Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (37 page)

After several weeks of this regime, she noticed that she was not feeling at all well, and she had a foul odor about her body, even after bathing.

So she made an appointment with her doctor, and after examining her he pronounced that she had managed to cook her internal organs by over-exposure to the tanning rays. The odor was actually the rotting of these organs, and further, this foolish girl had just two weeks to live.

Sent to me in January 1988 by Bill Kestell of New Holstein, Wisconsin. This story mistakenly assumes that microwaves are generated by tanning lamps; it was told nationwide in the summer of 1987 and got massive media publicity in “Dear Abby” columns of September 22 and November 6, both of which firmly debunked the tale. Sometimes the victim is a cheerleader preparing herself for a training camp, or a bride-to-be anticipating her honeymoon in Hawaii. The legend continued to annoy tanning-salon owners to such a degree that the June/July 1989 issue of the industry magazine
Tanning Trends
had to debunk it once again. But telling continued. In October 1994, a student at West Liberty (West Virginia) State College reported to me that her instructor in a health class included the story as an example of everyday causes of skin cancer; this victim was getting tanned so she would look nice at her homecoming dance. There are, of course, real dangers inherent in overexposing oneself to ultraviolet rays, whether from the sun or from tanning lamps, but the “broiled again!” legend derives from fantasy, not science.

“Push-Starting the Car”

Later the
[Providence] Bulletin
checked with state police, and had to announce that the story was not true. It appeared as a joke in a Boston paper, and was phoned into the Providence paper as straight news by a prankster.

From what the
[Reader’s] Digest
editors have been able to discover, this is another of those “true” stories that sweep the country. Before the AP item appeared we had already received more than 100 accounts of the incident. The earliest came from California, but it was followed in a few days by a version from Massachusetts. The story also came from Texas, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Connecticut—even from the Canal Zone, where the car was on the Trans-Isthmian Highway. In each case the writer insisted that the driver was his mother, a neighbor, a close friend or a coworker. One writer was the mechanic who repaired the cars, another was the insurance adjuster. One version had a wife pushing her husband—and she landed in the hospital with a fractured skull.

After the AP carried the story, hundreds of clippings poured into the
Digest
—and they’re still coming—including one from a woman in Tennessee who vowed that the Cranston motorist was her brother.

From
Reader’s Digest,
July 1954, p. 90, based on an Associated Press story picked up from the
Providence Bulletin.
The AP story and its aftermath were also summarized in
The Unicorn Book of 1954.
This is an instance when the media were ahead of the folklorists in recognizing, collecting, and comparing versions of an urban legend. The push-starting legend actually pre-dated automatic transmission when it was applied to various car models of the late 1930s and early ’40s, which were equipped with “Hydromatic,” “Fluid Drive,” or “Dynaflow.” It was necessary to push a car so equipped fast enough to develop sufficient torque in the drive-shaft fan blades to rotate the motor set of blades and start the engine. The legend continues to be told, with updated damage figures, and nowadays invariably mentioning automatic transmission. The blame for the misunderstanding always goes to a woman driver. Readers still send me versions of this story purporting to be firsthand experiences. Another legend describing a different misunderstanding of automatic transmission describes a young man taking a stolen car out for a drag race on the highway. He starts out with the shift lever in “D for drag,” and when another car starts to pass he shifts into “R for race” and tears out the transmission.

“Cruise Control”

I
heard this story about five years ago while I was living in Omaha, Nebraska, and I believe the source was supposed to be a Paul Harvey newscast.

From
Billy and the Boingers Bootleg
by Berke Breathed. Copyright © 1986
by
The Washington Post.
By permission of Little, Brown and Company

There was this wealthy student from the Middle East attending either the University of Kansas or Kansas State. He goes downtown and buys this fully equipped van; it has everything—fancy paint, sun roof, carpet, power everything, and a bar complete with a refrigerator. Picks up the whole works and pays cash. Hops in and drives off.

A little while later motorists on the Interstate see this van veer off the highway and go into the ditch where it overturns. They stop and rush over to see if the driver is hurt, and it turns out that he is only badly shaken up. Asked how he could lose control of his van on a flat stretch of Kansas Interstate, he replies, “Well, I put the van on cruise control, and went in back to fix myself a drink….”

Sent to me by Tom R. Roper of Waterloo, Iowa, in October 1982. I first heard this updated version of the latest-option car legend in 1977, and it has been popular ever since, often told about a foreign driver in the United States or Canada, usually one from a Middle Eastern country or from Pakistan. In the July 9, 1986, issue of the
Wall Street Journal
an article on strange insurance claims attributed the incident to a woman driving a new van on a highway near Washington, D.C., who left the wheel to tend to her crying baby in the back. When I queried the Allstate Insurance official mentioned in the news story, he said that he had heard about the case from a claims manager eight or nine years previously and had no other knowledge of it. Another Allstate spokesman swore that it “really happened,” but his attempts to track down a record of the case were unsuccessful. A reader who assured me in a 1987 letter that the incident had occurred in St. Louis in 1985 to an Arab student whose insurance claim was handled by the reader’s own sister never responded to my fervent plea for more information about the case. A “Bloom County” comic strip released on April 8, 1987, pictured all the members of the “Boingers World Tour” in the back of their van having a conference when somebody asked, “Who’s driving?!” The reply, from Opus the penguin, was, “Keep yer pants on. I pushed Cruise Control.”

“The Ice-Cream Car”

A
fter the engine is shut off the underhood temperature begins to rise. When the engine has been shut off for 20 minutes, referred to as a “hot soak” period, the temperature will usually reach it’s peak. This condition will occur particularly in the summertime or when the car is stored in a heated or attached garage.

Fuel will frequently drip from the ends of the throttle shaft or can be observed dripping out of the main discharge nozzle or pump nozzle into the manifold…. Hard hot starting occurs if the driver attempts to start the car after it has stood for 20 minutes.

This condition is PERCOLATION, not flooding….

A classic example of percolation was recorded recently. A lady driver stopped frequently at an ice cream store to buy ice cream. When she bought a quart of Vanilla and returned to her car the car started instantly. When she purchased Butterpeacan and returned to her car it wouldn’t start.

An alert service Representative made two trips to the store with the driver. The first trip she bought Vanilla. It was pre-packed and she returned to the car in 5 minutes and the vehicle started perfectly. When she returned to buy the Butterpecan she waited 20 minutes for it to be hand packed and pay her bill. When she returned to the car she pumped the accelerator 2 or 3 times; adding additional fuel to the already over rich mixture in the manifold. The car wouldn’t start. It was necessary for the Representative to explain the correct procedure to start a hot engine.

Verbatim, with a few deletions as indicated, from the Holley Carburetor Co.
Service Guide #2,
Part #36-71, p. 5. Frank W. King, national technical director of the Mercedes-Benz Club of America, who sent me a photocopy of this page in February 1990, did not know the date of the guide. But references on the page to “since 1968,” plus the part number, suggest 1971. Percolation and flooding are real enough mishaps, but the “classic example” cited is a legend. Several readers have written me to say that they remember the same finicky-car problem discussed in the “Model Garage” section of
Popular Science
sometime in the 1940s or ’50s. The June 1978 issue of
Traffic Safety
magazine repeated the story from
Automotive Engineering,
saying it was hand-packed pistachio ice cream that caused the problem, and that it occurred in Texas. A reader in Milwaukee wrote to say that she also heard the story about Texas, and that the problem was traced to “any flavor but vanilla.” The February 6, 1992, issue of
Bits & Pieces
magazine, “A monthly mixture of horse sense and common sense about working with people,” included a detailed account of “The Ice-Cream Car,” saying that it had happened to a Pontiac owner whose family voted each night after dinner which flavor of ice cream to have for dessert. Any time vanilla was chosen, the car would not start on the return trip. The problem was traced to the layout of the ice-cream store, which kept all the vanilla in a separate case at the front of the store for quick pickup. According to this source, the story was “a favorite at General Motors.”