Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (75 page)

Chin up:
Pogonology
is the study of beards.

PROBING QUESTIONS

Once privy diggers have identified likely areas to dig, they probe these locations, poking a seven-foot-long steel rod into the ground to see if they can detect the presence of a privy vault. What are they searching for? Any area that feels noticeably different from the surrounding ground. A “crunchy” layer could be glass bottles, fireplace ash (commonly dumped into outhouses), or household garbage, indicating the presence of a privy vault. In undisturbed dirt it’s difficult to push the probe more than two or three feet into the ground, so if there’s a spot in the yard that probes deeper than that, it may well be “the vault.”

PRIVY DIGGING DOS AND DON’TS

1. Pick an outhouse that’s on private property.
Privies on public land may be protected by historical preservation laws, so don’t go digging up the backyard of the governor’s mansion. When Tim Clements dug up a privy on the grounds of the University of Nebraska in 2001, he was arrested and charged with trespassing and theft. Private property is usually exempt from preservation laws.

2. Ask before you dig.
Getting permission to dig in someone’s backyard may be easier than you think—just offer to share the artifacts you find. “A lot of homeowners will agree so that they can have something that came from their house,” says Illinois privy digger David Beeler.

3. Keep digging.
When a privy vault became full, it was common to seal it up by filling the last few feet of the hole with dirt and garbage. There may well be plenty of interesting stuff in this “garbage layer,” but most of the artifacts are likely to have sunk all the way to the bottom. So keep going.

4. Check the sides and corners.
When an outhouse is in use, material “mounds up in the center,” just below where people sat, says privy digger Peter Bleed. “Things tend to roll off to the sides.”

5. But wait, there’s more!
When one privy vault filled up, a new one was dug—frequently right next to the old one. So if you find one privy vault, don’t stop! Look for more nearby.

The top-selling spice in the world? Pepper. Mustard is #2.

THE OUTHOUSE DETECTIVES

It’s amazing what you can learn about people who lived more than a century ago just by studying the junk they disposed of in their outhouses. Still don’t believe us? Read on to find out what these privies reveal
.

M
AGNUM P.U.

As we told you in the previous article (
page 463
), “privy diggers” are hobbyists who dig up old outhouses to collect the bottles and other objects that people tossed down there more than 100 years ago. These objects may be interesting in their own right, but they also shed light on the daily lives of the people who dropped them there. Some outhouse clues are subtler than others. See if you can figure out what these outhouse discoveries may reveal about their original owners.

DISCOVERY:
A child’s doll, recovered completely intact

MYSTERY:
Most items that are disposed of in an outhouse have clearly been thrown away—they were garbage. It’s unlikely that a 19th-century family would have thrown away even an unbroken doll. And yet it’s not unusual to find perfectly intact dolls at the bottom of an outhouse. What are they doing down there?

THEORY:
They ended up there by accident. “Lots of times, I think, little girls went to the bathroom and accidentally dropped their doll down there,” says Michigan privy digger John Ozoga. “Dad wouldn’t go get it.”

DISCOVERY:
A wide variety of items recovered from a “twoholer” (an outhouse with two holes to sit on instead of just one)

MYSTERY:
Underneath one of the holes were perfume bottles, pieces of china, and containers of Ruby Foam tooth powder. Underneath the other hole: “I just found beer bottles piled up,” Ozoga says. Why the difference?

THEORY:
Two-holers, like modern public restrooms, were segregated according to sex. One side—in this case the side with the perfume bottles, china, and tooth powder—was for females; and the side with all the beer bottles was for males. Such a find may also provide insight into the family’s attitude toward alcohol consumption: the outhouse was the only place where the men could enjoy a beer in peace.

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DISCOVERY:
Three bottles of Wilkerson’s Teething Syrup, recovered from an outhouse in St. Charles, Missouri. (Teething syrup was used to help relieve a baby’s teething pain.)

MYSTERY:
What’s remarkable about these bottles, privy diggers say, is that they are
never
found alone. “If you see one bottle in a privy hole, you’ll see a lot of them,” says privy digger David Beeler. Why?

THEORY:
The syrup’s active ingredient is opium, which is highly addictive. Babies who were given the syrup soon got hooked on the stuff, which meant that “parents had to keep on buying it to keep them from crying,” Beeler explains.

DISCOVERY:
Bottles, tin cans, and other brand-name items recovered from a 19th-century outhouse on Franklin Street in downtown Annapolis, Maryland. In the 19th century, that area was part of the African-American community.

MYSTERY:
A surprisingly high percentage of the items recovered were national brands instead of local products. These findings correspond to other excavations of outhouses in the area, which suggests that African Americans used more national brands and fewer local brands than did white communities. Why?

THEORY:
Anthropology professor Mark P. Leone, who directed the excavation, speculates that African Americans preferred national brands because the prices were set at the national level instead of by neighborhood grocers. By purchasing these brands, “they could avoid racism at the local grocery store, where shopkeepers might inflate prices or sell them substandard goods,” he explains.

DISCOVERY:
A “multitude” of Lydia Pinkham brand patent-medicine bottles, plus an entire set of gold-trimmed china dishes

MYSTERY:
These items were recovered from an outhouse behind the 19th-century home of a wealthy Michigan family that was excavated by John Ozoga in the 1990s. The bottles were clustered in a single layer, and the china dishes were found right on top of them. Why?

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THEORY:
The wife had fallen ill at a young age and died. Ozoga speculates that she was treated with the patent medicine. When she died, the family emptied the house of her belongings—including the entire set of china, which they threw down the hole in the outhouse—to avoid catching whatever it was that killed her.

*        *        *

WORDPLAY

How confusing is English to learn? Try on these sentences for size
.

1. We have to
polish
the
Polish
furniture.

2. How can he
lead
if he can’t get the
lead
out?

3. A skilled farmer sure can
produce
a lot of
produce
.

4. The dump was so full it had to
refuse refuse
.

5. The soldier decided to
desert
his
dessert
in the
desert
.

6. No time like the
present
to
present
the
present
.

7. A small-mouthed
bass
was painted on the big
bass
drum.

8. The white
dove dove
down into Dover.

9. I spent all of last
evening evening
out the pile.

10. That poor
invalid
, his insurance is
invalid
.

11. The bandage was
wound
around the
wound
.

12. They were much too
close
to the door to
close
it.

13. That buck sure
does
some odd things around the
does
.

14. The absent-minded
sewer
fell down into the
sewer
.

15. You
sow
! You’ll reap what you
sow
!

16. The
wind
was way too strong to
wind
the sail.

17. After a
number
of injections, my jaw finally got
number
.

18. If you don’t
object
to the
object
, I would like to
subject
the
subject
to a series of subjective objectives.

Worldwide, Christmas has been celebrated on 135 different days of the year.

INTREPID: MASTER SPY

Ever heard of William Stephenson? He was an inventor, industrialist, and the father of modern espionage. And if it hadn’t been for him, the Germans might have won World War II. Here’s the story of one of the most important—and least-known—men of the 20th century
.

I
NTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY

Although he’s not a household name, historians call William Stephenson the “single most important man in the war to defeat Hitler’s Third Reich.”

But he was reclusive. Never one to seek the public eye, Stephenson preferred to remain behind the scenes and let others take the glory. For this reason, many of the details of his life remain shrouded, and history books tend to contradict each other about his role. The following are factual (probably), agreed-upon (mostly) accounts of his life and work.

Early years.
On January 11, 1896, William Samuel Clouston Stanger (changed to Stephenson a few years later) was born in the bleak prairie town of Winnipeg, Manitoba. From an early age, it was apparent to all around him that he was no ordinary child. He taught himself Morse code, commercial cryptography (the system of sending coded telegrams), and demonstrated a photographic memory. Stephenson’s school principal described him as a boy with a “strong sense of duty and high powers of concentration.”

THE FIRST WORLD WAR

In August 1914, following the outbreak of World War I, that sense of duty prompted him to enlist with the Royal Canadian Engineers, who shipped him off to France. There, Stephenson was injured in a gas attack, and sent to England as an invalid labeled “disabled for life.” But within a year he recovered and, although unfit to return to the trenches, he was equally unwilling to settle for a desk job.

So Stephenson joined the Royal Flying Corps, returned to France, and became one of World War I’s most decorated fighter pilots, shooting down 26 enemy planes.

In 1918 Sergeant Stephenson’s luck seemingly ran out when he was accidentally shot down by his own side in hostile territory. He was captured and sent to Holzminden Camp in Germany. But instead of letting imprisonment break him, the opportunistic young man turned it into a business venture: he stole items from the guards and traded them to other POWs in return for favors.

Better bring a map: There are 412 doors in the White House.

One of the items Stephenson lifted was a hand-held can opener. After determining that it had only been patented in Germany, Austria, and Turkey, he escaped from the prison camp—with the can opener. By 1919 he was back home in Winnipeg, where he patented the clamp-style can opener, calling it Kleen Kut. It’s still in use today.

In 1922 he invented a device that improved the way photographs were sent over telephone lines (this device would later lead to the invention of television). Stephenson patented the wireless photography process and became a millionaire before he was 30.

THE MAKING OF A SPY

Although he never planned to work in military intelligence, all of Stephenson’s experiences pushed him in that direction. While teaching math and science at the University of Manitoba in the early 1920s, he was approached by a top-ranking British officer and invited to head up a team of cryptanalysts—people who analyze codes. Stephenson immediately left for England.

During his 19-year stay, he became friends with many powerful and influential people, including the authors George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, the nabob of Bhopal, the Aga Khan, and actress Greta Garbo. But Stephenson’s most important friendship was with Winston Churchill, a Conservative member of Parliament who was not in the good graces of the ruling Labour Party. Churchill and Stephenson shared an interest in technology and espionage; and both feared the rise of Nazi Germany.

CHATTING WITH THE ENEMY

Stephenson’s first dealings with the Nazis came in 1934 when an aircraft built by a company in which Stephenson was an investor, General Aircraft, won the King’s Cup air race, the premier flying event of the 1930s. The plane caught the attention of some German military officials, who started a dialogue with Stephenson. To the Germans, Stephenson was nothing more than a rich private citizen (he owned a cement company, a steel manufacturing plant, a movie studio, and real estate). But Stephenson took the opportunity to listen in on the Nazis.

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What he learned terrified him: the Germans, with Chancellor Adolf Hitler in charge, were building military aircraft at an alarming rate—positioning themselves for something big…really big. Stephenson reported his findings to Churchill, who in turn reported them to British prime minister Neville Chamberlain. The warnings were ignored at first, but when Stephenson’s claims were later verified, England began to prepare for war. Those reports also put Churchill back in the favor of Parliament, paving the way for his historic reign as prime minister.