Uncle John's Actual and Factual Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  During the so-called Indian Wars of U.S. westward expansion, the favored government strategy to rid itself of natives was to have the military corral them in reservations. In 1877 Victorio’s band was due to be forcibly taken to the San Carlos reservation in Arizona Territory, a place so desolate that it was called “Hell’s 40 Acres.” The Apache chief decided he would rather die fighting than watch his people die of disease or starvation, so he took the Chihenne to war.

  To confuse their enemy, the tribe fanned out in different directions with Lozen leading the women and children toward the Rio Grande. They found the river a torrent of churning water. Her followers froze at the river’s edge, as fearful of drowning as of capture by the cavalry. Lozen raised her rifle over her head, slammed a heel into her horse’s shoulder, and drove him into the river. As he kicked into a swim, the frozen women and children surged forward, buoyed by their leader’s courage. Once her people were safe on the other side, Lozen plunged back into the roaring water, determined to rejoin the warriors.

  She soon peeled off from the warrior band to escort a pregnant woman across the Chihuahuan Desert to reunite her with her family. Along the way she delivered the baby, killed a longhorn with nothing but a knife, and butchered it for food. Next, she stole two horses and a soldier’s saddle, ammo, canteen, blanket, and shirt. As Lozen trekked across the desert, delivering mother and baby safely home, Victorio and his remaining warriors were trapped and slaughtered by Mexican soldiers. Would that have happened if his “right hand” had been there? Many Apache said it would not. Strong as any man and braver than most, Lozen was, according to her brother, “a shield of her people.”

  Ouch! After a male bee mates, its testicles explode, and then it dies.

  MILUNKA SAVIĆ: THE FEARLESS

  What’s a poor Serbian farm girl to do when her brother is called up to fight the Bulgarians? Shave off her hair, dress like a man, and take his place in the army, of course. At least, that’s what 21-year-old Milunka Savić did. In 1913, within weeks of enlisting, Savić was boots-deep in the biggest battle in the Second Balkan War. Rifle in hand, Savić charged into wave after wave of assaults with the kind of courage every commander wants to see in a grunt. Savić’s commander was so impressed, he awarded her a medal and promoted her to corporal. But he didn’t know that she was a woman.

  On a subsequent charge into battle, a Bulgarian grenade blasted Savić’s position. Medics tossed her onto a stretcher and carried her to the field hospital, where a doctor opened her shirt to remove shrapnel from her chest and…the jig was up. When her commanding officer found out he’d pinned a medal on the chest of a woman, he didn’t know what to do. She’d proven herself not only capable but heroic. Could he punish a soldier of her caliber? Apparently not. But he did suggest a transfer to the nursing corps. Savić respectfully refused and told her commander that she would take no position in the army that would sideline her without a weapon with which to fight for her beloved Serbia. Her commander told her he’d think about it. Standing at attention, the wounded soldier replied, “I’ll wait.” Savić stood there for a full hour before her commander agreed to keep her in the infantry, and promoted her to junior sergeant.

  Savić survived the Balkan Wars, but a peaceful life back home on the farm was not to be. A Serbian dissident assassinated Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand and before long World War I was in full swing. Back on the front lines, Savić quickly earned her country’s highest award, the Order of Karađorđe’s Star (don’t worry—we can’t pronounce it either).

  In the 2017 movie Wonder Woman, there’s a scene in which Wonder Woman charges across a barbed wire–studded “no-man’s-land,” dives into an enemy trench, and dispenses a super-heroic smackdown. That could only happen in Hollywood, right? Not really. Savić reportedly did it in real life, capturing 23 Bulgarian soldiers and earning herself another Star.

  Unfortunately, the Serbian army wasn’t doing as well as Sergeant Savić and it retreated to join up with the French. How did the French general in charge react to Savić’s presence? He bet her a case of 1880 cognac that she couldn’t hit a bottle from 40 meters (131 feet). When she did, he welcomed her into the ranks. (It probably didn’t hurt that she shared the cognac.)

  By the end of the war, Savić had won the French Legion of Honor (twice), been awarded the Russian Cross of St. George, and received the British Medal of the Order of St. Michael, all for her kick-butt courage in battle. She was the only woman in World War I to be given the French Croix de Guerre, the highest award for bravery the country bestows. Her heroism was so legendary that when she was sent to a concentration camp during World War II, the German officer who was supposed to execute her recognized her name…and ordered her release.

  In India, a gas station is called a “petrol bunk.”

  BOUDICCA: THE QUEEN

  By 60 AD Rome had ruled Britannia for more than a century. But Emperor Nero was about to make a mistake that would (nearly) drive the Romans off the isle. He miscalculated the cost of enraging a tawny-haired Celtic queen named Boudicca.

  Like many British kings, Boudicca’s husband, Prasutagus, had allied his tribe—the Iceni—with the Roman invaders. That allowed him to keep partial control of his kingdom in eastern England (modern-day Norfolk). When he died, Prasutagus willed the kingdom to his two daughters and to the emperor. But Nero had no intention of sharing land, wealth, or power with women, and wasted no time in sending centurions to do what Romans did in those days: plunder the Iceni’s wealth, flog the king’s widow, and rape the daughters. The end? Nope. The beginning. Spear in hand, the tall, muscular queen called on the Iceni and neighboring tribes to unite and drive the Romans out of their lands, once and for all. And having seen their lands pillaged, they were inclined to follow her.

  The mob marched first to the town of Camulodunum (now Colchester). The Romans had a good laugh over the idea of a ragtag bunch of malcontents led by a woman, and sent 200 troops to quell the rebellion. Bad plan. When the Romans arrived, they discovered that 120,000 men had answered Boudicca’s call. The mob quickly slaughtered the Roman troops and then killed everyone in the city and burned it to the ground.

  Boudicca wasn’t done. As her rebel army grew—some accounts say to 230,000 fighters—she charged into Londinium (now London), slaughtered an entire Roman legion, and then burned that city to the ground. Before the legions finally stopped her, the Celtic queen and her minions had killed around 80,000 Romans. And, to the deep chagrin of the centurions, most of them accomplished their gory work using agricultural tools.

  Ultimately, the Romans regrouped and ended the rebellion, but they were so humiliated by the near-rout that they almost withdrew from Britain. As for the Brits, they turned Boudicca into a national hero, finally erecting a bronze statue to honor her in 1902, nearly 2,000 years later. Boudicca and Her Daughters stands on the west side of Westminster Bridge. The warrior queen rides her chariot into battle with her daughters at her side. The inscription reads:

  “Queen of the Iceni who died AD 61 after leading her people against the Roman invader.”

  What’s Mrs. Claus’s first name? According to the 1970 TV special Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, it’s Jessica.

  GO AHEAD—HAVE SOME

  MORE CHIPS

  On page 100 we told you the stories of some of the people responsible for bringing potato chips to the world. Like the chips themselves, chip trivia is a hard habit to break once you’ve gotten started. (Have you heard about the chip that was “born in a Disneyland trash can”?)

  HERMAN W. LAY

  In the depths of the Great Depression in 1932, Lay got a job selling peanut butter sandwiches made by Barrett Foods, an Atlanta snack food concern. After the company’s owner died in 1937, Lay bought the business and expanded into popcorn. In 1938 he added potato chips to his product line. Then in the early 1940s, rationing of sugar and chocolate during World War II made candy bars and other sweets hard to come by. Many people reached for potato chips as a substitute, and sales of Lay’
s Potato Chips soared. They were the first snack food advertised on television, which helped build Lay’s into the first potato chip brand sold nationwide.

  GUSTAVO OLGUIN & CHARLES ELMER DOOLIN

  At about the same time that Herman Lay got his job selling peanut butter sandwiches in Atlanta, a man named Elmer Doolin was making pies and cakes in his family’s struggling bakery in San Antonio, Texas. He’d thought about putting complimentary bowls of tortilla chips on the sales counter for his customers, but they went stale too quickly. Then in July 1932, he read a classified ad in the San Antonio Express placed by a man named Gustavo Olguin, a native of Mexico. He and his business partner, whose name has been lost to history, had a small business making fritas, or fried corn chips, using the same cornmeal dough, or masa, that is used to make tortillas. But he was homesick and wanted to return to Mexico, so the business was for sale. Price: $100, a lot of money during the Depression.

  Doolin started making the fritas—he anglicized the word into “Fritos”—in the family kitchen.

  Doolin went to Olguin’s store for a demonstration of how he squeezed the masa dough through a handheld device called a potato ricer to give the corn chips their shape, then cut strips of the extruded dough into a pot of boiling oil. Doolin tasted the finished product and was impressed. He wanted to buy the business, but he didn’t have $100. So he talked to his mother, Daisy Dean Doolin, and she agreed to pawn her wedding ring. When that brought just $80, Olguin’s business partner lent Doolin the remaining $20.

  The tires on NASCAR vehicles are filled with nitrogen. Why? Nitrogen is safer because it doesn’t expand as much when the tires heat up.

  With help from his brother and his parents, Doolin started making the fritas—he anglicized the word into “Fritos”—in the family kitchen. They averaged 10 pounds of chips a day. These sold so well that in 1933 he expanded production to factories in Dallas and Houston. In 1945, Doolin licensed Herman Lay to manufacture and sell Fritos Corn Chips in the southeastern United States, where Lay was based. They went nationwide four years later. By the time Doolin died in 1959 at the age of 56, the Frito Company was selling $60 million worth of Fritos and other snacks a year. Two years later it merged with the H. W. Lay & Company to become Frito-Lay. Today Frito-Lay, a division of PepsiCo, is the largest distributor of snack foods in the world. (C. E. Doolin’s other claim to fame: inventing Crunchy Cheetos in 1948. Cheetos Puffs weren’t introduced until 1971.)

  RICHARD MONTAÑEZ

  In 1976 Montañez was a janitor working at the Frito-Lay plant in Rancho Cucamonga, California. It was there that a machine on the Cheetos assembly line broke one day and some of the Cheetos were not dusted with the orange cheese powder that gives the snack food their flavor. Rather than toss the cheeseless Cheetos in the trash, Montañez took them home. He remembered back to his childhood days in Mexico, where elote, corn on the cob sprinkled with chili powder, was a popular street food. “I see the corn man adding butter, cheese, and chili to the corn and thought, what if I add chili to a Cheeto?” He sprinkled some chili powder on the Cheetos and was surprised by how good they tasted.

  Montañez’s wife, friends and co-workers also thought the spicy Cheetos were delicious. That inspired him to call the president of Frito-Lay and tell him about his product idea. The president asked Montañez to make a presentation at a meeting of company executives in two weeks’ time. Montañez and his wife spent those two weeks practicing his presentation, which they developed with help from a business book they borrowed from the public library. Montañez also bought a necktie—his first ever—for $3, and asked a neighbor to teach him how to tie it. He made his presentation to the executives, and they agreed to introduce the chili-flavored Cheetos under the name Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Today Flamin’ Hot Cheetos outsell regular Cheetos by a wide margin, and Montañez spends a lot more time in the executive suite than he used to: He’s PepsiCo’s executive vice president of multicultural sales and community activation. “There’s no such thing as ‘just a janitor,’ if you act like an owner,” he says.

  AN UNKNOWN SALESMAN AND ARCH WEST

  C. E. Doolin was also an early investor in Disneyland, which opened in Anaheim in 1955. The Frito Company, and later Frito-Lay, operated the “Casa de Fritos” Mexican restaurant in the park for many years. Free with every meal: Fritos corn chips. The restaurant had no use for actual tortilla chips, since the Frito-Lay Company didn’t make those. Then one day in the mid-1960s, a salesperson for Alex Foods, the Los Angeles company that supplied the tortillas that were used to make the restaurant’s enchiladas and other dishes, noticed that some unused tortillas had been tossed in the trash. Why let good food go to waste? The salesperson told the kitchen staff that if they cut the tortillas into triangles, fried them in oil, and added spicy seasoning, they would make delicious chips.

  When the Empire State Building opened in 1931, less than 25% of its offices were occupied. It was nicknamed the “Empty State Building.”

  West gave them a name similar to doraditos, the Spanish word for “little gold things”—Doritos.

  Casa De Fritos added the chips to the menu, apparently without telling the top brass at the Fritos Company, and they were a hit with diners. When Arch West, a vice president with Frito-Lay, paid a visit to Disneyland and saw the restaurant full of people enjoying the unfamiliar chips, he arranged for Alex Foods, and later Frito-Lay itself, to begin producing them. West gave them a name similar to doraditos, the Spanish word for “little gold things”—Doritos.

  Even after West retired from the Frito-Lay executive suite, he continued on as a Doritos taste tester until shortly before his death in 2011 at the age of 97. One of the last experimental flavors he tasted: cheeseburger Doritos (they were so disgusting that he spat them out). At his funeral, West’s family honored his request that they toss Doritos chips into his grave. “It will just be plain Doritos,” West’s daughter Jana Hacker told reporters. “Otherwise people will say, ‘Thanks Jana, I’ve got nacho all over my hand.’ ”

  (DIS)HONORABLE MENTION: TOM COLELLA

  Colella, an electrician who lives in Perth, Australia, didn’t invent a snack chip, but he did figure out a way to use them to play hooky from work: His employer issued him a personal data assistant that used GPS technology to track his location and report the information back to his employer. But as an electrician, Colella knew that if he placed the PDA in an empty bag of Twisties cheese curls, a snack food similar to Cheetos, the foil lining of the bag would act as a “Faraday cage” and block the PDA from sending or receiving signals. Thus blocked, Colella’s location would not be revealed to his employer, and he could go wherever he wanted. It’s estimated that Colella snuck off to play golf on the clock 140 times between 2014 and 2016. His fun ended when an anonymous tipster sent a letter to his employer, who promptly fired him. At last report, he was working as an Uber driver.

  OOPS: In 1915 the Washington Post reported that President Woodrow Wilson had attended a play with his fiancée and soon-to-be First Lady, Edith Galt, saying, “Rather than paying attention to the play, the President spent the evening entering Mrs. Galt.” (They meant to say “entertaining.”)

  The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC) believed that the heart, not the brain, was the…

  THE PRINCESS LETTERS

  Did you grow up watching The Princess Bride on VHS or cable TV? Or did your kids? Then you know all about this wonderful story full of romance, adventure, and Mandy Patinkin as the vengeance-seeking Inigo Montoya (“You killed my father! Prepare to die!”). Or do you? It turns out that there’s another chapter to the story—one you’ve probably never heard of.

  PAGE TO SCREEN

  Director Rob Reiner’s film The Princess Bride hit movie theaters in 1987. It’s a fairy tale adventure about the noble Westley’s (Cary Elwes) quest to reunite with his one true love, Princess Buttercup (Robin Wright), and save her from the clutches of the evil Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon). Along the way, he becomes a pirate, acquires three sid
ekicks—the revenge-obsessed Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin), the crafty Vizzini (Wallace Shawn), and the humongous Fezzik (Andre the Giant)—and even dies, only to be revived by Miracle Max the medicine man (Billy Crystal).

  Reiner presents the story as a book (“The Princess Bride, by S. Morgenstern”) being read by a grandfather (Peter Falk) to his grandson (Fred Savage). That framing device is the major difference between book and movie. William Goldman wrote the screenplay, and he also wrote the 1973 novel on which it’s based—The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure. The novel doesn’t have a story-within-a-story structure, so it has no grandpas and grandsons. Instead, it has a 50-page preamble in which Goldman explains that the book is actually an adaptation of a much longer, long-out-of-print book by “S. Morgenstern,” a legendary author from the nation of Florin. Morgenstern, Goldman says, wrote The Princess Bride, and he—Goldman—edited it down to just “the good parts.”

  FAKE NEWS

  Goldman’s introduction includes the story of how he discovered Morgenstern’s book: He needed a gift for his son, and so he sent his lawyer out to a bookstore in the middle of a snowstorm, and The Princess Bride was procured.

  However, absolutely none of that is true. No author named “S. Morgenstern” ever existed. The existence of an uncut version of The Princess Bride is fiction. Florin isn’t a real country. (Even the part about Goldman’s son is fictional—he doesn’t have a son.) Goldman wrote the entire book himself—the story and the “backstory.” He’s said his inspiration came one night when his two daughters were young and asked for a bedtime story; one wanted a story about a princess, and the other wanted a story about a bride. So he wrote a combination.