Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (14 page)

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Bobby Leach
(1911). This circus stuntman went over the falls in a steel barrel and survived. Fifteen years later, while on tour with his famous barrel in New Zealand, Leach slipped on an orange peel and fell. He broke his leg, which later had to be amputated, leading to gangrene, which killed him.

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Charles Stephens
(1920). A 58-year-old barber, he had a fair reputation as a high-dive and parachute artist, but thought a trip over Niagara Falls would make him really famous. He attached a 100-pound anvil to the bottom of his barrel for ballast and then got in and strapped his feet to the anvil. He surrounded himself with pillows and inserted his arms into two straps bolted inside the barrel. The force of the plunge caused the bottom to drop out of the barrel. The anvil, together with Mr. Stephens, sank to the bottom. The only part of the barrel recovered was a stave with an arm strap attached to it; Stephens’ right arm was still threaded through the strap. A tattoo on the arm read, “Forget me not, Annie.” Annie was his wife and mother of his 11 children.

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Jean Lussier
(1928). Lussier made the trip not in a barrel but in a six-foot rubber ball lined with rubber tubes. After bobbing about at the bottom of the falls for an hour, he was pulled to shore and emerged unharmed in front of an audience of more than 100,000. Afterward he sold small souvenir pieces of the inner tubes for 50 cents each. When he ran out of authentic pieces, he peddled rubber purchased from a nearby tire store.

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George Strathakis
(1930). This 46-year-old Greek chef went over to generate publicity for his book, The
Mysterious Veil of Humanity Through the Ages.
His airtight barrel was trapped behind the falls for over 14 hours before rescuers could retrieve it; by then it was out of air. Only his pet turtle, Sonny Boy, taken along for good luck, survived.

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William “Red” Hill, Jr.
(1951). Hill, 38, should have known better: his father was a boatman who retrieved the bodies of suicide victims from the waters below the falls. Hill didn’t use a barrel, he used “The Thing”—made of 13 inner tubes, a fish net, and canvas straps. Thousands of people watched as “The Thing” became trapped under the falling water. Finally a few inner tubes emerged from the mist. His mangled body turned up the next day.

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Nathan Boya
(1961). He made the trip in a steel sphere covered by six layers of rubber, which he called the “Plunge-o-Sphere.” He emerged unhurt to find the police waiting for him. He was fined $ 100—the minimum sentence for violating the Niagara Parks Act.

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Karel Soucek
(1984). The first Canadian to survive the plunge. His barrel had liquid foam insulation, two eye holes, and a snorkel. The fall took 3.2 seconds but left Soucek trapped in dangerous waters for 45 minutes before being pulled free. Fortunately, he suffered only minor injuries. Six months later, he recreated the spectacle at the Houston Astrodome in front of 45,000 spectators. His barrel was hoisted to the top of the dome by a crane and released into a water tank, 10 feet in diameter and 10 feet deep. But the barrel missed—it hit the edge of the water tank and killed him.

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Steven Trotter
(1985). This Rhode Island bartender went over the falls in two plastic pickle barrels wrapped in inner tubes. At the age of 22, he became the youngest person ever to make the trip. He was fined $5,000 for the stunt, but he more than made up for that with his talk show fees. On the 10th anniversary of the stunt, he returned with a woman named Lori Martin and they became the first coed couple to go over together.

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Dave Munday
(1985). Munday has dared the falls four times to date. In 1985 a police officer saw him and immediately radioed Hydro-Control to cut the water flow, which stopped the barrel. Later that year he made the trip successfully in an aluminum barrel. In 1990 his barrel got stuck at the very brink of the falls, but in 1993 he succeeded again, this time in a converted diving bell, and at age 56, became the first person to go over the falls twice.

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Peter DeBernardi and Geoffrey Petkovich
(1989). Canadian residents of Niagara Falls, they were the first people to go over the falls as a team, face to face in the same ten-foot steel barrel. Both men survived, suffering only minor injuries. Petkovich, who had been drinking, emerged wearing only a necktie and cowboy boots. They were arrested by the Niagara Parks Police.

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Jessie Sharp
(1990). 28-year-old Sharp rode the falls in a kayak. His plan was to gather so much momentum that he would avoid the thundering water and land in the pools at the bottom, then ride the rapids downstream to Lewiston, New York—where he had dinner reservations. He didn’t wear a life jacket or a helmet—he wanted his face to show clearly on the videotape his friends were shooting. Minutes after he entered the water above the falls, police ordered the hydroelectric dam to shut the water flow, intending to stop him. It didn’t stop him, but it slowed him down. He dropped over the falls like a sack of bricks. His kayak was recovered, but his body was never found.

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Robert Overacker
(1995). The 39-year-old Overacker was attracted to thrill sports. He wanted a career as a stuntman and thought performing the ultimate stunt would provide him with good publicity. He went over the falls on a jet ski, wearing a self-inflating life vest, a crash helmet, and a wet suit. A rocket-propelled parachute was supposed to be deployed at the brink of the falls—but it failed to inflate. His body was recovered by the tour boat Maid
of the Mist.

We’re not just fascinated by the way famous people lived, we’re fascinated by the way they die, too. Here are a few stories from our BR1 files.

Claim to Fame:
Widow of President Abraham Lincoln

How She Died:
In bed with “Mr. Lincoln.”

Postmortem:
Mrs. Lincoln’s life was filled with tragedy: Her son Edward died from tuberculosis in 1850 when he was only 3; her son Willie died of typhoid fever in 1862 when he was 11; her husband was assassinated in 1865; and her 18-year-old son Thomas died in 1871. Only one of her children, Robert Lincoln, survived into adulthood.

Mary Lincoln never recovered from the shock of her husband’s death, and her son Thomas’ death sent her completely over the edge. She suffered from hallucinations and by 1875 was so disturbed that she attempted suicide. Robert had her committed to an asylum that very night.

Four months later, she was released and sent to live with her sister in Illinois, and in June 1876, a jury ruled that she had regained her sanity. In 1879 Mrs. Lincoln’s health began to deteriorate. By now reclusive and nearly blind, she spent most of the last 18 months of her life locked in her bedroom, where she slept on one side of the bed because she was convinced that her husband was sleeping on the other side. She died on July 16, 1882, at the age of 63, after suffering a stroke.

Claim to Fame:
A singer and songwriter, Denver shot to fame in the 1970s with hits like “Rocky Mountain High” and “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”

How He Died:
He crashed his own airplane.

Postmortem:
Denver was a lifelong aviation buff and an experienced pilot. He learned to fly from his father, an ex-Air Force pilot who made his living training pilots to fly Lear Jets.

Broccoli was first introduced to the U.S. in the 1920s.

Denver had just bought an aerobatic plane known as a Long-EZ shortly before the crash and was still getting used to flying it. According to the report released by the National Transportation Safety Board, he needed an extra seatback cushion for his feet to reach the foot pedals, but when he used the cushion he had trouble reaching the fuel tank selector handle located behind his left shoulder. The NTSB speculates that he took off without enough fuel. When one of his tanks ran dry and the engine lost power, Denver accidentally stepped on the right rudder pedal while reaching over his left shoulder with his right arm to switch to the other fuel tank, and crashed the plane into the sea.

Final Irony:
Denver’s first big success came in 1967, when he wrote the Peter, Paul, and Mary hit “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”

Claim to Fame:
Science-fiction writer and founder of the Church of Scientology

How He Died:
No one knows for sure.

Postmortem:
Hubbard founded his church in 1952. The larger it grew and the more money it collected from followers, the more controversial it became. A British court condemned Scientology as “immoral, socially obnoxious, corrupt, sinister and dangerous;” a Los Angeles court denounced it as “schizophrenic and paranoid.”

Hubbard had a lot of enemies in law-enforcement agencies in the U.S.…the IRS suspected him of skimming millions in church funds. For a time he avoided prosecutors by sailing around the Mediterranean, and from 1976 to 1979 he lived in hiding in small desert towns in Southern California. Then in 1980 he vanished. He didn’t resurface until January 25, 1986, when someone called a funeral home in San Luis Obispo, California, and instructed them to pick up a body from a ranch about 20 miles north of town. The corpse was identified as Lafayette Ronald Hubbard.

The FBI’s fingerprint files confirmed that the man really was Hubbard. The official cause of death: a cerebral hemorrhage. But a “certificate of religious belief” filed on behalf of Hubbard prevented the coroner from conducting an autopsy, so we’ll never really know.

How did grocers get their name? They sold goods by the gross.

The medical profession pooh-poohs folk remedies, but who knows? Just because the cure involves fish skins or live frogs, that doesn’t make it wrong, does it? Read on for some of Uncle John’s favorite folk remedies.

To cure a cold, tie fish skin to your feet.

To cure mosquito bites, rub them with vinegar, oil, butter, onion, garlic, or lemon peel and then blow on them.

To get rid of freckles, rub a live frog over your face.

To cure earaches, plug the ears with a shelled snail or a slice of warm bacon. Another cure: Pour some pig’s milk, warm oil, or sap from a male ash tree on them.

Drinking red pepper tea or putting dry pepper in your stockings will cure the chills.

In order to get rid of warts, put a piece of silver and some stones in a little sack and leave it on a road—the person who picks up the sack will take on the warts.

Another way to be rid of warts: steal a piece of steak and bury it where three roads cross.

You can cure throat illnesses by rubbing the soles of your feet with an unguent made of garlic cooked in lard, but some prefer spitting in a frog’s mouth.

A general medicinal drink: kerosene with sugar.

Passing a child under the belly of a horse three times can cure the child’s cough.

Insomniacs should rub their temples with cat fat or eat chicken feet with cooked milkweed. Or they can smoke a mixture of black tobacco, toad powder, and honey.

Pierced ears are said to cure eye trouble.

For an upset stomach, dip a comb in holy water, then leave it in a pot of wine. The comb must stay on the person’s belly for 24 hours. This person must then drink a mouthful of the wine and throw away the rest.

Chew slowly: Choking on food is the seventh leading cause of death in America.

If you’re a fan of Monday Night Football, you may not realize that football was invented by college students long before the pros came along. Here’s Part I. Hut, hut, hike!

In 1827 the sophomores of Harvard University challenged the freshmen class to a game of “ball,” to be played on the first Monday of the new academic year. The freshmen accepted.

That first game was a pretty informal affair; they just kicked around an inflated pig’s bladder—a
pigskin.
There were few rules and there was no limit to how many people could play on each team so the
entire
freshman class played the
entire
sophomore class, minus anyone who chickened out. The young gentlemen—many of whom were very drunk—must have had a good time, because the freshman-sophomore ball game became an annual Harvard tradition.

…A very violent Harvard tradition: “The game consisted of kicking, pushing, slugging, and getting angry,” Allison Danzig writes in
The History of American Football.
“Anyone who felt like joining in and getting his shins barked, his eyes blacked or his teeth knocked out, was free to do so.” The sophomores had an advantage, because as returning students they could recognize their teammates on the field; the incoming freshmen could not.