Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

NUDE: Ontario, Canada, police arrested a 39-year-old man after he stripped off his clothes and jumped naked into a gas-station car wash when his taxi driver stopped at the station to fill up. The man, whose name was not released to the media, was still “bathing” when police came and took him away. He was later charged with being naked and intoxicated in a public place.

  PRUDE: The city of San Antonio, Texas, has come up with a novel way to prevent strippers from stripping completely: They are now required to apply for business licenses, and must carry them on their person while performing. The licenses are about half the size of a credit card…so where are the dancers supposed to put them? “It can be on the wrist or ankle, or something like that,” says Lt. Mike Gorhum, head of the city’s vice squad.

  The Great Salt Lake is getting saltier—rivers dump 1.1 million tons of new salt into it every year.

  MORE BATHROOM NEWS

  Our continuing quest to keep commodes in the public eye.

  PASTORAL PIT STOP

  Rev. John Hawdon was filling in for the regular vicar at Longforgan Parish Church in Perthshire, Scotland, when, during a break in the service, he had to make a pit

  stop…forgetting that his wireless lapel mic was still attached to his robe. The stunned congregation listened to the sounds of the reverend

  “peeing, sighing with relief, flushing, and washing his hands.” Said one parishioner, “It was mortifying. Every sound boomed and echoed around the church. We all sat there looking at each other, totally embarrassed. One or two folk managed a wee giggle.”

  TAKE A SEAT

  Rosemary Salce is a guidance counselor at Public School #18 in Manhattan. Because of overcrowding and budget cuts in New York City’s public schools, Salce’s counseling office had to be turned into a classroom, which left the school’s only guidance counselor with no place to counsel. Her solution: She converted one of the school’s restrooms into an office. It has room for only two chairs and a desk, but the small size isn’t the biggest problem. “Every time a toilet flushes somewhere in the school, it stinks in here,” Salce laments. But at least, she admits, the students have access to her services.

  DID A DEADHEAD STEAL THE DEAD’S HEAD?

  One of Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia’s most treasured possessions was his salmon-colored personal toilet, where he reportedly spent a lot of time thinking and writing songs. After his death in 1995, the toilet became the property of Henry Koltys, who had purchased Garcia’s Sonoma, California, home. Koltys didn’t want the toilet, though, and sold it to a casino for $2,550. The casino planned to add the potty to a traveling exhibit (they also purchased William Shatner’s kidney stones for the show), but before they could claim the commode, someone stole it. Garcia’s gardener, Jon Lipsin, thinks it was “liberated” by Deadheads. “It’s a little gross,” he said, “but I could see that toilet in a rock ’n’ roll museum.”

  Prince Charles owns a collection of toilet seats.

  AMERICA’S MOST WANTED

  America’s Most Wanted was the Fox network’s first big hit. It was pretty controversial when it was launched in the late 1980s, but love it or hate it, it’s hard to argue against a show that has led to the capture of nearly 1,000 wanted criminals.

  MADE IN GERMANY

  When Fox TV first went on the air on October 6, 1986, it had only one show—The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers—but it had ambitious plans to add others. One program that Fox wanted to copy was Aktenzeichen XY…Ungelöst (File XY…Unsolved), a German TV show that had been on the air since 1967. Each episode featured as many as five real-life unsolved crimes that were reenacted and presented to the viewing audience. The hope was that someone would call in with a tip that would help solve the crime.

  File XY was the outgrowth of an earlier show called Vorsicht, Falle! (Beware, Trap!), which warned viewers about scam artists operating in Germany. Without being asked, so many viewers had sent in information about the con men depicted on the show that the producers decided to create File XY around the premise of asking viewers to send in tips. In 1984 the BBC began airing a similar show called Crimewatch UK; it too was successful. But would the concept work in the United States?

  PUTTING IT TOGETHER

  Michael Linder, a former Entertainment Tonight producer, and Stephen Chao, a former National Enquirer reporter, were the Fox executives who fleshed out the show’s details. They decided to focus the most attention on cases involving violent criminals who had committed crimes in the recent past and were likely to continue if they weren’t caught right away. Escaped cons or repeat offenders were preferred; with these cases it was thought there would be less risk of violating the rights of someone who might later turn out to be innocent. Cases involving people who were only “wanted for questioning” were off-limits for the same reason.

  One of the biggest challenges was getting law-enforcement agencies to cooperate with the show. Linder wanted to feature someone on the FBI’s Most Wanted list in the pilot episode, but the FBI wasn’t sure it should get involved. Fox was a new network and America’s Most Wanted was an unproven concept. The show would film reenactments of brutal real-life crimes—would they be done respectfully and in good taste? In the end the FBI did decide to cooperate…with the pilot. Future cooperation would depend on how the first show turned out.

  Is this some kind of joke? In Quitman, Georgia, it is illegal for a chicken to cross the road.

  FBI officials gave Linder information on each criminal on the Most Wanted list. After reading about them all, he decided to focus on the case of David James Roberts, an Indiana prison inmate who had escaped from custody in 1968 while serving six life terms for rape, arson, and murder, including the murder of two children. He’d been on the run for nearly 20 years.

  The producers recruited actors to play Roberts and his victims, returned to the scenes of some of his crimes, and filmed reenactments. Stories on other wanted criminals were also filmed.

  Now all the show needed was a host.

  FIRST CHOICE

  Early on, Linder and Chao thought John Walsh, an outspoken advocate for missing and exploited children, would make a good host for the show. In 1981 Walsh’s six-year-old son, Adam, had been kidnapped from a shopping mall in Hollywood, Florida. Weeks later, his partial remains were recovered in a drainage ditch 120 miles away; the rest of his body was never found. Since then, Walsh and his wife, Revé, had channeled their grief into lobbying to remove the legal and bureaucratic obstacles that made it difficult to recover missing children. The passage of the federal Missing Children Act of 1982 and the Missing Children’s Assistance Act of 1984 were due in large part to their efforts.

  Walsh understood from personal experience the impact that the media could play in solving crimes. His family’s story was made into two TV movies: Adam (1983) and Adam: His Song Continues (1986). Each movie had ended with photos of and information on 55 missing kids, for a total of 110 for both shows. Dozens of the kids were then found or accounted for (by 1990, 71 of the cases would be solved).

  Still, Walsh wasn’t sure he wanted to host the show. Like the FBI, he didn’t know what to make of it. He was worried that if it turned out to be cheesy and exploitative, it might hurt his ability to continue lobbying on behalf of missing children.

  About 1,500 New York residents are bitten every year…by other New Yorkers.

  HOST TO HOST

  Walsh told Fox he wasn’t interested, and the producers considered a number of other people to host the show, including a former commandant of the Marine Corps, former U.S. attorney Rudolph Giuliani, and several actors, including Treat Williams, Brian Dennehy, and Brian Keith. While some agreed to take the job, none of them had the credibility that Walsh did. Linder and Chao decided to wait.

  Finally, after six months of saying no, Walsh changed his mind. He agreed to host the show provided that Fox would flash a phone number on the screen during the broadcast so viewers would know where to call. “What would be the point, otherwise?” he told Newsday in 1988. But
the deciding factor for Walsh was David James Roberts, the escaped killer who was going to be featured on the pilot. Walsh decided that if there was anything he could do to put a murderer of children behind bars, he had to try.

  PREMIERE

  The pilot of America’s Most Wanted aired on Sunday, February 7, 1988. Nobody knew how it would do—nothing like it had been shown in the U.S. before. Would anyone watch? The FBI had questioned the show’s merit; so had most of the other law-enforcement agencies who were asked to participate. So had John Walsh.

  So had Fox—AMW was so unusual and so untested that instead of broadcasting the show to the nearly 100 stations in their fledgling network, Fox decided to air it only on the seven stations that it owned outright. They did very little to promote the show, and scheduled it to run following 21 Jump Street, a program that didn’t provide much of a lead-in audience. Those few people who did watch were asked to help find a man that police had been hunting nonstop for 19 years, and whose appearance must have changed considerably since 1968.

  So how long did it take to catch Roberts after America’s Most Wanted debuted on seven TV stations? Four days.

  GOTCHA!

  Then, as now, AMW set up a phone bank to handle whatever calls came in, even though “we didn’t know if we’d get one call,” Linder admitted in 1988. They did get calls, though—dozens of them, including 15 tips in the first 40 minutes that placed Roberts in New York City. One of the callers recognized him as the man running a homeless shelter on Staten Island. Police took Roberts into custody on February 11.

  What do smelly cheeses, sweaty feet, and vomit have in common? Butyric acid.

  Other arrests followed: In the first two months alone, 15 other suspects profiled on the show were captured, eight of them caught solely on the basis of tips phoned in to the AMW hotline.

  America’s Most Wanted moved to the full network in early April and quickly became Fox’s highest-rated show—and its first genuine hit. As torrents of viewer tips led to the arrest of one fugitive after another, the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies abandoned their skepticism. Soon they were fighting to get their most difficult unsolved cases on the air. By the end of the first year, more than 25 million viewers were tuning in each week; the tips they phoned in led to the arrests of 73 fugitives. By the end of 1989, America’s Most Wanted was averaging one arrest every 16 days, a success rate of 44%.

  I WANT MY AMW

  America’s Most Wanted was a hit, but Fox may not have realized what a cultural force the show had become until 1996, when they announced they were pulling it from the upcoming fall season—even though its ratings were still on the upswing. Why kill a success? The up-to-the-minute nature of the show means that there isn’t much of a market for reruns or DVD collections. Apparently Fox was hoping to replace AMW with something that had a greater potential for future profits.

  Fox broke the news to John Walsh on a Monday, made the public announcement on Tuesday, and by Wednesday a campaign to save the show was well underway. FBI director Louis Freeh asked Fox to put the show back on; so did countless other law-enforcement agencies. So did the governors of 37 states. But it was the letters from fans, Walsh says—more than 200,000 of them—that got the show back on the air after an absence of just six weeks. “The public was the judge,” he told reporters. “It was the shortest cancellation in the history of network television.”

  Marlon Brando was paid $14 million for his cameo in Superman.

  ROGUE’S GALLERY

  America’s Most Wanted hasn’t been perfect—Walsh admits that he cringes when he thinks back to how graphic the filmed reenactments were in the show’s early days. And it’s not uncommon for the actors who play the criminals to be mistakenly turned in to the police. One man in Louisiana was “apprehended” six times in one week in March 1990 just because he looked like someone who had been profiled on the show.

  Even so, the number of criminals who have been captured over the years is astounding—as of August 2006, 900 fugitives had been captured and 42 missing children returned safely to their homes. Here’s a look at some of the most notable captures:

  • Jack and Mona Volagres, wanted for the murder of Mona’s daughter Saleana. They were arrested only 29 minutes after the episode aired, the quickest arrest in the show’s history.

  • James Charles Stark, a repeat sex offender. The week before his segment was scheduled to air, AMW showed his picture for five seconds as part of a preview. That’s all it took—six people phoned in tips that he worked at a car wash in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Police took him into custody the next day.

  • Stephen Randall Dye, wanted for shooting a man and linked to the murder of a motorcyclist. After seeing himself profiled on the show, he went outside, flagged down the first police car that came along, and surrendered on the spot.

  • James Henderson, wanted for kidnapping and assault in Arizona. Henderson wasn’t on the show at all—Tucson police suspected that his wife was in contact with him, so they told her that an America’s Most Wanted film crew was in town shooting reenactments of his crimes. Henderson’s wife didn’t know they were lying, and passed the information on to Henderson. He surrendered to police a short time later.

  • Steven Ray Stout, wanted for the murder of his stepmother-in-law and stepsister-in-law. Arrested nine days after his story aired, Stout pled guilty to both murders and was sentenced to life in prison. One of the few subjects of the show who also admits to being a fan, Stout says he watches the program in prison every week. “There’s no doubt that most of the people on the show need to be off the streets,” he says.

  Technically, you must have a hunting license to catch mice in California.

  CAN YOU PASS THE U.S. CITIZENSHIP TEST?

  Bad news! The government lost the answers to the quiz you took on page 177. You need to take it again. Here are 21 “medium-hard” questions.

  1. What is it called when the president refuses to sign a bill into law and returns it to the Congress with his objections?

  2. What do we celebrate on the 4th of July?

  3. Name one of the five freedoms outlined in the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

  4. How many justices are there in the U.S. Supreme Court?

  5. Who is the commander in chief of the U.S. military?

  6. Who alone has the power to declare war in the U.S.?

  7. Who elects the Congress?

  8. Who elects the president of the United States?

  9. Name the three branches of the federal government.

  10. Who is the head of the executive branch?

  11. The Civil War was fought over what important issues?

  12. What are the duties of the Supreme Court?

  13. How many voting members are there in the House of Representatives?

  14. How many senators are there in the U.S. Senate?

  15. Why are there that many senators in the U.S. Senate?

  16. What are the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution called?

  17. How long is the term of each U.S. senator?

  18. How long is the term of each U.S. representative?

  19. How many full terms can a president serve?

  20. How many full terms can a U.S. senator or representative serve?

  21. Who said, “Give me liberty, or give me death?”

  Whew! Check your answers on page 516, then try the “hard” test on page 473…if you dare.

  Old softie: President Andrew Johnson left crumbs out for the White House mice.

  DELICIOUSLY FAMILIAR PHRASES

  Hungry for some word play? You’ll eat up these juicy origins of popular phrases.

  SPILL THE BEANS

  Meaning: To give away a secret

  Origin: “A tradition that began in ancient Greece for electing a new member to a private club was to give each existing member one white and one brown bean with which to cast their votes (white was ‘yes’; brown was ‘no’). The beans were then placed in a jar and then counted in secre
t by an official. The prospective member would never know how many people voted for or against him. Unless, that is, the jar was knocked over before the secret count and the beans spilled. Then the members’ secret would be out.” (Red Herrings & White Elephants, by Albert Jack)

  TO EGG ONE ON

  Meaning: To persistently urge someone to do something

  Origin: “Following the Norman Conquest, Anglo-Saxon peasants were treated brutally. Roped or chained together, they were often driven from place to place like cattle. Many prisoners were urged to move faster by a poke of their captor’s spearpoint, or ecg. Later, children listened as their elders told of having been “ecged on” in this fashion. Tradition kept the stories alive long after Anglo-Saxon ceased to be spoken, with the result that later generations referred to their ancestors as having been egged on.” (I’ve Got Goose Pimples, by Marvin Vanoni)

  EAT, DRINK, AND BE MERRY

  Meaning: To feast and not worry about life’s problems

  Origin: “This phrase has its roots in the Bible, where, in Ecclesiastes 8:15, we read: ‘A man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry.’ There is a further reference in Isaiah 22:13, ‘Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we may die.’” (Everyday Phrases—Their Origins and Meanings, by Neil Ewart)

  Until 2004, caffeine was on the International Olympic Committee list of prohibited substances.

  IN A PICKLE

  Meaning: To be stuck in a difficult situation

  Origin: “From in de pikel zitten, a Dutch phrase going back four centuries, literally meaning to sit in a salt solution used for preserving pickles, an uncomfortable or sorry plight.” Dante used the idiom in his Divine Comedy; Shakespeare used it in The Tempest (“How camest thou in this pickle?”). It’s now also used to describe the sorry plight of a baseball player caught in a rundown between two bases.” (Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, by Robert Hendrickson)