Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (14 page)

I can understand why people would want to spread this one. As legends go, it’s top-rank. But since its truth is doubtful, let’s give the tale early retirement, okay? The police have enough troubles without being accused of losing cars they almost certainly didn’t lose.

From “Bob Levey’s Washington” column in the
Washington Post,
April 7, 1986. Paul Harvey broadcast a version of “The Arrest” from Raleigh, North Carolina, on January 15, 1986, and published it in his 1991 book,
For What It’s Worth.
I’ve received reports of the story from New York, Connecticut, West Virginia, Florida, Canada, Australia, and England. A version was in the 1997 film
Good Will Hunting,
told by Will’s friend about his uncle. In most versions the man is said to have driven “the car” home, without any mention that it’s the
wrong
car. He convinces his wife to furnish an alibi if the police come looking for him, but her story falls flat when the cops find their cruiser in the garage. The flashing dome lights on the police car are evidence of just how drunk the man must have been. See the following for another legend about a drunken driver that became popular the same year.

“The Body on the Car”

A
man came home at 2:00 a.m., drunk as a skunk. But he had managed to drive his car all the way home and to get it parked in the driveway before he stumbled into the house and fell asleep on the living-room couch.

The next morning he was rudely awakened by his wife’s screams. She had gone outside to pick up the newspaper and glanced over at his car. There, embedded on the front grill of the car, she saw the twisted body of an eight-year-old girl!

Reported to me several times in 1986 and 1987 as a cautionary story sometimes told by representatives of either SADD—Students Against Drunk Driving—or MADD—Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Ann Landers printed the story in her column on September 24, 1986, quoting a letter from Portland (Oregon, I presume). A horror comic-book version of the story published in the 1950s was reprinted in a Marvel Comics anthology in 1975, and cartoonist Gary Larson has his own version among the examples published in his 1989 book
Prehistory of “The Far Side,”
but never used it in daily newspapers. An allusion to the legend also appeared in a “Bizarro” cartoon in 1991. Readers have pointed out to me several well-documented accounts in newspapers of similar accidents, some occurring as long ago as the 1930s, but none exactly matched the legend. I conclude that victims of hit-and-run accidents have indeed sometimes become stuck to vehicles and dragged or carried for some distance, but “The Body on the Car” story seems to have a life of its own separate from any specific real-life incident. Whether literally true or not, it is certainly an effective warning against mixing alcohol and gasoline. It’s worth noting that a similar story circulates among seafaring folk: A large ship is said to have struck a small vessel in the dark without anyone aboard the ship noticing; the smaller boat is carried along, stuck to the bow, until the ship reaches port. This story has even been told on the
Queen Elizabeth II
and on U.S. Navy aircraft carriers and battleships.

“The Wife Left Behind”

I
n 1986, a family from Oregon traveling in their RV through California stopped at a freeway-interchange restaurant. The wife went to the restroom, and her husband drove off without her, believing she had gone to the back of their vehicle for a nap. He drove 300 miles before discovering his error. They were reunited with the help of the highway patrol.

I know of six cases of this incident from 1986 to 1992, all reported in well-documented news stories; there’s no doubt that each incident really happened. The reports mention several different states and a variety of vehicles and stopping places. I also have reliable newspaper articles about a truck driver in 1986 leaving his wife behind in a New York State motel, a Democratic state senator from Indiana in 1988 leaving his campaign director behind in a Tennessee rest stop, and a husband in 1992 leaving his wife behind in another Tennessee rest stop. Adding to the data on riders left behind, I have a first-person account of a California family in 1973 leaving their nine-year-old son behind in a California gas station. I’m sure, if I applied myself to further research, I could easily double the number of reports of similar incidents. So is it an urban legend? Calvin Trillin, in discussing the 1992 Tennessee occurrence, which he heard of directly from the participants, described it as “a palpably authentic example of the sort of experience you hear now and then in the sort of modern folk-tales that usually carry the sniff of the apocryphal and the embellished.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. Surely “The Wife [and others] Left Behind” incident
did
happen—and several times at that—but in telling and retelling the story people tend to focus on the salient details, and the story probably becomes funnier and more pointed with each telling. At the same time, there’s a certain whiff of true legendry in the story when you encounter the undeniably 100 percent fictional story of “The Nude in the RV,” another left-behind-during-travel yarn containing further juicy details, which I’ve grouped with other slapstick humor in Chapter 19.

“The Baby on the Roof”

D
id you hear about this couple driving through Southern Utah? They were on their way to California, and they went to change drivers and the wife took the baby out of the car and put him on the roof of the car. Then they both switched sides and got back into the car. She just assumed that the husband had put the baby back in, but he hadn’t even seen it.

They drove off, and the baby slid off, but he was OK because he was in a plastic infant seat. About two hours later they realized that they forgot the baby. So they drove back, and someone had stopped for the baby, and the baby was OK.

Collected from his mother in 1981 by M. Steven Marsden for his folklore project in one of my classes at the University of Utah. This is the generic, or “legendary,” form of an incident that has happened more often than you might think. I have on file documented news stories or firsthand accounts dating from 1975 to 1993 of 14 such incidents occurring in several states, as well as one in Germany. Not surprisingly, some babies have been injured or traumatized in these adventures. Other items forgotten on car roofs are purses, wallets, books, groceries, lunch bags or boxes, ski gloves, fishing rods, cameras, miscellaneous packages, a bottle of whiskey, and even a rare violin. It certainly happens, but as such stories circulate in oral tradition, they become “folklorized” when narrators generalize the plot details, elaborate on favorite points, and focus on a happy ending. Sometimes the baby is forgotten while the mother is loading groceries into the car, or while a family is repacking the car after changing a tire. The 1987 film
Raising Arizona
contained a hilarious scene based on this story, and I am told that a 1990 episode of the TV sitcom
Married with Children
referred to the story as well, but I’d rather ride clinging to the roof of a car than watch reruns of that program to verify this reference.

“The Nut and the Tire Nuts”

S
ummarized:

Found both as a published “puzzle story” and an oral legend. A motorist changing a flat accidentally loses the four tire nuts from the wheel. A mentally retarded person (or perhaps an escapee from a nearby asylum) comes by and suggests a simple way to solve the problem. (What’s the answer?)

H
ow to tell this story:

To wring the most enjoyment from this incident, it is imperative that the story embrace enough of the following detail for the listener to fully visualize the incident.

The scene was rural, at near dusk, with the point made that the flat tire was on the left rear wheel and occurred while the motorist was driving along a winding, two-lane, rural road.


The motorist drove off the road just a few feet from a fence surrounding the mental institution where an inmate was leaning idly against the fence.


After the driver [here a stuffed shirt, pompous type can be identified] confidently jacked up the left rear of the car, thinking he would demonstrate his efficiency to the inmate-observer, he took off the wheel cover [the “hub cap” back in the ‘50s] and placed it, concave side up, behind him on the edge of the paving.


The wheel had
five,
not four, lug nuts.


As the driver removed the nuts with his lug wrench, he carefully deposited each lug nut in the wheel cover for what he intended to be efficient retrieval.


The motorist then retreated to the trunk of his car to get the spare tire and wheel. Just as he lifted the wheel from the trunk, he noticed an automobile approaching on his side of the road.


Conscious of his own safety, the man discreetly stepped back until the car could go by, then watched in dismay as the passing car’s right front wheel hit the edge of the wheel cover, launching the five lug nuts into space and scattering them over a wide area.


His hands-and-knees search along the shoulders of the road and in the wild ground cover along the roadside in the diminishing daylight produced only one lug nut.


Holding the single lug nut between a thumb and a forefinger, the driver was dejectedly contemplating his predicament when the inmate who had been watching the whole episode spoke up. He suggested that the driver take one lug nut from each of the other three wheels, which would give him four for the spare wheel and permit him to drive safely to a service station to replace the lost lug nuts.


The driver, in his grateful astonishment, said, “Thanks for the great idea. But what in the world is someone as intelligent and resourceful as you doing in a mental institution?”


The response: “I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid.”

The summary is from my article “Urban Legends in the Making: Write Me if You’ve Heard This,” in
Whole Earth Review,
fall 1985. The instructions on how to tell the story properly came in a letter from M. B. Cox of Bountiful, Utah. Cox, who said he had been telling it for more than 40 years, was responding—as did dozens of other people—to my newspaper column (“Flat Joke Drives Folklorist Nutty”) questioning what is so funny about this particular story. Numerous readers over the years have sent me “The Nut and the Tire Nuts,” declaring it to be their favorite joke or legend, and the puzzle version of the story has been published several times. Yet I’ve always failed to see the humor of the situation or of the punch line, even when it was pointed out to me that the latter is a twist on the expression “I may be stupid but I’m not crazy,” something one might say, for example, after taking an icy swim in the ocean on New Year’s Day, but remaining in the water for only ten seconds. The tire-nut story was formerly told as a rural anecdote, illustrating the triumph of native wit over city sophistication; in that spirit, Winston Groom included it in his 1986 novel
Forrest Gump
with the punch line “Maybe I am an idiot, but at least I ain’t
stupid.”
Lately the story has been given an urban setting, with the tire nuts disappearing down a street drain. I still don’t find it very funny, but I’m sure that if I failed to include it with other automobile legends some people would think I am either crazy or stupid.

“The Pig on the Road”

A
friend of mine was driving along happily, minding his own business, when all of a sudden a woman driver came tearing round the corner in the opposite direction on the wrong side of the road. Passing him, she rolled down the window and shouted, “Pig.” My friend, quite astonished by this insult, replied, “Silly old cow.” On turning the corner, he drove straight into a herd of pigs.

From Robert Morley’s 1983 book,
“Pardon Me, But You’re Eating My Doily!”
where it is credited to Serena Fass, travel agent. This version, from England, quotes the common British expression “silly old cow,” but lacks the usual line “Bloody pig!” The story popped up on the
Benny Hill Show,
and it was formerly told about an English driver in France where a passing Frenchman shouts “cochon!” (pig). In American versions, such as the one broadcast by Paul Harvey in January 1988, the man is a police officer, so the word “pig” sounds like a specific crack about his profession. Harvey’s story named names and identified places, but an Associated Press writer tracked down the presumed source and learned that it was merely a story the policeman had repeated, not an actual occurrence. Leo Buscaglia, the Southern California “professor of love,” has used the story in his lectures, and published it in his 1982 book
Living, Loving, and Learning.
The humorist Bennett Cerf beat him to it, though, by publishing it in a 1970 collection, and several writers since then—as well as
Reader’s Digest—
have used the story.