuring one cubic mile weighs about 3.5 million pounds.

  SEE YOU IN COURT

  The new state constitution had been in effect for less than a year when Sedgwick went to court in May 1781 and filed what is called a “writ of replevin.” The writ ordered Colonel Ashley to surrender property—Betty and another slave, Brom, who had joined in the suit—that wasn’t rightfully his. When Ashley refused to obey the writ, a trial was scheduled for the following August.

  Colonel Ashley probably didn’t realize it at the time, but the odds were against him from the start. Although slavery was still legal in Massachusetts, it had become very unpopular. The case was going to be tried before a jury, at a time when citizens of Massachusetts were still fighting in the Revolutionary War. These people took their freedoms seriously. And sure enough, when the trial was over, the jury decided in favor of Betty and Brom. The court set both of them free and ordered Ashley to pay them 30 shillings in damages, plus court costs.

  THE BEGINNING OF THE END

  Brom and Bett v. Ashley was a lower court case and did not set much of a precedent—Brom and Bett were the only slaves freed by the decision. But it did set a precedent of another kind, demonstrating that if slaves went to court to win their freedom, juries were very likely to give it to them. Slavery began to die a death of a thousand cuts in Massachusetts as other slaves filed lawsuits or just walked away from their owners, knowing that the owners couldn’t turn to the law for assistance. Owning slaves in the state had suddenly become a very risky business.

  Another nail in slavery’s coffin came as a result of a second lawsuit, filed in 1781 by a slave named Quock Walker, who sued his owner in civil court for assault and battery after the owner beat him for trying to escape. Walker not only won the case and £50 in damages, but the attorney general prosecuted his owner on criminal charges of assault and battery. That case went all the way to the Supreme Judicial Court, the state’s highest court. Once again the jury sided with the slave, by finding his owner guilty and fining him 40 shillings.

  The first-ever rock concert was held in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1952—the Moondog Coronation Ball.

  Chief Justice William Cushing’s instructions to the jury turned out to be even more important than their decision. He stated that “perpetual servitude can no longer be tolerated in our government; and…liberty can be only forfeited by criminal conduct or relinquished by personal consent.” Cushing’s words weren’t legally binding but they might as well have been—they made it clear that the court was against slavery. Without the protection of the law, slavery was doomed in Massachusetts.

  AFTERMATH

  Theodore Sedgwick, the lawyer who had helped Betty Freeman, went on to an illustrious career in politics and law. He served in both houses of state government, as well as in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives, where he was Speaker of the House from 1799 to 1801. In 1802 he became a justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, and served there until his death in 1813.

  What happened to Brom is unknown; after the case ended he disappeared into history. We do know what happened to Betty, however. After Colonel Ashley lost the case, he asked Betty to come back and work for wages. Would you have accepted such an offer? Neither did Betty—she went to work for Theodore Sedgwick instead. After many years, she saved enough money to buy her own house and retire. When she died in 1829 at about the age of 85, she was buried in the Sedgwick family plot in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where her grave can still be seen today. One of her great-grandchildren was W.E.B. DuBois, one of the most important civil rights leaders of the 20th century.

  THE MEANING OF FREEDOM

  Many years after Betty’s death, Theodore Sedgwick’s daughter Catherine recounted Betty’s explanation of what freedom meant to her: “Any time while I was a slave,” she said, “if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told that I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it just to stand one minute on God’s earth a free woman.”

  Philadelphia was the first U.S. city to have a public water system.

  WASHINGTON’S POSTS

  Booker T. Washington is one of the most important figures in African-American history. He was born into slavery in 1856, but went on to found the Tuskegee Institute and improve race relations in America—decades before the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

  “Never be ashamed to ask for information. The ignorant man will always be ignorant if he fears that by asking he will display ignorance.”

  “It’s better to be alone than in bad company.”

  “Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.”

  “I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.”

  “No man who continues to add something to the well-being of the place in which he lives is left long without proper reward.”

  “Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.”

  “Success is to be measured not by the position that one has reached in life but by the obstacles which he has overcome.”

  “One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.”

  “Great men cultivate love.”

  “The highest test of a civilization is its willingness to extend a helping hand to the less fortunate. Like an individual, it lifts itself up by lifting others up.”

  “We should never permit our grievance
s to overshadow our opportunities.”

  “Character, not circumstances, makes the man.”

  “Most leaders spend time trying to get others to think highly of them, when instead they should try to get their people to think more highly of themselves.”

  “The world cares very little about what a man or woman knows; it is what a man or woman is able to do that counts.”

  Munchkin: Judy Garland was 16 when she played an 11-year-old in The Wizard of Oz.

  WAR PLAN RED

  When this bizarre story surfaced a few years ago, it reminded us of this quote, attributed to Warren G. Harding: “I can take care of my enemies all right. But my damn friends—they’re the ones that keep me walking the floors nights.”

  NORTHERN EXPOSURE

  If you had to invade another country, how would you do it? Believe it or not, the United States military spent a lot of time pondering that question in the late 1920s, when it came up with a plan to invade its closest neighbor, Canada.

  There was certainly a precedent for the two nations battling it out. The Continental Army invaded Canada during the American Revolution, and the U.S. Army made repeated incursions during the War of 1812. In 1839 the state of Maine only narrowly avoided a shooting war with the province of New Brunswick over a border dispute. Then, in 1866, about 800 Irish-American members of a group called the Fenian Brotherhood tried to occupy part of Canada for the purpose of using it as a bargaining chip to force Great Britain to grant independence to Ireland. (They were quickly driven back across the U.S. border.)

  That last invasion had an upside for Canadians: It convinced the last holdouts in the independent provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Quebec that they’d be better able to defend themselves against the next invasion if they banded together to form the Dominion of Canada, which they did on July 1, 1867.