Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (75 page)

1956 was also the year that the Corvette’s body received a bumper-to-bumper cosmetic restyling. In the process, many of the amenities that had been left out of the 1953–55 Corvettes—roll-up windows and exterior door handles and locks, to name three—were put in. By now GM had also solved many of the technical
challenges associated with working with fiberglass body panels, so there was no talk of going back to steel. Corvettes kept their fiberglass bodies for more than 50 years, until they were finally replaced with a new composite material in 2005.

As the Corvette made steady improvement from one year to the next, Duntov also worked to raise Chevrolet’s racing profile. In 1955 he entered a 1956 Chevy Bel-Air in the annual race to the top of Pike’s Peak in Colorado. He drove the car himself to a record-breaking first-place finish, shaving a full two minutes off the old record, which had been set by a Ford
.
Then in January 1956, Duntov took a modified 1957 Corvette to Daytona Beach, Florida, and set a 150-mph speed record there.

Chevrolet wouldn’t be directly involved in racing for very long. The sport’s image took a beating after a 1955 car crash at the Grand Prix race in Le Mans, France, killed 80 spectators. In mid-1957, GM, citing safety concerns, joined with the other big U.S. automakers and got out of auto racing altogether. Auto racers would continue to race American cars, of course, but the automakers no longer fielded their own teams or race cars. By then, however, Chevrolet’s reputation as a manufacturer of fast, exciting cars was secure.

1957 was also the year that Duntov was appointed to the newly created position of Chevrolet’s Director of High Performance. For the first time in his career, he had an official title to go with his growing public persona as the “Father of the Corvette.”

 

Myth:
Napoleon Bonaparte was very short—about 5’2”.

Truth:
His body was measured at that height when he died in 1821. At the time, France used a slightly different system of measurement. In today’s universally agreed-upon measurements, that height corresponds to about 5’ 6½ “—short, but not that short.

William Driver was just 13 years old when he left his

Salem, Massachusetts, home in 1816 to work as a cabin boy on a sailing ship. By the age of 21, he was a seasoned enough sailor to earn a captain’s license. To celebrate the occasion, his mother and family friends presented him with a gift they’d made: a 10’-by-17’ American flag, with 24 stars (the number of states at the time), to fly from his first ship. After gazing on it for the first time, the story goes, Driver dubbed the flag “Old Glory.” It flew from Driver’s ships for the rest of his career—twice circling the globe on whaling ships—before he retired in 1837.

Shortly after that, Driver’s wife died, and he moved his three children to Nashville, Tennessee, where his two brothers lived. He became a salesman, married again, had nine more children, and over the years became a well-known man around town. His flag became well known, too: On every national holiday (and on March 17—his own birthday), Old Glory flew from the peak of the Driver house on what is now Nashville’s Fifth Avenue.

In 1861 Driver’s daughters gave the flag an update, removing the 24 stars and replacing them with 34 new ones (10 states had joined the union since he’d received the flag in 1824) and adding a small white anchor to the lower right corner of the blue field in honor of their seafaring father. By then, the flag was beloved by the townspeople, but within a few short months that would change dramatically.

In April 1861, the Civil War began. Driver, originally from Massachusetts, was pro-Union, but he lived in the capital of a state that had joined the Confederacy—and suddenly his cherished flag became a symbol of an enemy country. On two occasions, mobs of
Confederates showed up at the house, one directed by the Tennessee governor himself, and demanded the flag, vowing to burn it. In a letter to one of his daughters, Driver wrote:

After that, the flag disappeared until February 1862, when Nashville became the first Confederate capital to fall to the North. Members of the 6th Regiment of the Ohio Volunteer Infantry, who helped take the city, hoisted their military flag to the top of the recaptured Capitol building…but Driver, who was at the scene, would have none of it.

Escorted back to his home by soldiers, Driver went up to his bedroom took a quilt out from under his bed—and cut it open. He’d gotten a neighbor to sew the flag into it months earlier, hiding its location even from his family. Driver marched back to the Capitol, climbed the stairs to the top of the tower—and hoisted the flag up the pole himself. From that same letter:

Old Glory was eventually returned to Driver, but it never flew again. In 1873 he gave it to one of his daughters, telling her, “Mary Jane, this is my ship’s flag, ‘Old Glory.’ It has been my constant companion. I love it as a mother loves her child. Cherish it as I have cherished it.”

Driver died in 1886 and was buried in the Nashville City Cemetery. His daughter kept the flag for nearly 50 years until 1922, when she presented it to President Warren G. Harding. Being in too delicate a condition to display, it was stored away in the Smithsonian Institute. There it sat for 60 years until it was restored in 1982 and put in a special glass case in the National Museum of American History, right alongside another large flag—the 30’-by-34’ “Star Spangled Banner” that inspired America’s national anthem—where it remains today.

 

Legendary Hero:
Pecos Bill

The Tale:
Bill was born in Texas, but fell out of a covered wagon when he was a baby and was raised by coyotes. He grew up to be the most powerful cowboy in the Old West. He used a rattlesnake as a lasso, could ride a tornado like a rodeo bull, and personally dug out the Rio Grande River.

The Truth:
The Century
magazine writer Edward O’Reilly began publishing Pecos Bill stories in 1916, claiming that they were part of a cowboy oral tradition. They weren’t. O’Reilly made them all up.

 

Legendary Hero:
Astrild

The Tale:
In the 900-year-old pantheon of Norse gods (which also includes Odin and Thor), Astrild, whose name means “love fire,” was the god of love—like Cupid.

The Truth:
Astrild was a popular subject for romantic poets in the 18th and 19th centuries, but he was never actually worshiped by ancient Scandinavians. That’s because he was the invention of Swedish poet Georg Stiernhielm in the mid-1600s.

 

Legendary Hero:
Joe Magarac

The Tale:
A folk hero in the steel-making towns of Pennsylvania, Magarac was the greatest steelworker who ever lived. He was made of steel and worked every moment of every day. Not only that, but he would show up just in the nick of time to save steelworkers from danger.

The Truth:
The story spread when it was mentioned in a 1931

Scribner’s Magazine
article by Owen Francis, who heard the story from steelworkers. However, according to historians, the men who told Francis the Joe Magarac story probably made it up on the spot. They were eastern European, and “magarac” means “jackass” in several Slavic languages.

 

Legendary Heroes:
Wesley and Princess Buttercup

The Tale:
The classic 1987 movie
The Princess Bride
is based on a 1973 novel by William Goldman. But Goldman’s book, as stated in the introduction, is an abridged version of a 200-year-old folktale that he took from a much longer book of the same name by a reclusive writer named S. Morgenstern.
The Princess Bride
is, in fact, one of the most beloved stories of Morgenstern’s home country of Florin (where the book takes place).

The Truth:
There’s no such place as Florin, and no such writer as S. Morgenstern. Goldman wrote the book, and the idea that he abridged it from an older novel was used as a “literary device.”

How We Use It:
A problem

What It Really Means:
Specifically, a problem in which one must choose between two or more unsavory choices

 

How We Use It:
Something that’s pleasingly fantastic

What It Really Means:
Something that causes terror

 

How We Use It:
A lot of something

What It Really Means:
Too much of something

 

How We Use It:
Enormous

What It Really Means:
Evil

•
“Ice Ice Baby,”
by Vanilla Ice. The first rap song to ever reach #1 on the
Billboard
chart.

 

•
“Losing My Religion,” by R.E.M.
Their first (and only) top-5 hit, it’s one of only two hit songs ever to feature a mandolin prominently. (The other is Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May.”)

 

•
“I Love Your Smile,” by Shanice.
This teen pop song by an 18-year-old former child star (at age 8, Shanice appeared in a KFC commercial with Ella Fitzgerald) features a sax solo by jazz star Branford Marsalis.

 

• “Achy Breaky Heart,” by Billy Ray Cyrus.
The first country song to sell a million copies since Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers’ “Islands in the Stream” in 1983. The song and its accompanying dance, the “Achy Breaky,” spawned 1992’s country line-dance fad.

 

•
“November Rain,” by Guns N’ Roses.
At 8 minutes, 59 seconds, it’s the longest top-10 hit of all time.

 

•
“Dreamlover,” by Mariah Carey.
The first of three Carey singles to sample the 1982 Tom Tom Club hit “Genius of Love.” Like the other two (“Heartbreaker” and “Fantasy”), it was a #1 hit.

 

•
“Stay (I Missed You),” by Lisa Loeb and Nine Stories.
Loeb got this song on the
Reality Bites
soundtrack because her neighbor was the film’s star, Ethan Hawke. It went all the way to #1, making her the only artist ever to score a #1 hit without a record deal.