Uncle John's Actual and Factual Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  Total Performances: 9

  Musical: Home Sweet Homer (1976)

  Story: A musical based on The Odyssey, Homer’s epic about the warrior Odysseus’s treacherous ten-year journey home to his wife, Penelope, after the Trojan War. It seemed like a good idea, but the production was seemingly cursed. It began with promise: the original book and lyrics were by screenwriter Erich Segal (Yellow Submarine, Love Story), and Yul Brynner, star of The King and I, signed on to star as Odysseus, setting himself up for a huge comeback. Before the show opened on Broadway, it toured the United States under the name Odyssey. Performances sold out as fans clamored to see Brynner, who frequently missed shows, claiming he was suffering from a difficult-to-beat bout of food poisoning incurred from a plate of short ribs at a New York restaurant. Despite the sellouts, critics savaged the musical—so much so that Segal took his name off the project. The scheduled Broadway run was canceled…until Brynner reminded producers that it was in his contract that the show play in New York at least once. So they gave him a single New York performance.

  Total Performances: With its name changed to Home Sweet Homer, the musical opened at the Palace Theatre on Broadway as a matinee on January 4, 1976—its first and its last performance.

  NAME THAT CANDY BAR

  The candy bar known in the U.S. as Three Musketeers is sold in Europe under the name Milky Way. The American candy bar called Milky Way is called a Mars Bar in Europe. The American Mars Bar no longer exists—it was renamed Snickers with Almonds in the 1990s (and caramel was added).

  Who inspired the tongue twister “she sells seashells by the seashore”?…

  A LONG, STRANGE TRIP,

  PART II

  Here’s the last installment of our story about the odd couple who tried to circumnavigate the globe in an amphibious car. Fasten your seat belts—it’s gonna be a bumpy ride! (Part I is on page 267.)

  OUT OF THE FRYING PAN

  The Carlins rested on Flores Island for about a week, then spent the next three months island-hopping eastward through the Azores, stopping to exhibit the Half-Safe whenever possible to raise money for the next leg of the trip. In late November they set off for Madeira, a Portuguese archipelago 600 miles to the east and about midway between the Azores and the west coast of Africa. The Carlins assumed that because the trip to Madeira was shorter than their trip to the Azores, it would also be easier. They were wrong—it was hurricane season. For days on end, the Half-Safe was battered by tropical storms with powerful winds and high waves that pounded the hull so violently, the Carlins feared it might be crushed in at any minute. “We go up, up, up & smack, down, down, down,” Elinore Carlin wrote in her diary. “Used to think it was an exaggeration when people talked of seas 30, 40, and 50 feet high. I’ve now seen them.”

  Average speed: 2 miles per hour. Reason: they were being cautious because they didn’t have a spare tire. It had fallen overboard somewhere in the Atlantic.

  The trip that was supposed to take ten days took them more than three weeks. That they made it at all astonished the authorities in Madeira, who, like the officials in the Azores, had given the couple up for dead. They didn’t see how a ship could have ridden out the storm, let alone a couple of nuts in a jeep.

  After resting up on Madeira for two months and making repairs to the Half-Safe, in February 1951 the Carlins set sail for the west coast of Africa by way of the Canary Islands. On February 23, they landed at Cape Juby, just south of Morocco, and entered the record books as the first—and still the only—people to drive across the Atlantic Ocean in an amphibious car.

  BRITISH INVASION

  The Carlins drove north from Cape Juby to Morocco. (Average speed: 2 miles per hour. Reason: they were being cautious because they didn’t have a spare tire. It had fallen overboard somewhere in the Atlantic.) In April 1951 they floated across the strait of Gibraltar into Europe, then embarked on a four-month driving tour of Europe. In August they crossed the English Channel and drove ashore at Kent, the same place where Julius Caesar landed during his invasion of the British Isles in 55 BC. (Caesar had to walk ashore.) In England, Ben Carlin was reunited with his old friend Mac Bunting, who was with him back in 1946 when they saw that first amphibious jeep and Carlin said he thought he could travel around the world in one. “By Jove, old boy,” Bunting exclaimed, “you were right!”

  …One theory: an English seaside fossil shop owner named Marry Anning.

  SEEING, BUT NOT BELIEVING

  One of the reasons the Carlins made their trip was for the fame and fortune that they thought it would bring them. Ben imagined himself writing books and articles and traveling the world giving paid lectures to a public eager to devour his every word. With book royalties and speaking fees rolling in, he would never have to work a real job again. But when Ben and Elinore arrived in England, they were surprised to see how little attention they received. After just a day or two the reporters stopped calling, and Life magazine, which had already done one article on the couple, backed out of doing a second.

  The Carlins had also assumed that someone would sponsor a European exhibition tour of the Half-Safe, which would bring in the money they needed to repair the jeep and prepare the vehicle for the next leg of the trip. But there were no takers; the Carlins had to tour on their own. And when they did exhibit the Half-Safe to the public, they were astonished to discover that many people believed the whole thing was a hoax. People simply did not believe that anyone could, or would, cross the Atlantic in a jeep.

  Instead of being showered with attention and cash, Ben and Elinore had to go back to work for two years to save up the money they needed to continue their journey. Ben found a job as an auto mechanic in Birmingham, and Elinore worked as a secretary in London. It was at this time that Ben wrote a book about the journey so far, titled Half-Safe: Across the Atlantic by Jeep. It sold more than 30,000 copies in five languages—an impressive figure to be sure, but far less than the Carlins expected.

  HERE WE GO AGAIN

  When he wasn’t fixing other people’s cars or writing his book, Ben Carlin worked on the Half-Safe, repairing damage, rebuilding the engine, and making various improvements. By April 1955, just shy of five years after leaving Halifax on what he thought would be a one-year trip, he and Elinore climbed back into the jeep, drove into the English Channel, and set off for France. From there they drove through Switzerland, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, and western Istanbul, then sailed across the Bosporus strait to Asia Minor, the part of Turkey that lies in Asia. Next they drove south and east through Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and then across India to Calcutta. They arrived there in the middle of summer, having driven more than 8,500 miles in just under three months—all of it at speeds of 25 mph or less.

  How do guinea pigs get back the nutrients they excrete? The old-fashioned way: They eat their own poop.

  In some ways, the trip from France to Calcutta was more grueling than their transatlantic crossing: The Half-Safe didn’t have air-conditioning, and in the desert heat of the Middle East, temperatures inside the vehicle climbed as high as 180°F. Elinore, not a very big woman, lost 30 pounds during the trip due to chronic stomach problems. In India, Ben contracted dengue fever, also known as “breakbone fever” because of the terrible pain it causes to the joints, and was laid up in Calcutta for weeks.

  Perhaps worst of all, they were out of money. Again.

  Ben contracted dengue fever, also known as “breakbone fever” because of the terrible pain it causes to the joints, and was laid up in Calcutta for weeks.

  Perhaps worst of all, they were out of money. Again.

  DOWN UNDER

  Luckily for the Carlins, they soon received an offer from Ben’s publisher to go take the Half-Safe on a book tour of Australia. So they loaded the jeep onto a steamship and sailed for Australia, planning to return to Calcutta after the book tour and resume the trip where they’d left off. But the Australia trip, which had offered the promise of diversion from their difficult life in Calcutta, turned
out to be a financial disaster. The books never arrived, so there was nothing for the Carlins to sell. By the time the tour was over, Elinore decided she’d had enough of both the trip and her marriage to Ben. Instead of accompanying him back to Calcutta, she returned home to the United States and filed for divorce. According to some accounts, she never saw Ben again.

  MOVING ON

  In December 1955, Carlin returned to Calcutta by steamship—alone. A few weeks later he climbed aboard the Half-Safe and set sail for Burma (Myanmar), across the Bay of Bengal. For the rest of the trip he covered some stretches by himself, and others with the assistance of hired crewmembers who’d signed on for parts of the trip.

  From Burma, Carlin drove through Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, then sailed across the South China Sea to Hong Kong. From there he sailed to Taiwan, then drove north across the island and sailed to Kyushu, the southernmost of the major islands of Japan, and then island-hopped northward across Japan. From Japan he sailed to the southernmost of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, and island-hopped all the way to Anchorage, where he arrived on September 2, 1957. He spent the next eight months driving all around the United States and Canada.

  The Brazilian capital of Brasilia, founded in 1960, is designed to look like an airplane when seen from the air.

  THANKS, BUT…

  As Carlin traveled around North America, he was saddened to see that, just as in Europe, people weren’t very excited about his trip. Some people still thought it was a hoax. He drove to Southern California and spent a few weeks in Hollywood trying to put together a movie deal, but no one was interested. When he drove through Michigan, he stopped at the Ford Motor Company’s headquarters in Dearborn and tried to interest the publicity department in what he’d been able to accomplish with one of their amphibious jeeps. But Ford executives refused to meet with him, so he got back in the Half-Safe and drove away.

  He drove to Southern California and spent a few weeks in Hollywood trying to put together a movie deal, but no one was interested.

  On May 13, 1958, just short of eight years after setting out across the Atlantic (and just shy of ten years after his first failed attempt to cross it), Carlin arrived back in Montreal, where he and Elinore had started their trip in July 1950. A few reporters were there to greet him, but there were no crowds. He’d been gone so long that most people had forgotten that he and Elinore had ever set off on such a trip. By his calculations, he’d traveled some 39,000 miles by land and another 11,000 by sea, and had spent roughly $35,000 doing it, the equivalent of nearly $300,000 today. But no one seemed to care.

  END OF THE ROAD

  Now that his journey was finished, Carlin handed over the Half-Safe to an American friend who owned a half-share in the vehicle, perhaps as collateral on a loan that Carlin had yet to repay. “I can’t get rid of her fast enough. It’s been a tortoise shell on my back for many years,” Carlin told a reporter at the time. He wrote a second book, The Other Half of Half-Safe, but no one wanted to publish it, so he set the manuscript aside. It was not published in his lifetime.

  Carlin lived out the rest of his life in obscurity, first in Canada and then in the United States. By the late 1970s, he was back in Western Australia. There he suffered a series of strokes that left him increasingly debilitated, until a final one killed him in 1981. Elinore Carlin died in 1996.

  FORGET ME NOT

  In his will, Ben Carlin bequeathed his entire estate—his meager life savings, his half-ownership stake in the Half-Safe, the unpublished manuscript of The Other Half of Half-Safe, and all of his photo albums, scrapbooks, correspondence, and other records of the trip—to the school he’d attended in Australia as a boy, Guildford Grammar School in Perth. It’s because of this bequest that we know as much about the Carlins and their strange adventure as we do, because the school took a lot more interest in their story than the rest of the world had.

  What’s a postprandial somnolence? That’s the technical name for a “food coma,” getting sleepy after a big meal.

  In the early 1980s, the school tracked down the Half-Safe. It was still sitting abandoned in a barn in Ohio where Carlin and his partner dumped it not long after he’d finished the voyage. The school acquired the other half-interest in the vehicle from Carlin’s partner, then had the jeep shipped back to the school. When it arrived in Australia, the school had it lovingly restored. Today it sits proudly on campus in a glass-walled building that was specially constructed to house it.

  In 1989 the school published The Other Half of Half-Safe. It is still in print and can be purchased from the school directly. The rest of Ben Carlin’s papers have been made a part of the Guildford Grammar School’s archives, where they are available for researchers and scholars to study. In 2011 a journalist named James Nestor used the material to write Half-Safe, the first new book about the Carlins and their strange odyssey in more than 40 years.

  INSPIRATION

  The school has also named a classroom in Carlin’s honor, and—in perhaps its greatest tribute to their oddly distinguished alumnus—it has incorporated his spirit of adventure and stubborn perseverance into the curriculum by creating the “Carlin Challenge,” a contest that “encourages students in innovation, courage, research, and risk-taking.”

  If you ever find yourself in the city of Perth in Western Australia, be sure to take a trip out to Guildford Grammar School and have a look at the Half-Safe. It’s in beautiful shape and looks like it’s ready for another adventure. You might even be tempted to take it out into the Swan River, which runs through Perth, or even out into the Indian Ocean. But no matter how tempting it seems, resist the urge. If Ben or Elinore Carlin were still alive today, they’d probably tell you it’s not such a good idea.

  MORE GROANERS

  • Lack of general knowledge is my Achilles’ knee.

  • I poured root beer in a square glass. Now I just have beer.

  • Communism jokes aren’t funny unless everyone gets them.

  • I’ve been to the dentist a lot, so I know the drill.

  The chocolate chip cookie was invented at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, MA, in 1930.

  HISTORY’S

  WONDER WOMEN

  After seeing the 2017 film, we decided to track down real-life Wonder Women—female warriors who defied their times to defend their people, without hot pants, bustiers, bulletproof bracelets, or a lasso of truth.

  FU HAO: THE GENERAL

  As consort of Shang dynasty king Wu Ding, Fu Hao could have faded into obscurity. That’s what happened to Wu’s other 59 wives. But Fu Hao climbed over the crowd to become the king’s favorite, reportedly because of her skill as a tough military leader.

  The Shang ruled China’s Yellow River Valley from about 1556 to 1046 BC. They built huge walled cities, improved irrigation systems, mastered the use of bronze, and developed a writing system. Much of what is known about the Shang has been found on “oracle bones”—ox shoulder bones or turtle shells inscribed with questions related to important events of the day. Those included military events. Hundreds of oracle bones have been found with questions about the military exploits of Lady Fu Hao. For years, archaeologists (mostly male) pooh-poohed the existence of a Shang dynasty warrior queen. But in 1976, modern archaeologists found proof: Fu Hao’s tomb. Unlike most Shang tombs, hers had remained undisturbed. Inside they found a bronze battle axe—proof of her military authority—130 weapons, 27 knives, dozens of bone arrowheads, and the skeletons of six dogs and 16 human slaves.

  Fu Hao reportedly began her military career when one of the dynasty’s fiercest rivals—the Tu-Fang—threatened attack the Shang while two of Wu Ding’s top commanders were fighting elsewhere. Fu Hao stepped forward to offer her services. She’d had military training, knew the country’s geography, and understood the subtleties of the art of war. Wu Ding granted her a bronze jue, a ritual bronze wine vessel, and empowered her as a military commander. Though the Tu-Fang had been gnawing at the kingdom’s borders for generations, Fu Hao defeated them so d
ecisively that they never challenged the Shang again.

  Fu Hao quickly became Wu Ding’s most powerful military leader and was China’s first female general. A force of more than 13,000 soldiers followed her command. Other powerful generals fought beneath her standard as she led successful campaigns against neighboring kingdoms. Wu Ding granted his gifted general a fiefdom from territories she conquered. From that stronghold, she defended the kingdom’s borders and launched attacks against other tribes. After her death (around 1200 BC), the Shang’s military dominance weakened, despite Wu Ding’s many prayers to her spirit for aid.

  Black gold: Printer ink costs $4,000 per gallon.

  LOZEN: THE SHIELD

  Historians call Victorio, chief of the Chihenne Apache, the “greatest Indian general who had ever appeared on the American continent.” Apparently, the guerrilla warrior got a lot of help…from his younger sister, Lozen. At the age of 12, Lozen journeyed into the craggy mountains of southwestern New Mexico on a vision quest. There, oral tradition says, she was gifted with a supernatural power: the ability to locate her tribe’s enemies.

  Born around 1840, Lozen grew up during a time of relentless warfare. Squeezed between two powerhouses determined to wipe them out—Mexico and the United States—the Apache nation was harried to near-extermination. Lozen chose the warrior’s path early, vowing neither to marry nor have children, but instead to give her life to the survival of her people. She dressed, fought, and trained with male warriors; and her acceptance into the Apache warrior society gave her the right to sit at council. Her eerie ability to sneak past enemy lines and quietly steal their horses earned her the name Lozen, which means “dexterous horse thief.”