Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (22 page)

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Here are some of Samuel Popeil’s surefire sales tactics. (His son, Ron, uses many of the same methods on TV today.)

• Sales booths should be situated near makeup aisles or women’s restrooms to ensure a receptive—and captive—audience.

• Get one or two people to stop and listen. That will pique the interest of others passing by.

• Tout the product’s indispensability. Show how the item is a value because it performs multiple tasks. Memorize the spoken part of the pitch so you can deliver it flawlessly while you demonstrate the product. That will show how easy it is to use.

• Describe the product’s usefulness repeatedly, using words like “magic,” “fantastic,” and “miracle.” Ask rhetorical questions like “Isn’t that amazing?” when demonstrating the product.

• Never reveal the price until the end of the pitch. This builds suspense. Say to the audience, “You’re probably asking yourself what a product like this costs.” Then give a high round number, like $40. Then say that the item is well worth that price, but right now it’s much cheaper. Progressively move the price down: It’s not $10; it’s not $5. It’s the low, low price of $3.98! To encourage immediate purchase, tell the crowd that “supplies are limited.”

• But wait, there’s more! Before allowing anyone to purchase it, suddenly introduce and demonstrate a smaller product, noting its “retail” value, and give it away for free with purchase.

Artist Paul Cézanne taught his parrot to say “Cézanne is a great painter.”

DUMB CROOKS

Here’s proof that crime doesn’t pay
.

S
AY WHAT?
“In 2002 Blair MacKay, 32, was fined $600 for invasion of privacy by a court in Dingwall, Scotland. The court had heard testimony that he had barged into a female neighbor’s apartment and asserted, ‘I don’t listen to phone conversations!’ The woman testified that she had just told her friend over the phone that MacKay was probably listening to them.”

—The Scotsman

MAZDA
LIGHT POLE
3000

“It wasn’t the Mazda RX-7’s speed that caught the eye of Redondo Beach Police Officer Joseph Fonteno. It was the hood ornament—a 9-foot light pole draped across the hood. Minutes earlier, the car’s driver had clipped a three-phase traffic signal from its concrete base and proceeded about seven miles to Pacific Coast Highway, where Fonteno pulled him over. When the officer asked about the traffic signal, the driver replied. ‘It came with the car when I bought it.’ The motorist was booked on charges of drunk driving, hit-and-run, and ‘excessive sarcasm,’ said police.”

—Los Angeles Times

STUPID FOR 15 MINUTES

“A day after they told their tale of buried treasure on national television, two men were charged with stealing the 1,800 antique dollar bills (estimated value: more than $100,000) they said they found in their back yard. As Timothy Crebase, 24, and Barry Billcliff, 27, of Methuen, Mass., recounted their story on
Good Morning America, Today
, Fox, and CNN, police noticed the details changed with each appearance. There were discrepancies about when they found the money, how deep it was buried, why they were digging, and the exact site.

“When Crebase and Billcliff returned from the New York media blitz, police and the Secret Service were waiting to question them. When it turned out they had found the bills in a barn they were roofing, the two were charged with receiving stolen property and conspiracy to commit larceny. Ironically, the men were unable to raise the $5,000 cash bail.”

Life imitates architecture: The ancient Assyrians cut their hair in the shape of a pyramid.

—Lawrence
(Mass.)
Eagle-Tribune

FEELING WANTED

“A suspect in two taxicab robberies walked into a New York City police station and failed to notice his picture in a ‘wanted’ photo on the wall, giving cops an opportunity to make one of their easiest busts ever. An alert detective noticed the resemblance and immediately arrested Awiey ‘Chucky’ Hernandez, 20. Hernandez had gone to the station to inquire about a friend, Huquan ‘Guns’ Gavin, who had been arrested in another investigation, said Det. Sgt. Norman Horowitz of the New York Police Dept., adding that he had ‘never seen anything like it in 30 years on the force.’”

—Reuters

HE BLEW IT

“A Warrensburg man burned himself and is facing criminal charges after he used a lighter to check on his efforts to steal gasoline from a dump truck, causing a fire that destroyed a forklift. Glen Germain, 19, suffered minor burns in the blaze when he lit a lighter to see how full the gas can he was filling had become, sheriff’s investigators said. The lighter ignited gas on his hands and in the can; the gas can fire then spread to the forklift, destroying the vehicle. Germain admitted he was responsible for the fire, telling investigators he was trying to see the progress of the siphoning process.”

—Post Star
(N.Y.)

QUICKIES

• A couple rushing to make a high school graduation ceremony led police on a high speed chase that ended when they sped through a train crossing and crashed into a nearby home (no one was hurt). The wrecked car was going to be a surprise present for the graduate.

• A five-time burglar from Detroit found himself back in the can, charged with yet another burglary. How’d they catch him? He played with some Silly Putty in the home he’d just robbed and left his fingerprints.

October 10th (10/10) is National Metric Day.

D. B. COOPER

Modern-day Robin Hood? Or high-flying robber? He hijacked an airplane, stole a small fortune, then parachuted out of sight…and straight into legend
.

D
AREDEVIL
On Thanksgiving Eve, November 24, 1971, a nondescript man wearing a conservative dark suit, white shirt, narrow black tie, and sunglasses stepped up to the Northwest Orient Airlines ticket counter in Portland, Oregon. He paid $20 in cash for a one-way ticket to Seattle on Flight 305.

Once the 727 was airborne, the man summoned the flight attendant, Tina Mucklow, introduced himself as “Dan Cooper,” and handed her a note. It said he had a bomb in his briefcase and would blow up the plane if they didn’t grant his demands. He wanted two parachutes and $200,000 in $20 bills. When the plane landed in Seattle, Cooper kept the pilot and crew hostage but let the passengers off in exchange for the chutes and the loot. Then he ordered the pilot to take off again and set a course for Mexico with some special instructions: Keep the landing gear down, and the flight speed under 170 mph. Somewhere over the Lewis River, 25 miles northeast of Portland, Cooper strapped on a parachute, tied the money around his waist, and jumped out the rear stairway of the plane. He was never seen or heard from again.

THE BIGFOOT OF CRIME

In the ensuing investigation, the FBI questioned a man named Daniel B. Cooper. Although that person was never a serious suspect, the FBI reported to the press that they’d interrogated a “D. B. Cooper.” And those initials became forever linked with the skyjacker.

The FBI manhunt that followed was unprecedented in scope and intensity. It was a showcase investigation, meant to display the competency and professionalism of the world’s greatest law enforcement agency. Every inch of ground in the vicinity of the purported landing site was searched from the air and land, with teams of trackers and dogs, for 18 days. So it was a humbling moment when, after weeks of tracking down leads, the FBI admitted that they had come up with…nothing. No credible suspect. No trace of the loot or the parachute. No further leads to follow. A complete dead end. One frustrated FBI agent referred to Cooper as the “Bigfoot of crime” because there was no proof of his existence anywhere.

It is illegal to walk a pet snake on a leash in Osnago, Italy.

If Cooper survived, he’d pulled off the crime of the century.

A STAR IS BORN

Something about the hijacking caught the public imagination, as the media reports raved about the audacity of the crime and the calm, competent way in which Cooper carried it out. According to the flight attendants, Cooper behaved like a gentleman throughout the ordeal, even requesting that meals be delivered to the crew while they were stuck on the ground in Seattle, waiting for the ransom money to be delivered.

He became a folk hero, a latter-day Jesse James. Songs were written about him, and a movie was made, starring Treat Williams as Cooper and Robert Duvall as the FBI agent on his trail. Half a dozen books, mostly by former FBI agents, published theories about what happened to him. He was living the high life on a beach in Mexico. Or he’d slipped back into his former life somewhere in the States, undetected, unnoticed, and forgotten.

On February 13, 1980, a family picnicking on the Columbia River, 30 miles west of Cooper’s landing area, found three bundles of disintegrating $20 bills ($5,800 total). The serial numbers were traced to the ransom. The rest of the cash has never been found.

…SO WHO DUNNIT?

• Possible Suspect #1
. On April 7, 1972, four months after Cooper’s successful hijacking, another hijacker stole a plane in Denver, using the same M.O. as D. B. Cooper. The Denver flight was also a 727 with a rear stairway, from which the hijacker made his getaway by parachute. A tip led police to Richard McCoy Jr., a man with an unusual profile: married with two children, a former Sunday school teacher, a law enforcement major at Brigham Young University, a former Green Beret helicopter pilot with service in Vietnam, and an avid skydiver. When FBI agents arrested McCoy two days after the Denver hijacking, they found a jumpsuit and a duffel bag containing half a million dollars. McCoy was convicted and sentenced to 45 years.

First African-American to play in the NBA: Earl Lloyd of the Washington Capitols (1950).

In August 1974 McCoy escaped from prison (he tricked the guards into letting him out of his cell with a handgun made from toothpaste and then crashed a garbage truck through the prison gate). The FBI tracked him down and three months later killed him in a shootout in Virginia.

In 1991 former FBI agent Russell Calame wrote a book titled
D. B. Cooper: The Real McCoy
, in which he claimed McCoy and Cooper were the same person. He quoted Nicholas O’Hara, the FBI agent who tracked down McCoy, as saying, “When I shot Richard McCoy, I shot D. B. Cooper at the same time.” But there’s no conclusive evidence. In fact, McCoy’s widow sued for libel and won.

Possible Suspect #2
. In August 2000, a Florida widow told
U.S. News and World Report
that her husband was D.B. Cooper. Jo Weber claimed that shortly before his death in 1995, her husband, Duane, told her, “I’m Dan Cooper.” Later she remembered he’d talked in his sleep about jumping out of an airplane. She checked into his background and discovered he’d spent time in prison near Portland, Oregon, then found an old Northwest Airlines ticket stub from the Seattle-Tacoma airport among his papers. She found a book about D. B. Cooper in the local library—it had notations in the margins matching her husband’s handwriting.

She relayed her suspicions to FBI Agent Ralph Himmelsbach, chief investigator on the D. B. Cooper case. To this day he insists Weber is one of the likeliest suspects he’s come across. More recently, facial recognition software was used to find the closest match to the composite picture of D. B. Cooper. Of the 3,000 photographs used (including Richard McCoy’s), Duane Weber’s was identified as the “best match.”

Possible Suspect #3
. Elsie Rodgers of Cozad, Nebraska, often told her family about the time she was hiking near the Columbia River in Washington in the 1970s and found a human head. They never really believed her until, while going through her things shortly after her death in 2000, they found a hatbox in her attic…with a human skull in it. Could that have been the remains of D. B. Cooper? And if so, what happened to the ransom money? Thirty years later, his fate remains a mystery.

Not as fast as you think: A housefly only flies at about 4.3 mph.

UNCLE JOHN HELPS OUT AROUND THE HOUSE

Impress your family with these strange household tips
.

• Having trouble removing a stubborn splinter? Squirt some Elmer’s Glue on the area. When it dries, peel it off—the splinter will come off with it.

• To protect fine china from getting scratched, put a coffee filter between each dish or teacup when you stack them.

• Telephone getting grimy? Wipe it down with a soft cloth dipped in rubbing alcohol.

• Lose a contact lens in your carpet? Cover the end of a vacuum hose with a stocking and secure it with a rubber band. Then vacuum, holding the hose about an inch off the carpet. The stocking will prevent the lens from being sucked in.

• In a pinch, olive oil makes an effective (but greasy) substitute for shaving cream.

• Used fabric softener sheets are excellent for wiping dust off computer and TV screens.

• Adding a cup of coarse table salt to a load of wash helps prevent colors from fading.

• You can use Silly Putty to clean the gunk off your computer keyboard (and when you’re finished you can use it to remove lint from clothes).

• Spy tip: Mailing a sensitive document? Seal the envelope with egg white—it’s nearly impossible to steam open.