Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader (27 page)

Call it doublespeak, call it spin, call it “a different version of the facts.” The truth is—it's still a lie.

T
RUST ME…
“I wouldn't call it an accident. I'd call it a malfunction.”

SAID BY:
Dr. Edward Teller, “father of the hydrogen bomb,” referring to Three Mile Island, 1979

THE FACT:
It was a real accident—250,000 gallons of radioactive waste leaked out.

TRUST ME…
“Our one desire is that…the people of Southeast Asia be left in peace to work out their own destinies in their way.”
SAID BY:
President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964

THE FACT:
Maybe he meant “left in pieces”—the war in Vietnam was well underway and escalating.

TRUST ME…
“I have no more territorial ambitions in Europe.”
SAID BY:
Adolf Hitler, 1938

THE FACT:
Within two years of saying this, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France.

TRUST ME…
“I would have never owned those ugly-ass shoes.”
SAID BY:
O. J. Simpson, in a 1996 civil lawsuit, denying he owned a pair of Bruno Magli “Lorenzos”

THE FACT:
A month later, 30 photographs were discovered that showed Simpson wearing the shoes at a 1993 Buffalo Bills game.

TRUST ME…
“The army is the Indian's best friend.”

SAID BY:
General George Armstrong Custer, 1870

THE FACT:
He then wiped out most of the Sioux nation before being killed at Little Big Horn.

TRUST ME…
“As long as I own the Cleveland Browns, they will remain in Cleveland.”

SAID BY:
Brown's owner Art Modell, 1993

THE FACT:
He moved the franchise to Baltimore in 1996.

Some hilarious lines from the late comedian Ronnie Shakes.

“A lot of people wonder how you know if you're really in love. Just ask yourself this one question: ‘Would I mind being destroyed financially by this person?'”

“They say that hell is hot, but is it humid? Because I can take the heat; it's the humidity I can't stand.”

“After twelve years of therapy my psychiatrist said something that brought tears to my eyes. He said, ‘No hablo ingles.'”

“I was going to buy a copy of
The Power of Positive Thinking
, and then I thought: What the hell good would that do?”

“My doctor gave me two weeks to live. I hope they're in August.”

“I like life. It's something to do.”

“We live in a mobile home. Hey, there are advantages to living in a mobile home. One time, it caught on fire. We met the fire department half way.”

“I spend money with reckless abandon. Last month I blew five thousand dollars at a reincarnation seminar. I got to thinking, ‘what the hell, you only live once.'”

“I was an ugly baby. On my birth certificate there was a listing for ‘Probable Cause.'”

“One question on hospital admittance forms really gets me. ‘Sex: Male or Female?' Do I want to be in a hospital where they can't tell the difference?”

“As a teenager I just wanted to fit in, just be one of the boys. It was tough. I went to an all-black school. I went so far as to have them print my negative in the yearbook. I think it was the black teeth that gave me away.”

“I wouldn't mind being the last man on Earth—just to see if all of those girls were telling me the truth.”

“I fear that one day I'll meet God, He'll sneeze, and I won't know what to say.”

Here's a look at the origins of some of the most popular obsessions from days gone by.

Created by Belgian storybook illustrator Pierre “Peyo” Culliford in 1957, the Smurfs developed followings in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Scandanavia (where the blue creatures were known as Schlumpfe, Puffo, Pitufo, and Smolf, respectively), but they remained more or less unknown in the rest of the world.

Then in 1978, British Petroleum launched an advertising campaign featuring the creatures, which it renamed the Smurfs for the English audience. The ads sparked a Smurf craze in England, prompting an American importer to bring them to America… where they caught the eye of the daughter of the president of NBC. Her enthusiasm prompted dad to order up a Saturday morning Smurf cartoon show for the network. The show became an enormous hit, turning NBC into a Saturday morning juggernaut and launching a Smurf craze in the United States. By 1982 the Smurfs were the biggest-selling toy merchandising line in the country, outselling even
E.T.
and
Star Wars
.

In 1984 an executive recruiter named Michael Lerner decided to start his own consumer products business. The only problem: he couldn't think of any products to sell. Lucky for him, an old college friend told him about a couple who'd just come back from a vacation in Germany, where they'd seen small signs suction-cupped to automobile windows warning motorists to drive carefully because a baby was on board. The couple wanted to start selling the signs in the United States.

Lerner offered them a deal: If they would agree to let
him
market the signs, he would give them a royalty. Deal! Lerner founded a company called Safety 1st; by the end of 1985 he was selling 500,000 of the little diamond-shaped yellow signs a month. The couple made more than $100,000 for doing absolutely nothing.

Soon imitators stole his idea and swamped the market with
humorous signs like “Beam Me Up Scotty” and “Ex-Husband in Trunk.” Lerner couldn't sue—he didn't have a patent, but that wasn't a problem: He just used his Baby On Board profits to branch out into other child-safety products. He eventually took Safety 1st public, and in April 2000 it sold to a Canadian company for $195 million.

In 1952, a Detroit paint-company owner named Max Klein got together with an artist named Dan Robbins and formed Craft Master, a company that sold the world's first paint-by-numbers kits. The kits consisted of numbered jars of paint and a rolled-up canvas (later cardboard) stamped with the outline of a painting; each section of the painting had a number that corresponded to a particular color of paint. Price, including paints and brush: $1.79

So who did Klein and Robbins get the idea from? Leonardo da Vinci. “I recalled reading about da Vinci, and when he got large and complicated commissions, he would give numbered patterns to his apprentices to block in areas for him that he'd go back and finish himself,” Robbins explains. “It took two years to get off the ground; then they took off like a rocket.” By 1954 more paint-by-numbers paintings were hanging in American homes than were original works of art.

At the peak of the fad, Craft Master was producing 50,000 kits a day. Their slogan was “Every man a Rembrandt.” Among the Rembrandts: Nelson Rockefeller, Ethel Merman, Andy Warhol, J. Edgar Hoover…and even President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The world's first toy slot cars were introduced by the Aurora Plastics Company in 1960. Aurora's cars came with special slotted tracks that kept the cars on the road, thanks to a small projection under the car's nose that inserted into the slot. Cost: $3.00 to $8.00 per car, or $20–40 for an entire racing set, which made them affordable for just about everyone. The cars went up to 600 mph in scale, and since the “drivers” were in continuous control of their vehicles' speeds, the cars were more challenging—and more fun—to operate than toy cars had ever been.

Because of all of this, the cars became hugely popular. Entrepreneurs
built huge multilevel slot-car racing centers that competed with pinball arcades for America's pocket change, and home enthusiasts spent $1,500 or more building their own elaborate speedways at home. In all, Americans spent $100 million on slot cars and tracks in 1963—more than they spent on model rail-roads—and by 1965 more than 3.5 million Americans were racing slot cars on a regular basis. For a time it seemed that slot cars might even become more popular than bowling, but the fad didn't last long—sales dropped off sharply in 1967 and never recovered.

Dihydroxyacetone
is a drug that's used as an antidote for cyanide poisoning. It has a side effect: It stains human skin brown on contact. A sun worshipper named John Andre noticed this in the late 1950s and decided to mix the medicine with alcohol and fragrances and sell it as a self-tanning aftershave called Man-Tan. Andre sold $3 million worth of the stuff in 1960, giving both aftershave and suntan lotion companies quite a scare. They needn't have worried: paint-on tans were just a flash in the pan, and sales “virtually disappeared” the following year. (Update: Man-tan is still gone, but thanks to the established link between sunlight and skin cancer, paint-on tans are more popular than ever.)

In 1948 cartoonist Al Capp added a new character to his L'il Abner comic strip: the
shmoo
, a strange creature, described as “a cross between Casper the Ghost and a misshapen dinosaur.” In Capp's comic-strip world, the shmoos were as much a part of the food supply as they were a part of the story line: they laid eggs, produced butter, and gave milk in glass bottles. If you broiled them, they turned into steak; if you boiled them, they turned into chicken.

And if you made a toy out of them, manufacturers learned in the late l940s, they sold by the millions. Companies made fortunes selling shmoo ashtrays, clocks, piggy banks, pencil sharpeners, clothing, candy, and even shmoo meat products. By 1950 more than $25 million worth of shmoo items had been sold, yet for some reason, Capp decided to write the characters out of the story line. He created a “shmooicide squad” that gunned down every single shmoo in the strip, and the fad died out soon after that.

Most people have fantasized about being someone else, but few of us have actually done it. Here's an amazing story of a man who pretended to be someone he wasn't…and pulled it off.

B
ACKGROUND:
Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr. was one of the most prolific imposters in history. Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1921, the high school dropout had successfully passed himself off as a doctor of philosophy, a zoologist, a Trappist monk, a prison counselor, a biologist doing cancer research, a sheriff, a soldier, and a sailor by the time he was in his 30s.

MOMENT OF “TRUTH”:
His greatest ruse came during the Korean War when he used the identity of Dr. Joseph Cyr, and enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy in 1951. He served aboard a destroyer off the Korean coast. Under intense battle conditions, Demara
was
the ship's surgeon: he pulled teeth, removed tonsils, administered anaesthesia, and even amputated limbs. But most incredibly, after studying the procedure in a book, he successfully removed a bullet from a wounded soldier that was less than an inch from his heart. Onlookers let out a cheer as he completed the impeccable operation and saved the man's life. In all his time as a doctor in Korea, he never lost a single patient.

UNMASKED:
His success turned out to be his undoing—photographs of the heroic doctor made it into Canadian newspapers. The real Dr. Cyr's mother saw them and alerted authorites. Amazingly, no charges were filed; Demara had saved too many lives. A naval board of inquiry released him—with back pay. Demara was later arrested for posing as a teacher in the United States and served a six-month sentence. When asked why he did it, noting that he didn't get rich from his escapades, he answered, “Rascality, pure rascality.”

IMMORTALITY ACHIEVED:
In 1961 Hollywood made a movie based on the Demara story,
The Great Imposter
, starring Tony Curtis and Karl Malden. Director Robert Mulligan was a finalist for the Director's Guild Award for the film. And Demara himself got a minor part in another movie: In 1960 he appeared in the melodrama
The Hypnotic Eye
. He played…the doctor.

Classical “Greco-Roman” wrestling can trace its roots all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. But what about “professional” wrestling—the kind where costumed buffoons hit each other with folding chairs? How old is that? Older than you might think.