Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (47 page)

“But neither of us noticed that the rope was tied to the bumper.

“I turned around and started hammering on a shingle just as she pulled away. I hit the ground hard and shot right through the garden fence.

“I figured I was dragged about 200 feet through the grass before the rope finally broke.”

Willis’ wife Michelle didn’t realize what happened and drove off into the distance.

A neighbor found Willis writhing in his front yard and called an ambulance.

“I’m in no condition to spank my son even if I wanted to,” said Willis.

“Actually, I don’t think I need to. He knows his thoughtlessness almost killed his daddy.”

Article by Irwin Fisher from the tabloid
Weekly World News
on September 19, 1988. The named locale, plus the phrase “attach it to something secure,” identify the story as being greatly expanded from a brief Reuters news item circulated in January 1980. Ladder humor is a staple of slapstick comedy, whether in films or folklore. “The Man on the Roof” has been a popular urban legend both in the United States and abroad since at least the mid-1960s. The man sometimes climbs onto the roof to adjust his TV antenna or to shovel down a heavy accumulation of snow. Often the story merges into “The Exploding Toilet” when the wife decides to paint the bathroom during her husband’s hospital stay. She pours used paint thinner into the toilet just as her husband is arriving home, and she neglects to flush, setting the poor man up for a second accident. Naturally, those laughing paramedics are waiting in the wings to enter this slapstick comedy during Scene Three. The man pulled from his roof becomes an airline pilot working at home in Greenwich, Connecticut, in a version included in
Cabin Pressure,
a 1989 collection of flight attendants’ anecdotes compiled by Elizabeth Harwell and Corylee Spiro. However, in another airline version a mechanic is working on the wing of a large aircraft while secured by a rope that is tied to a portable piece of large ground equipment. The modern legends may have originated with a popular European folktale about a farmer and his wife who decide to switch tasks. The husband makes a complete mess of the household tasks, even putting the cow to graze on the grass roof of the house while he cleans up from various mishaps he caused inside. To secure the cow, he ties a rope around its neck, drops the loose end down the chimney, and ties the other end around his waist. Naturally, the cow falls off the roof, dragging the man up the chimney upside down. I’ve searched for a variant of this folktale that includes laughing paramedics, but the ones I’ve found so far just have the wife laughing her head off.

“The Exploding Bra”

T
his happened around 1960 to my aunt, who was at that time a very glamorous young lady. She wore a platinum beehive hairdo, gold spike heels, capri pants—and she wore an article of underclothing I have actually seen, an inflatable bra. This was briefly popular in the early ’60s, and consisted of a plastic falsie which was blown up with a straw to the desired fullness and inserted into a special bra.

The story goes that my aunt and her husband were in an airplane when the decompression effect resulted in her bra expanding alarmingly. She raced for the restroom; in some versions she made it in time, but in others she was in the middle of the aisle when her frontage loudly exploded.

I showed your story of the inflatable bra exploding to a colleague who mentioned hearing similar stories 25 years ago in Western Colorado when he was in high school. The stories he heard were about girls wearing inflatable bras to the prom and having their dates pin a corsage on and the bras popping and/or deflating.

Eve Golden of Secaucus, New Jersey, sent me the first story in 1989; after I published a column on the topic, I received the second version from my friend Dan Lester, then living in Durango, Colorado. Jearl Walker, in his 1975 book
The Flying Circus of Physics,
includes an even more slapstick version of the story. He reprints an undated Associated Press report of an airline stewardess whose inflatable bra “expands to about size 46,” whereupon the stewardess uses a passenger’s hatpin to pierce the bra, leading “a man of foreign descent” on board to grapple with her, intending to prevent the stewardess from injuring herself. More recently I have heard of breast implants rather than inflatable bras supposedly expanding when cabin pressure in an airliner changes suddenly.

“The Nude Housewife”

T
he following incident took place in an apartment house near Homewood, Illinois, and for obvious reasons I shall use no names. A housewife washed her hair, put it in curlers, and then went to the basement laundry room with some dirty clothes. Soon she was waiting for one load to finish in the dryer as she put the second load into the washer.

At the last minute she decided that the dress she was wearing needed cleaning, too. She removed it and threw it into the washing machine, knowing she would get a change from the dryer in a moment or two. Standing there in her shoes and brief undergarments, she noticed a cobweb in the corner. She decided to remove it. She didn’t want to get her hair dirty, so she pulled a discarded football helmet over the curlers, and got ready to sweep down the cobweb. Just then the meter reader walked into the basement. The lady froze quietly in the corner, hoping to avoid his attention. She thought she had been successful, but as he departed he looked at her and said, “I do hope your team wins.”

From Jerome Beatty, Jr.’s, “Trade Winds” column in
Saturday Review,
July 4, 1964, where a discreet illustration is included. In the November 1970 issue of
Esquire,
Beatty described telling this story to friends as something that had happened to “a friend of a friend of mine in Illinois” and then having another version from the March 1961 issue of
Reader’s Digest
pointed out to him. The
Digest
also illustrated the story, for modesty adding “an old raccoon coat” to the woman’s attire. This oft-told slapstick story with a joke-like punch line is a favorite of Ann Landers, who has published it in her columns at least six times between 1975 and 1992 and who was also credited with it in a 1966 book called
Family Laugh Lines.
Landers described the housewife putting on her son’s football helmet to protect her hair curlers from leaking pipes, but she mentioned no spider web, broom, or raccoon coat. Erma Bombeck modified the story yet again in her 1979
Aunt Erma’s Cope Book
by having the housewife wearing her son’s full football uniform when the washer repairman arrived. The best treatment of the plot I have seen appeared in Gerald Kloss’s column “Slightly Kloss-Eyed” in the
Milwaukee Journal
in 1988. Kloss, in a parody of urban legend research, pretended to have collected several texts from his readers. From “Helena Handbasket” of “Dry Prong, LA” he quoted the story of a 275-pound defensive tackle for a pro football team who was surprised by a female meter reader while he tried to repair a leaky faucet while wearing only a football helmet. The meter reader quipped, “I hope you win the game Sunday, mister,” and the player replied: “Thanks for your support. You can talk about all the money we make, but we’re really playing for all you fans out there, and you can count on us to put out a 100-percent effort. Our running game’s shaping up and if our pass defense holds up, I think we’ve got a good chance of going all the way.” Beautiful!

“The Nude in the RV”

T
his is not a funny book, but we’ll begin it by telling a funny story. It’s about a couple of veteran campers and we tell it only because (1) it happened needlessly, (2) it might have ended in tragedy, and (3) anything as silly as this won’t happen to you if you follow our philosophy of restricting weekend camping to within easy driving distance of home.

It happened to John and Jane Doe (we call them that in order to protect them from the laughter and ribbing of the many friends they’ve made over the years in campgrounds throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico) while homeward-bound after weeks on the road in their pickup-truck camper. And it happened on the last day.

Three hundred miles usually was the limit of a day’s driving for John and Jane on any camping trip they ever had taken. But on the end of one of the most pleasant journeys of their lives, as day dawned they were 450 miles from home, and so they decided to press on until they got there.

Then, a good breakfast under their belts, coffee pot, frying pan, dishes and knives and forks washed and safely stowed away, campsite policed for stray scraps of debris they might have overlooked, John got behind the wheel of their camper and Jane on the seat beside him.

Nine hours later and still about 75 miles from home, John had had it. He pulled to the side of the road, turned to Jane and said: “You drive, I’m going to climb into the sack and take a nap.” He got out of the cab, walked to the camper’s rear door, climbed in, took off his shoes and stripped down to his BVDs, stretched out on a bunk, pulled a cover over him and within minutes was dead to the world.

Jane, totally out of sight and without means of communication with John in the back compartment, tooled merrily down the highway thinking nice thoughts of spending that night in the coziness of their long-unseen home—until suddenly she came to a fork in the road and did not know which to take, left or right.

She did what any driver would do under such circumstances—came to a stop to ponder the problem. But so abruptly that John was tossed from his bunk and onto the floor of the camper. His mind befogged by sleep, he jumped to his feet, plowed through the rear door and sockless, shoeless, shirtless and clad only in his shorts, leaped down into the road to find out what was going on.

And just then, having made up her mind, Jane took off again, oblivious to what was going on behind her. John shouted, screamed, cried, raced after her.

“Jane! Jane! Stop! Stop!”

But Jane did not hear nor did she stop, and as the camper faded into the distance, passing motorists slowed and stared at John, wondered what kind of nut was this, and sped off again.

To one or two he raised his thumb, wondering at the coldness, the cruelty, the animosity of drivers who would not give a man a lift. And then, for the first time, he came fully awake and aware of what little he wore. No socks, no shoes, no undershirt, only shorts. Quickly then he hopped behind some bushes hoping that a police car would come along that he could flag down.

But none came, the sun was fading and John was growing colder. So, stifling his embarrassment, he once more stepped to the side of the road and bravely signaled for a lift. Again car after car slowed, stared and sped off again until finally a truck came along and stopped.

“Buddy,” the driver said, “you look like you’re in trouble. Hop in.”

John did, told his story, and the driver, a sympathetic man, stripped off his jacket and said “Here, buddy, you wear this and we’ll go find your wife.”

He stepped on the gas, tooled down the road to catch the long-gone camper and so an hour or more went by and they were at a cutoff 15 miles from John’s home.

“She must be there by now,” he said. “I’ll get out here.”

“Not on your life,” the truck driver said. “I’ll take you.”

And he did. But when they got there, Jane was not.

John thanked him, invited him in for a drink, heard him decline, took his name and address so he could properly say thank you by mail and perhaps with a gift, climbed down from the cab, waved goodbye, walked up the walk to the front door, to the rear door and then to every window that he could reach. They all, of course, were locked.

But, luckily, the garage doors were not. So John opened them wide, unfolded a garden chair and sat down inside, safe from prying passing eyes, to wait for Jane.

He sat and he sat and slowly became aware that the lawn was parched, more brown than green, and badly in need of watering—this, John, an amateur gardener who took great pride in his grass and his flowers, could not stand.

John rationalized. They live in a sparsely settled area. Houses are few and far between. He’d worked in the yard before in bathing trunks. If any neighbors should see him maybe they’d think he was wearing bathing trunks once again.

Thus mentally fortified, he hooked up the garden hose, turned on the valve and proceeded to give the lawn a long-overdue watering.

And that was what he was doing when Jane, who thought him still asleep in the camper, came home several wrong turns later. She turned into the driveway, saw him, let out a shriek, rammed her foot down on the gas pedal instead of the brake, drove into the garage, through the rear wall and out again. Luckily she was unhurt.