Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (41 page)

The man said, “My wife is Jewish, and she won’t let me have a Christmas tree in the house. So every year, to celebrate Christmas, I plant a pine tree where the public can enjoy it.”

The trooper replied, “You can’t do that! Take your damn tree and get out of here.”

Sent to me in March 1994 by Tricia Scarnati of Portland, Oregon. In July of the same year Mary A. Hochberg of Eugene, Oregon, wrote to me describing a story she heard as a child in New York City in the 1960s, in which a man using a similar ploy steals some bricks from a pile left near a building site. He tells the policeman that he is leaving some bricks left over from a home-improvement project. Both these writers were responding to a story from Belgium that I included in
The Baby Train,
in which a man following the identical scheme steals cobblestones from a pile left by street-repair workers.

It’s just human
nature to jump to conclusions (see Chapter 1)—also to seize at opportunities, miss the point, fudge the data, complain, criticize, rationalize, sympathize, brag, gloat, miss the boat, jump ship, blindly follow tradition (yet yearn to be different), and in general to act like the kids and grown-up kids that we are. At least, so the legends tell us. Urban legends reveal our self-image as being just semirational beings, and we tell and retell these legends in order to illustrate our candid view of our nature.

Here is the Chinese-American t’ai chi master Al Chung-liang Huang explaining an ancient principle of Asian wisdom about life, using a modern urban legend heard from one of his disciples:

(From
Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain.
) If that story seems familiar, check back in Chapter 6, where the same “Bungling Bride” legend is quoted from a rabbi who used it to encourage his congregation to learn the backgrounds of religious rituals. Whether told in a Zen, Jewish, or secular context, this traditional story illustrates a point about human nature, that sometimes we blindly follow tradition.

Here is another example, also revealing the wisdom of youth in the ways of human nature. This story was quoted in a Salt Lake City newspaper article that was part of a series on family relationships and counseling:

Years later, in the same newspaper, a letter to the editor concerning Social Security recounted a variation of the same legend, calling it “an Asian fable.” This time the father made a basket in which to place grandfather so he could throw him in the river and end the drain on the family finances. One of the children commented, “When you dispose of grandfather, bring back the basket, because we will need to use it for you someday.”

Characteristic of both the ancient stories and the modern legends of this type is that they reveal how people supposedly behave, but generally end abruptly without describing the reaction of the character whose inhumane human nature is exposed. Incidentally, these wooden-utensil/basket-casket stories are, in fact, both ancient fables and modern legends, since their plots can be traced widely in time and space and (as my examples demonstrate) they continue to be told.

Another aspect of human nature that is revealed in legends is our tendency to want to have a more glorious past. Many families tell stories of this kind to account for their average economic status when, of course, they would prefer to be—and feel they
deserve
to be—filthy rich:

“If Grandpa had held on to that piece of property, we’d be millionaires today.”

“Uncle Ed invented an improved widget, but he let a big company develop it, and he lost the profits that should have been his.”

“Our ancestors were English nobles, but they gave it all up to immigrate to the States.”

Although these “family misfortune stories” may contain some grains of truth, they become exaggerated and stylized as they’re retold through the generations. In short, they become wishful-thinking legends. Eventually that parcel of downtown Chicago property that Grandpa once owned becomes in the story “the exact piece of land where the Marshall Field’s department store stands today.” Uncle Ed’s widget is said to be the key ingredient in the success of General Electric, General Motors, or another giant corporation, though the details of the device are always sketchy.

The family nobility, it is explained, was forsaken many generations ago, so that by now nobody is quite sure how it happened. Perhaps some ancestor ran off with a commoner, or lost the family fortune for love, or differed with the king, forfeiting wealth in order to uphold some moral principle. According to other stories, the land became worthless, the business went bust, or the railroad went elsewhere, leaving Grandpa and his descendants stuck in the middle class.

People tell such stories because they really believe that hard work and persistence—not just blind luck—
should
pay off. If we’re not rich (industrious people that we are), then an ancestor
must
have done something wrong. That’s just human nature, no matter how you look at it.

“The Baby Train”

T
he first thing you hear mornings in Manitou is the early Q train to Chicago. It’s too early to get up and too late to go to sleep again. They have a legend out there that the morning yells of that rattler do a good deal to keep up the birth-rate.

Dear Ann Landers: If you think this is as funny as I do, go ahead and print it.

—Longtime Reader in Bentonville, Ark.

Dear Ark: I do, and I will. Here it is:

“I asked my Uncle Jeb why he and Aunt Tessie had so many kids. He replied ‘We lived down by the tracks. The train woke me up at 6 a.m., and I didn’t have to be anywhere ‘til 7.’”

The first is from Christopher Morley’s novel
Kitty Foyle,
published in 1939; the second is from Ann Landers’s column of July 9, 1996. In my book of the same title I print longer versions of “The Baby Train” from the United States, England, South Africa, and Australia. This story, illustrating how people will presumably seize any opportunity for sex, goes back at least to the early Industrial Revolution, when train travel was just developing. Some Canadian versions describe a French-Canadian train engineer who deliberately blows his whistle long and loud early in the mornings, waking people up and leading them to do what comes naturally. The punch line in Canada is often something like “Gawdam that Jean-Pierre!” The baby-train legend has long been a favorite on college campuses, told to explain the supposedly high birth rate in certain married-student apartment units. In coastal locations the same story is told, with a fog horn waking up the couples. The English term “whistle babies” is sometimes used to refer to the results of these early morning incidents; it has a counterpart in the German
Jagd kinder
or “hunt children,” referring to conceptions occurring during the hunting season. Contradicting the legends, demographers generally deny that events such as blackouts, earthquakes, and major snowstorms often spur a huge increase in births nine months later. However, following Hurricane Andrew in 1993 news stories claimed that hundreds of people in southern Florida had conceived unexpected babies during the storm. A Knight-Ridder article circulated in May of that year quoted a Florida obstetrician saying, “Major snowstorms, blackouts, anything that shuts business down…if you’re stuck at home and there’s nothing else to do, these kind of things do happen.”

“The Trained Professor”

T
here is an ancient legend that has been showing up in college classrooms for at least 20 years. According to the story, a group of psychology students was being lectured on the principle of positive reinforcement. The lecturer was boring, so to relieve the tedium, the students concocted a scheme whereby they would all look up and smile whenever the instructor spoke from the left-hand side of the room. According to another version, by the end of the semester they had trained him to lecture with one hand stuck into his coat à la Napoleon Bonaparte, speaking in terse, clipped sentences.

I
heard the “Trained Professor” story from our psychology teacher in Psych 101 at Princeton sometime between 1963 and 1967. He said it was true. The behavior induced was lecturing from one side of the platform. Several of us in his class decided to test his hypothesis, and we succeeded in inducing the same behavior from him within about two weeks.

I
n 1978 while I was a teaching assistant in the English Department at California State University, Sacramento, a group of us decided to condition our seminar instructor. We used rapt attention as a reward when he stood in the most remote and darkest corner of the classroom to lecture. It wasn’t long before he headed to that spot to begin each class…. I know that our idea was not original, but I’ve forgotten where it came from or who first suggested it.

The first report is from Jeffrey Swain of San Diego, California, writing in 1988. The second came from James C. Thompson, librarian at the University of California, Riverside, in 1989. The third came from Meredith A. Wilson of Solano Community College in Suisun, California, in 1990. Although I quote these examples of “The Trained Professor” from California sources, the story—and the prank itself—are well known all across the United States and in Great Britain, if not beyond. A report on an actual experiment of this kind published in
Teaching of Psychology,
vol. 15, no. 3 (October 1988), commented “Anecdotes about groups of students conditioning their professors as a practical joke are legion.” The induced behavior, according to the stories, may include lecturing while standing on a desk or on an overturned wastebasket. The legend is based on a technique that B. F. Skinner, the father of behavioralism, called “operant behavior.” The underlying principle, often demonstrated in animal experiments (particularly using pigeons), is that any behavior followed by reinforcing stimuli, such as food or praise, is more likely to occur again. Skinner, who died in 1990, not only developed techniques for animal behavior modification, he also claimed to have applied the system to a human subject, specifically to a rival psychologist who was conducting a seminar. Skinner’s story, often repeated or paraphrased in lectures and in published sources, is the likely basis of the campus pranks and legends. Two reviews of “Trained Professor” legends and the psychology underlying them appeared in
FOAFtale News
(Nos. 21 and 24; March and December 1991, respectively). In her 1975 book on animal behavior,
Lads Before the Wind,
Karen Pryor recounts Skinner’s version of the rival-training episode and quotes the following story
about
Skinner, as told in 1966 by his daughter Deborah: “Two of his students decided to shape a piece of behavior in their roommate by giving or withholding smiling and approval. They succeeded so well that they could elicit the behavior of standing on a chair and doing a little dance, at will. Excited by success, they invited Skinner to coffee in their room one night and showed him the poor roommate, climbing in all innocence onto a chair and shuffling about. ‘Very interesting,’ says Skinner, ‘but what does it tell us about pigeons?’”

“Cussing and Clowns”

I
grew up near Chicago and always watched Bozo, who was based in Chicago. I vividly recall talking with my friends in the late 1950s or 1960s about that cussing incident on TV. It was always a “friend” who had seen it. In our version, the kid was playing a game that involved tossing a ping pong ball into six buckets. The first was closest to him, and the 6th was farthest out. Each day, before the game started, the host of the show would place a silver dollar in Bucket Number 6, and each kid who was able to toss the ball into that bucket won all the silver dollars that had accumulated. Of course, for each other bucket he made, he won a prize too, and the prizes grew in value the farther he went down the line of buckets.

Supposedly, this kid had made five buckets, and was on the all-important Bucket Number Six. He blew it and said, “Shit!” So Bozo admonished him, saying “That was a Bozo no-no.” And the kid replied, “Ram it, clown!” or something even worse.