Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (74 page)

Crispus Attucks’s first State Championship, the first Championship for an all-black school in Indiana or anywhere else in the United States, was also the long-awaited first Championship for the city of Indianapolis. Fans both black and white celebrated. Robertson later said, “I remember that night they called us Indianapolis Attucks, not Crispus Attucks. To me, that meant we’d arrived. They just wanted you to win; they didn’t care what color you were.”

In 1956, led by Oscar Robertson as a senior, the Crispus Attucks Tigers had their best season yet. Robertson broke the city scoring record twice, once with 45 points, then later with 62 points—still an Indianapolis record—and the Attucks team drew huge crowds wherever they played, at home or on the road.

They rolled through the 1956 regular season and playoffs, and other teams seemed to stand still as the Tigers ran past them. Lafayette Jefferson High School, the team they faced in the 1956
Championship Finals, played an old-fashioned game, similar to Milan’s—they held the ball and controlled the pace of the game with multiple passes. They even shot their free throws underhand. Needless to say, they were overmatched. Robertson scored 39 points despite being double- and triple-teamed all night, and Crispus Attucks won 79–57. With that win, they became Indiana’s first undefeated State Basketball Champions.

The build-up to that moment had been remarkable. The Tigers had gone 30–1 back in 1955 and 31–0 in 1956, setting a state record with 45 consecutive wins over two seasons. And over the course of just two years, they had changed everything—not just the way the game of Indiana basketball was played, but its color, too. The 1954 Championship Game had three black players; the next year, the Championship Game was contested by two all-black high schools. Now, in 1956, an all-black team was the best that had ever been—the state’s first undefeated state championship team. Over the next few years, high schools in Indianapolis and around the state started recruiting black students who once would have been segregated in schools like Crispus Attucks and Gary Roosevelt.

The renowned winner-take-all Indiana High School State Championship Tournament no longer exists; the state went to a four-class system in 1998. Crispus Attucks itself was integrated in 1970 under court-ordered desegregation. Because of declining enrollment, it was converted to a junior high school in 1986 and then later to a middle school. In 2006 it became a high school again—a magnet school for students preparing to become medical professionals. And in 2008, more than 50 years after they won their first State Championship, the Crispus Attucks Tigers returned to playing varsity basketball.

“Police responded to a report of two dogs running loose and attacking ducks last Sunday. The officer cited a resident for the loose dogs. The ducks refused medical treatment and left the area, according to police.”

—
Ashland (Oregon) Daily Tidings

Lobster may taste like shellfish (crab, shrimp), but it looks like an insect. And technically, it’s an arthropod—more closely related to spiders than to anything from the sea. Lobsters are abundant off the coast of New England, and from the colonial era until the 19th century, they were treated like insects; fisherman considered them pests that took up room in nets meant for more desirable fish. But fishermen caught them in large quantities and were reluctant to throw them back, especially since they were edible and could be sold (cheaply) for other uses. Those uses: ground up and used as high-protein plant fertilizer or as food for slaves, indentured servants, and prisoners. In fact, during the American Revolution, some British prisoners revolted over being served lobster too often. When the railroads made mass transport of goods possible in the late 1800s, East Coast fisheries realized that they could ship lobster west…where nobody knew it wasn’t an expensive delicacy. In other words, they decided they could make a buck by
calling
lobster a delicacy. They did, and it worked.

Pronounced “fwah-grah,” it’s the extra-fatty, rich-tasting liver of a goose that was force-fed until its liver grew to 10 times normal size. Today, the food is banned in many places because force-feeding the goose is considered by some to be an act of cruelty. Goose liver was a favorite dish of rulers in ancient Egypt. But its popularity died out over time, until Jewish people in the Middle Ages discovered that the fatty liver of the common wild goose was delicious. Not just that, but geese are
kosher,
meaning they pass the rigorous Jewish dietary guidelines. By the Renaissance, most of
the Jewish population of Rome was confined to ghettos. Word got out to the ruling elite that the Jewish dish of fatty goose liver was pretty good, so the wealthy went into butcher shops in the Jewish ghettos to buy it. Suddenly, fattened goose liver was a fancy food. And as the Roman Empire’s cultural influence spread throughout Europe, the dish became especially popular in what is now France. (
Foie gras
is French for “fat liver.”)

It’s amazing that anybody ever discovered that oysters are edible. They securely affix themselves to shoreline rock clusters, and they themselves
look
like rocks—they’re encased in thick, hard-to-crack shells. And then, once you’ve got one open, the edible portion is a slimy, misshapen, gelatinous glob. (Never eat oysters that were open when you found them—they’ll give you a “gut-wrenching” experience.) But people do have to eat, and the lower the income bracket, the more creative the food sources sometimes have to be. The late-19th-century immigration boom created a population explosion, particularly on the east coast of North America, where oysters were abundant at the time. They became a cheap favorite of the working and lower classes. By the 1920s, oysters were overconsumed to the point of scarcity. And things that are scarce tend to become more expensive…and more desirable.

They’ve been eaten all around the world for thousands of years, but we know snails, or
escargots,
as a French dish. Poor French peasants ate snails at least as far back as the 1600s. The most commonly consumed variety: vineyard snails, which are easily caught and found in abundance in (obviously) vineyards. Snails remained a rustic French country dish until the early 20th century. That’s when restaurants became common in the United States and, as is partly still true today, the fanciest restaurants were the French ones. And because French food was considered exotic, American diners didn’t know that when they ordered expensive plates of
escargot,
they were actually ordering slimy creatures from the yard cooked in the same way they were in the 1600s: baked with inexpensive, easily obtained ingredients—butter, garlic, and parsley.

In January of 1953, a Belgian-born, Russian-Jewish immigrant named Zora Arkus-Duntov paid a visit to the General Motors Motorama auto show at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. There the first Chevrolet Corvette was unveiled to the public, and like so many other people who got their first look at the car, Duntov was struck by its beauty.

Unlike most of the spectators, Duntov was an automotive engineer who’d spent years working on and around race cars. As he studied the Corvette’s motor and other components, he realized that it would not be able to deliver on the promise of performance that its sporty good looks implied. “Mechanically, it stunk, with its six-cylinder engine and two-speed automatic transmission,” he remembered. “But visually, it was superb.”

Duntov had been looking for a job with one of the major American automakers for several months. Before Motorama, he wasn’t too particular about which company he went to work for, but after seeing the Corvette, he knew he wanted a job at Chevrolet.
This
was a car he could work on—this was a car that needed his help. Luckily for Duntov (and for
you
, if you’re a Corvette fan), Ed Cole, Chevrolet’s chief engineer, was impressed with his credentials and gave him a job. In May 1953, Duntov started as an assistant staff engineer in Chevrolet’s Research & Development department.

If Duntov thought he was going to be assigned full-time to the Corvette, he was probably disappointed—the car was so new and sold at such low volumes that
no
employees were assigned to it full-time. People worked on the car on temporary assignment and only when their work on other, more important projects permitted.

Duntov had run his own businesses before, but he’d never worked for a big corporation, and he had a tough time adjusting to life at GM, then the world’s largest. Just a few weeks after landing his job at Chevrolet, he nearly lost it when he insisted on taking a leave of absence to honor a prior commitment and go to France to race at Le Mans, a grueling 24-hour road race. Result: When he (reluctantly) returned to Detroit, he was demoted and reassigned to work on GM trucks and schoolbuses. In December 1953, however, he worked his way back into the good graces of his superiors by drafting a memo titled, “Thoughts Pertaining to Youth, Hot-Rodders and Chevrolet.”

In his memo, Duntov observed that the hobby of fixing up cars and turning them into hot rods was a rapidly growing fad with young men. Currently Fords were the cars of choice for hot-rodders, and Duntov speculated that when these young men outgrew their street racers, they were likely to continue buying Fords. In the Corvette, Duntov saw an opportunity to win some of this business for Chevrolet. But the performance of the standard Corvette had to be improved considerably, and on top of that, Chevy had to begin offering a full line of optional high-performance parts for buyers who wanted their Corvettes to be able to take on all those souped-up Fords.

The 1953 Corvette aside, Chevrolet had a reputation for selling low-priced, underpowered, and unexciting cars to buyers who didn’t have the money to buy the cars they really wanted—hardly the car of choice for hot-rodders. The division’s bargain-basement image had cost it a lot of business in recent years, and that was one of the reasons Cole had wanted the Corvette for Chevrolet. It was also one of the reasons he wanted
Duntov
for Chevrolet, even after he’d run off to Europe to play with race cars. Duntov may well have been the only engineer at GM who would have known
how
to play with race cars, and he was certainly one of the few with the insight to write his famous memo about Chevrolet and hot-rodders.

Remember that, though Chevrolet had been founded by a race car driver, Louis Chevrolet, in 1911, it had been decades since
Chevy or any other GM division had built anything resembling a race car (or a sports car). And paradoxically, GM could be a tough place to work for people who were interested in cars. A typical career path for a GM engineer was to start out working on designs for one small part of the car—say, the latch mechanism for the hood—then eventually move on to another, such as engine mounts or trunk lid hinges. A job at GM was steady, high-paying work for people willing to endure years of tedium as they paid their dues, but serious “car guys” who were passionate about hot rods and racing stayed away. Duntov was one of the few who was willing to take a chance at GM. And that was why Cole only banished him to work on trucks and schoolbuses instead of firing him outright.

Duntov’s hot-rod memo laid out a strategy for Chevrolet to become a dominant force in auto racing, just the kind of thing the division needed to change its image. Cole agreed with many of Duntov’s observations and set to work implementing them. Soon, for example, a full line of high-performance parts became available from every Chevy dealer in the country.

As soon as Cole felt that Duntov had been punished enough, he pulled him off of trucks and schoolbuses and assigned him to the team that was developing fuel injection for the 195-horsepower V-8 engine that would soon be replacing the Corvette’s six-cylinder Stovebolt Six. The V-8 was ready in time for the 1955 model year; all but 6 of the 700 Corvettes manufactured that year had them. (Fuel injection, which increased the engine’s power to as high as 283 hp, didn’t become available until 1957.)

Bit by bit, Duntov and the other engineers and stylists who worked on the Corvette chipped away at the long list of things that were so annoying about the early cars. A three-speed manual transmission was made available as an option in 1955; the following year, it became standard equipment.