Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (15 page)

The discomfort of the photo-taking experience manifested itself in the form of urban legends that swirled around more than a
few college campuses: Chilling tales of break-ins at the photo labs and naked pictures for sale on the bad side of town probably kept plenty of co-eds up at night over the years.

As generation after generation of students graduated and moved on with their lives, many would look back 20, 30, or 40 years later and wonder, whatever happened to that nude picture they took of me in college? Where is it now? Will it ever come back to haunt me?

The fear must have been particularly acute for those alumni who went on to become famous: Bob Woodward, Meryl Streep, Diane Sawyer, George Bush, Sr., and Hillary Clinton, to name just a few, all attended colleges where freshman nude photos were taken; presumably, all of them submitted to the ritual. Even Judith Martin, better known as the newspaper columnist Miss Manners, posed in the altogether at Wellesley College. Once, when she delivered a speech to an alumni gathering at her alma mater, she brought up the subject of the photographs and offered to sell them back to her former classmates in return for hefty donations to the school. “A lot of people turned pale before they realized it was a joke,” she told the
New York Times
in 1995.

The fears of countless alumni might have continued forever, simmering but never really materializing, were it not for the fact that when television talk-show host Dick Cavett (Yale ’55) spoke at the graduation of the Yale class of ’84 (which did not have to pose nude), he made an off-color reference to the urban legend. When he was in school, he explained to the crowd, the photos of the Vassar women were stolen and ended up for sale in the red-light district of New Haven, Connecticut. “The photos found no buyers,” Cavett joked.

One of the graduates in the audience was Naomi Wolf, who would go on to become a bestselling author in the early 1990s. She never forgot Cavett’s tasteless joke, and in 1992 she attacked him in an opinion piece in the
New York Times.
Cavett responded in a letter to the editor, and that in turn prompted a Yale history professor named George Hersey to write to the paper, claiming
that the so-called “posture photos” weren’t really taken for that purpose at all, at least not by the 1960s—that was just a cover story for a much more sinister project. Many of the photos, he revealed, were really taken by a quack scientist who wanted to prove that body measurements could be used to predict the subjects’ intelligence, personality traits, and even their likely success in life. What Hersey was saying, in effect, was that colleges all over the country had allowed their most vulnerable students to be used as guinea pigs and then had lied about it. And Hersey, it turns out, was correct.

The “quack scientist” was a Columbia University psychologist named William Sheldon. He had once been considered a leader in his field, and that was how he gained access to the students.

Sheldon was best known for his theory that there was an inborn link between body types and personality. He came up with the idea after studying and photographing hundreds of juvenile delinquents at a reform school in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1940. After analyzing the photos, Sheldon concluded that each individual’s physique was a combination of three primary physical body types:
mesomorphs
(large, muscular features and little or no body fat);
ectomorphs
(long and thin with linear features), and
endomorphs
(short and fat with round features).

With some people, one of the three body types was clearly dominant—the person was either very muscular, very thin, or very fat. But many people were more subtle combinations of all three types. Sheldon had devised a three-digit numerical scale for grading a person’s physique. The values ranged from 1 to 7, with each of the three digits referring to a different body type: an extreme or “pure” mesomorph measured 7-1-1 on Sheldon’s scale; a pure ectomorph scored as 1-7-1, and a pure endomorph scored as 1-1-7.

Sheldon believed that each of the three body types had specific character traits associated with them: mesomorphs were aggressive, self confident, and drawn to physical activity (and were more likely to commit crimes); ectomorphs valued their privacy and led lives of self restraint; and endomorphs were social people who loved
food and comfort. Since he presumed a link between body type and character traits, Sheldon was also convinced that by photographing and then measuring the different parts of a person’s body, he could determine what kind of personality that person had and even predict the kind of life he or she would lead in the future.

That was Sheldon’s
theory,
anyway, and to prove it he needed to collect photographs of many thousands of people, both to refine and perfect his measuring techniques and also to have a large enough sample of people to be able to extrapolate his findings to the population at large. A
voluntary
study was out of the question, as far as Sheldon was concerned: He believed that some body types were more likely to agree to be photographed than others, and that would make the study sample unrepresentative of the general population, and therefore worthless.

As an academic, Sheldon was well acquainted with the long-standing practice of taking posture photographs of an entire freshman class, and he began approaching colleges and universities for permission to take photographs of his own. His standing in the scientific community was such that with very little effort he was able to convince the best schools in the country to let him take compulsory nude photographs of their most vulnerable charges: young men and women who had been high school students just a few months before.

In the 1940s, when colleges still placed great emphasis on developing proper posture, the nude photo sessions served the school’s purpose (documenting each student’s posture) as well as Sheldon’s. But even as the years passed and the academic world gradually got out of the business of teaching students how to stand up straight, Sheldon’s nude photo sessions continued unabated. Even his own friend and colleague, Ellery Lanier, conceded that in the end the “posture photo” program had become little more than pretense, “part of a facade or cover-up for what we were really doing,” he told the
New York Times
in 1995.

Don’t be shy. Part II of the story is on page 251.

Dogs eat the darndest things. (Now pass the haggis.)

U
NCHAIN MY HEART

“A puppy called Harley has survived after wolfing down a 16-inch-long metal chain. Her owner, Devina Alderson from Cambridge, said she saw 18-week-old Harley chewing on it, and then the next minute it was gone. Vets had to carry out an urgent operation to remove the chain from the dog’s stomach, and she’s fine now. ‘I think she may have a metal fetish because she tried to eat the scissors too,’ her vet said.”

—BBC

“A rubber duck sat in a dog’s stomach for five years before being removed by Swedish vets, a local newspaper said. The owner of Apollo, a Boxer, assumed the toy had dissolved in the dog’s stomach over the years as it had not come out any other way. But Apollo’s owner, from Ostersund, took the dog to a vet when he began vomiting and refused to drink. The vet removed the rubber ducky, which had turned black and gone rock hard.”

—
Reuters

“Jake, a 12-week-old Staffordshire Bull Terrier mix who swallowed a kitchen knife nearly as long as he is, is recovering after surgery to remove the implement. Owner John Mallett, 22, says he knew something was wrong when he saw the dog ‘trying to keep his body in a straight line.’ Vets spotted the knife, with the handle against the dog’s pelvis and the point lodged against his throat, on an x-ray. ‘Dogs are always swallowing strange things,’ said vet Christina Symonds, ‘but this was particularly unusual because it was such a large knife in a small puppy.’ They operated immediately. Jake survived, and according to Mallett, ‘He’s totally back to his old self.’”

—Yahoo! News

“A German vet who operated on a dog to remove a suspected stomach tumor found a g-string instead. Claudia Schuermann, head of the Troisdorf animal rescue home, said bull terrier Breiti was abandoned after his previous owners complained he ate ‘anything that wasn’t nailed down’. The vet noticed ‘a hard lump in his stomach,’ and after examining 10-year-old Breiti, she concluded he had stomach cancer and operated immediately to remove the ‘tumor’. But when the pet was cut open the vet found the cancer was actually an undigested g-string the dog had stolen from his last owners. ‘Bull terriers tend to have fetishes,’ an aide said. ‘Some like shoes, but with Breiti, it’s lacy lingerie.’”

—
Ananova

“A German woman thought she had been robbed when she returned to her car to find 380 euros ($470) missing and her dog vomiting, only to discover the pet had eaten the cash. ‘She thought the dog had been drugged and that thieves had taken the money,’ police in the western town of Aschaffenburg said. ‘The woman had withdrawn the money and hidden it under bank statements on the passenger seat.’ When she figured out what had happened, she took the dog to a vet, who gave the dog a laxative and within 20 minutes six of the 50 euro notes reappeared.”

—
Reuters

“In a feat that put human sword swallowers to shame, a British dog managed to gulp down a stick only two inches shorter than its own body…and escape unscathed. Millie, a two-year-old Staffordshire bull terrier, was on a walk with her owner, John Hurst, in Portsmouth, England. Hurst threw the 16-inch stick for the 18-inch Millie to retrieve, but it stuck in the ground like a javelin and the sprinting dog impaled herself on it, swallowing it whole. Hurst rushed his pet to a vet, where micro-cameras found the stick had somehow worked its way deep into her stomach without hitting any vital organs on the way. After a two-hour operation, the only injury to Millie was a small scratch inside her stomach.”

—
USA Today

For 20 years this American singer was the face of rock ’n’ roll in the East Bloc. Was he just a stooge of the Kremlin propaganda machine?

A
LL-AMERICAN BOY

In 1958, 20-year-old Dean Reed moved from his home outside Denver, Colorado, to Los Angeles. Blessed with drop-dead good looks, and hungry for success, Reed thought he could be the next Elvis. Capitol Records agreed—they signed him to a recording contract. Over the next four years he released eight singles as the record company booked him on variety shows, trying to market him as a teen idol, like a hipper Tab Hunter. All eight records flopped in the United States, but South America was another story. His record “A Summer Romance” was a monster hit in Argentina, so Reed headed south of the border to capitalize on his regional success with a follow-up tour—and thus began one of the strangest odysseys in rock history.

To Reed’s astonishment, he wasn’t just a
hit
in Argentina—he was a
superstar
. Mobbed at every stop by screaming fans, his records outsold Elvis’s. But something happened on the tour that changed Reed’s life forever—he became a revolutionary. Argentina was in the midst of a grass roots social upheaval. The longer Reed stayed there, the more he got caught up in the movement, especially when he was booked to play concerts at prisons, in poor neighborhoods, and at rallies protesting U.S. nuclear testing policy.

Nicknamed “the Red Elvis,” Reed churned out dozens of hit records, starred in a bunch of cheap movies (like Elvis) and had his own TV variety show in Argentina. Within a few years, Reed was the #1 performer not only in that country, but in socialist-leaning South American countries including Chile, Peru, and Venezuela.

Unknown in America, Reed had become a rock ’n’ roll poster boy for the extreme left…which got him on the wrong side of the right wing Argentine government. Reed was thrown out of Argentina in 1966. But that was just a bump in the road. His star was rising—and it was red.

Combining American rock ’n’ roll with Socialism had an unexpected bonus: it made Reed a hit in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. Melodiya, the U.S.S.R.’s state-run record label, signed him to make records and tour. It was a win-win situation: Reed became the international teen idol he’d always wanted to be and the Soviet Union got an American rock star who would speak out between songs, publicly denouncing U.S. involvement in Vietnam, insisting that the Berlin Wall was a necessary and prudent security measure, and touting the glories of the Communist system.