Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (5 page)

• It wasn’t until the Middle Ages that German peasants became the first to celebrate the birthdays of everyone in the family. Children’s birthday celebrations were especially important. Called
Kinderfestes
, they were the forerunner to our toddler birthday parties.

THE BIRTHDAY SONG.
Mildred and Patty Smith Hill, two sisters from Louisville, Kentucky, published a song called “Good Morning to All” in a kindergarten songbook in 1893. They wrote it as a “welcoming” song, to be sung to young students at the beginning of each school day.

In 1924, a songbook editor changed the lyrics to “Happy Birthday to You” and published it without the Hill sisters’ permission. The new lyrics made it a popular tune, but the Hill family took no action...until the song appeared in a Broadway play in 1933. Then Jessica Hill (a third sister) sued for copyright infringement. She won, but most singers stopped using the song rather than pay the royalty fee. In one play called
Happy Birthday
, for example, actress Helen Hayes
spoke
the words to avoid paying it.

Today, whenever “Happy Birthday” is sung commercially, a royalty still must be paid to the Hills.

What’s the most popular candy bar in the U.S.? Snickers.

Some pop songs are pure fiction, but some are inspired by real events in a songwriter’s life. Here are four examples of “pop autobiography” from
Behind the Hits,
by Bob Shannon and John Javna.

T
HE DOCK OF THE BAY—OTIS REDDING.
One warm morning in late 1967, Redding relaxed on a houseboat he’d rented in Sausalito, across the bay from San Francisco. He was “just wastin’ time”—and he could afford to. A few days earlier, he’d electrified the audience with his midnight show-closing performance at the Monterey Pop Festival. Then, he had headed north to the legendary Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco and knocked out the audience there. He was definitely on his way to rock stardom. Satisfied, Redding kicked back in the sunshine, played a few chords on his guitar, and dreamed up a little tune: “Sittin’ in the mornin’ sun...”

When Redding got back to Memphis, he went into the studio and recorded his song. At the end he wasn’t sure what to sing or say—so he just whistled, capturing the casual mood he’d been in on that houseboat in Sausalito.

For the Record: Three days later, Redding died in a plane crash near Madison, Wisconsin. “The Dock of the Bay” became the first posthumous #1 record in history—and Redding’s only #1 pop hit.

ROXANNE—THE POLICE.
On October 20, 1977, the Police—a starving “art rock” band—were scheduled to be the opening act for a punk band in a Paris club. So they loaded up their car with equipment and drove to France. But when they arrived at the club, they found that there was no gig. They weren’t opening for anybody, and no one had come to watch them. They played to an empty house anyway, and left disconsolate, because they could scarcely afford to have made the trip for nothing.

Things got worse: As they drove around the city right after the gig, their car broke down; it had to be towed back to London.

Sting, their bass player and singer, decided that as long as he had to walk, he might as well take a stroll through Paris’s famous red-light district. “It was the first time I’d seen prostitutes on the streets,” Sting recalls. “I imagined being in love with one of those girls. I mean, they do have fellas. How would I feel?” He translated the experience into a song called “Roxanne.” Two years later it became the first big New Wave hit and established the Police.

Someone paid $14,000 for the bra Marilyn Monroe wore in
Some Like It Hot
.

For the Record:
Where did he get the name? “It’s a beautiful name, with such a rich history....Roxanne was Alexander the Great’s wife, and Cyrano de Bergerac’s girlfriend.”

UP, UP AND AWAY—THE FIFTH DIMENSION.
Here’s songwriter Jimmy Webb’s version of writing the song: “A friend of mine named William F. Williams, who was at radio station KMEN in San Bernardino, was using this hot air balloon for promotions in the...area. He and I were just kind of hanging out, and he took me up a couple of times. The first time, he and I started thinking about doing a film about hot air balloons...just because they were so colorful and so big and so different....He said, ‘I’ve got a great idea for a title—
Up, Up and Away
.’ And I said, ‘Oh, that’s good, I like that.’ I was still going to San Bernardino Valley College, so that afternoon I sneaked into a practice room and I wrote ‘Up, Up and Away.’ The next time I saw him, I said, ‘Well, I’ve got the music for the film.’ As it turned out, there never was a film made. But the Fifth Dimension recorded it a few years later, and it worked out nicely for everybody.”

SOMEONE SAVED MY LIFE TONIGHT—ELTON JOHN.
“She was six feet tall and going out with a midget in Sheffield,” Elton John told
Rolling Stone
about a woman he’d met in 1968. “He used to beat her up! I felt so sorry for her...I fell desperately in love.” When they moved in together, “It was just like six months in hell....I tried to commit suicide. It was a very Woody Allen-type suicide. I turned on the gas and left all the windows open.” Still, Elton planned to marry her. The night before the ceremony, his friend and manager, John Baldry, came over and convinced him to call it off. Some time later, Elton and Bernie Taupin wrote “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” about Baldry’s eleventh-hour wedding intervention.

For the Record:
Elton didn’t like the record. “I thought it was the worst vocal of all time.” But it hit #4 on the charts and was nominated for a Grammy.

Sammy Davis, Jr., was originally known professionally as “Silent Sam, the Dancing Midget.”

When Dolley Madison passed away, a critic noted that “the first lady of the nation” had died. Since then, we’ve referred to all presidents’ wives as “First Ladies.” Here are 10 facts about them.

1.
Following doctor’s orders, Eleanor Roosevelt ate three chocolate-covered garlic balls every day of her adult life. Her physician assured her it would improve her memory.

2.
Lady Bird Johnson was such a fan of TV’s “Gunsmoke” that she sometimes left official functions early to watch the show.

3.
William McKinley’s wife, Ida, suffered from seizures. (She was believed to be an epileptic.) She and her husband took the problem in stride: whenever she suffered a seizure during a state dinner, President McKinley would drape a handkerchief over her face. When the fit had passed, Ida would remove the handkerchief herself and continue as if nothing had happened.

4.
Louisa Adams (John Quincy Adams’s wife) had a unique hobby: she spun silk from silkworms living in the mulberry trees on the White House lawn.

5.
Martha Washington was such a poor speller (she spelled the word “cat” with two t’s) that George often wrote her letters for her.

6.
Dolley Madison was addicted to snuff.

7.
Edith Wilson (Woodrow Wilson’s wife) was a direct descendant of Pocahontas.

8.
Elizabeth Monroe, wife of James Monroe, liked to have the White House staff address her as “Your Majesty.”

9.
Zachary Taylor’s wife hated public life so much that she rarely attended White House functions. Many people never even realized the president had a wife until he died in office in 1850...and she attended the funeral.

10.
Harry Truman met his future wife, Bess, when both were only five years old. One thing he liked about her: she was the only girl in Independence, Missouri, who could whistle through her teeth.

Bad year: Nobody won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1972.

You’ve bought them. You’ve played with them. Now the BRI will satisfy your curiousity about where they came from and who created them.

W
IFFLE BALLS
In 1953, David Mullany noticed that his son and a friend were playing stickball in the small backyard of their Fairfield, Connecticut, home...but they were using one of Mullany’s plastic golf balls instead of a rubber ball. It seemed like a good idea; that way the ball couldn’t be hit or thrown too far.

Intrigued, Mullany began experimenting with the golf balls. He cut holes in some with a razor blade and discovered that, with the right configuration, players using a lightweight plastic ball could even throw curves and sliders. In 1955, he began manufacturing his new creation, marketing it as a Wiffle Ball—a name he adapted from the baseball term “to whiff,” or strike out.

SUPERBALLS

In the early 1960s, a chemist named Norman Stingley was experimenting with high-resiliency synthetics when he discovered a compound he dubbed “Zectron.” He was intrigued: When the material was fashioned into a ball, he found it retained almost 100% of its bounce—which meant it had six times the bounce of regular rubber balls. And a Zectron ball kept bouncing about 10 times longer than a tennis ball.

Stingley presented the discovery to his employer, the Bettis Rubber Company, but the firm had no use for it. So, in 1965, Stingley took his Zectron ball to Wham-O, the toy company that had created Hula Hoops and Frisbees. It was a profitable trip. Wham-O snapped up Stingley’s invention, named it “Superball,” and sold 7 million of them in the next six months.

Scientific Curiosity.
Stingley wasn’t the only “scientist” interested in Superballs. During the Superball craze, aficionados in Australia made a giant Superball and dropped it from a skyscraper to see if it would bounce all the way back up.

About a quarter of the oxygen in your bloodstream is used by your brain.

Unfortunately, the experiment went awry: when the ball hit the ground, it split in half and one part went crashing down the street, bouncing off cars and buildings until it crashed through the front window of a store.

PIGGY BANKS

“For almost 300 years,” writes Charles Panati in
Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things
, “the predominant child’s bank has been a pig with a slot in its back.” Yet, he points out, pigs have no symbolic connection to saving money. So why did people pick a pig?

According to Panati, “The answer is: by coincidence. During the Middle Ages, mined metal was scarce, expensive, and thus rarely used in the manufacture of household utensils. More abundant and economical throughout Western Europe was a type of dense, orange clay known as pygg. It was used in making dishes, cups, pots, and jars, and the earthenware items were referred to as pygg.

“Frugal people then as now saved cash in the kitchen pots and jars. A ‘pygg jar’ was not yet shaped like a pig. But the name persisted as the clay was forgotten. By the 18th century in England, pygg jar had become pig jar, or pig bank. Potters, not usually etymologists, simply cast the bank in the shape of its common, everyday name.”

TROLL DOLLS

In the early 1950s, a Danish woodcarver named Thomas Dam made a wooden doll as a birthday gift for his teenage daughter.

The doll, Dam’s interpretation of “the mythical Scandinavian elves visible only to children and childlike grown-ups,” was so popular with local kids that a Danish toy store owner insisted he make more of them. Eventually, to keep up with European demand, Dam began mass-producing them out of plastic.

In the early 1960s, they were exported to the United States as Dammit Dolls...and quickly became a teenage fad, adapted to everything from key chains to sentimental “message” dolls. But since Dam had no legal protection for the design, dozens of manufacturers jumped on the troll-wagon with knockoffs called Wish Niks, Dam Things, Norfins, etc.

The original Dammit Dolls are now collectors’ items.

Some toothpastes contain antifreeze.

General George Patton was famous for his one-liners as he was for his military victories in World War II.

“In war, just as in loving, you’ve got to keep on shoving.”

“To be a successful soldier you must know history....What you must know is how man reacts. Weapons change but man who uses them changes not at all. To win battles you do not beat weapons—you beat the soul of the enemy man.”

“Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory.”

“The most vital quality a soldier can possess is self-confidence, utter, complete, and bumptious.”

“Never tell people
how
to do things. Tell them
what
to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”

“A pint of sweat will save a gallon of blood.”

“Untutored courage is useless in the face of educated bullets.”

“Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.”

“A piece of spaghetti or a military unit can only be led from the front end.”

“Use steamroller strategy; that is, make up your mind on the course and direction of action, and stick to it. But in tactics, do not steamroller. Attack weakness. Hold them by the nose and kick them in the pants.”

“There’s one thing you men can say when it’s all over and you’re home once more. You can thank God that twenty years from now when you’re sitting by the fireside with your grandson on your knee, and he asks you what you did in the war, you won’t have to shift him to the other knee, cough and say, ‘I shoveled crap in Louisiana.’”

Q: How long is the world’s longest human foot? A: 27 inches.

Who was Christopher Columbus and what did he really do? Much of what we were taught in school is untrue, according to
The Myth-Adventures of Christopher Columbus,
by Jack Mingo. Here are some examples.

T
HE MYTH:
Columbus was born in Genoa, Italy.

BACKGROUND:
The only documentary proof is a will written in 1498, purportedly by Columbus, that begins with “I, being born in Genoa...”

THE TRUTH:
According to his son Fernando, Columbus never revealed where he was born; he preferred to call himself “a man of the sea.” And historians doubt whether the 1498 will is genuine. Meanwhile, dozens of places claim to be Columbus’s birthplace, including: