Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (36 page)

THE TERROR OF TINY TOWN (1938)
Western

Review:
“The only singing cowboy movie ever made with a cast made up entirely of midgets. If you’ve ever seen a singing cowboy western with Roy Rogers, you’ve seen this one—just shrink the entire cast in half. The story stinks
(Romeo and Juliet
without the gore, good writing, or tragedy) and the acting is pretty awful. Seeing this movie is like a badge of bad movieness.” (Oh,
the Humanity: The Worst Films Ever
)
Stars:
Billy Curtis, Yvonne Moray.
Director:
Sam Newfield.

VIVA KNIEVEL! (1977)
Action

Review:
“Gangsters plan to kill motorcycle stunt rider Evel Knievel in order to use his trailer to smuggle cocaine. In between his stunts, Evel makes the lame walk, causes women to go weak in the knees, cures junkies, reconciles an estranged father and son, and bores cinema audiences.”
(Halliwell’s Film and Video Guide
)
Stars:
Evel Knievel, Lauren Hutton.
Director:
Gordon Douglas.

What do you call a fish with no eyes? “Fsh.”

THE BIRTH OF THE NFL, PART I

On
page 103
, we told you about the first professional football player. Here’s the story of the NFL—how it went from a ragtag league of misfits to a multibillion-dollar enterprise
.

T
HE FIRST NFL
By the turn of the 20th century, it was clear that professional football was more than a passing fad. Pro teams were popping up in gritty industrial towns in Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, and Rhode Island. Many were sponsored by steel mills, coal mines, or other businesses to provide a Sunday afternoon diversion on their employees’ one day off. These teams usually lost money.

In 1902 David Berry, owner of the Pittsburgh Stars, announced he was forming what he called the “National Football League.” It failed miserably, folding within a year.

What went wrong?

• First, only three teams, all from Pennsylvania, joined the new league. Teams from New York and Chicago declined, figuring that fans were more interested in local rivalries.

• Second, pro football’s image was at an all-time low. The play was slow, mostly defensive; the players were violent; the games often ended in riots; and the teams were corrupt because big-time gamblers bought out coaches and players.

• The more “refined” games of baseball, golf, and tennis were gaining in stature.

ADDING DIGNITY

In 1915 Jim Thorpe, the nation’s most famous athlete, joined the Canton Bulldogs. In addition to being a gold-medal Olympian and champion baseball player, Thorpe conducted himself with a quiet dignity that people looked up to. His addition to pro football gave it some credibility, but it still didn’t have much of a following outside of a team’s local community.

After World War I, a new attempt was made to form a national league. On September 17, 1920, four team owners met in a Hupmobile auto dealership in Canton, Ohio, and voted to form what became known as the American Professional Football Association (APFA). Over the next six weeks, they persuaded ten other teams from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and New York to join. Jim Thorpe was appointed president, not because he was an experienced manager (he wasn’t), but because his name generated headlines and again gave the new league credibility.

Why bother? 95% of the paperwork filed in an average office will never be seen again.

IF AT FIRST…

Like its predecessor, the new league was troubled from the start. They could pay players about $150 per game (not much by today’s standards), and the players still had to supply their own protective gear. The game itself was still slow; once a team got a touchdown, they tried to stall for the rest of the game to make it stand. And few fans showed up: the average game that first 1920 season attracted only 3,000 fans—less than a tenth the size of a good college football crowd. Three teams—the Cleveland Tigers, the Detroit Heralds, and the Muncie Flyers—folded after one season; the rest struggled to survive. There was little indication that these working-class teams, who played for money, would one day eclipse the noble college teams, who played for the enjoyment of the sport.

After one year as president of the APFA, Jim Thorpe declined to run for reelection. Joe Carr, manager of the Columbus Panhandles, was forced into the job. Although Carr had been involved with football since forming a team in 1904, he only had a fifth-grade education and showed no interest in running the league. But the other APFA members felt that as the manager with the most football experience, Carr was the best candidate, so they waited for him to leave the room and then elected him president without his consent. That turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to professional football.

TURNING IT AROUND

If he was going to be president, Carr figured he ought to try to improve the game’s image, so he made some changes. •

•In 1921 his office began releasing official weekly standings of each team in the league so that fans could keep track of how well their teams were doing.

King Kong
was the first feature-length movie to have a sequel.

• He assigned each team a geographic territory, then declared it off limits to all of the other APFA franchises so teams wouldn’t drive each other out of business by fighting over the same fans.

• Carr outlawed the practice of hiring college undergraduates to play for pro teams under assumed names. Using ringers was a tempting prospect both for the teams, who needed the talent, and for student athletes, who needed the cash (and had nothing else to do on Sunday afternoons). It drove college coaches crazy.

• In 1922 Carr instituted a standard player’s contract (with a reserve clause that gave a player’s current team first dibs on him the following season) and capped salaries at $1,200 per game. Both measures helped control costs, which helped strengthen the league.

• The APFA made one other significant change in 1922: they voted to change their name to the National Football League.

RED GRANGE

Thanks to Carr’s reforms, this second NFL looked like it might last a little longer than the first one had, but pro football still needed a lot of help. Mostly, it needed more star players to get fans into the stands. It needed Harold “Red” Grange. He’d become famous playing halfback for the University of Illinois. His uncanny ability to dart and weave his way downfield past his opponents made Grange the best player of his day. Fans called him “the Galloping Ghost.”

The newly formed Chicago Bears, coached by George Halas, signed Grange in 1925 for the last two games of the season. The first was against the Chicago Cardinals. Bears-Cardinals games usually attracted 10,000 fans, but with Grange on the field they drew 39,000, by far the largest crowd for a pro game to date. That record fell one week later when 70,000 people turned out to watch Grange and the Bears play the New York Giants. (In a sign of things to come, the following day Grange signed an estimated $125,000 worth of commercial endorsement deals.)

A successful 12-day exhibition tour followed, in which Grange and the Bears played eight teams from eight different cities. (They won the first four but were so exhausted that they lost the last four.) But what mattered most was that pro football was finally on the map. The Bears made an estimated $297,000 in 1925, up from $116,500 the year before; and the New York Giants, who were $40,000 in debt and close to collapse when Grange and the Bears rolled into town, ended the season with $18,000 in the bank. By attracting attention to the struggling Giants, Grange is credited with single-handedly saving the franchise.

Bad kitty! A giraffe can kill a lion with one kick.

THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

But Grange couldn’t single-handedly save the NFL, which was still in trouble. Sure, the games he played in drew fans, but others were still sparsely attended. To make matters worse, Grange left the Bears and formed his own team after contract negotiations with the Bears broke down (he wanted a one-third ownership stake in the team). The new team was called the New York Yankees, but the NFL denied admission to them because there already was a football team in New York. So Grange formed a new league, the American Football League, which fared about as poorly as the first NFL and folded after a season. But the NFL also had a tough year without Grange as a draw, so they let the Yankees join in 1927. (The football Yankees folded a year later; Grange played the rest of his Hall of Fame career with the Bears.)

So that saved football, right? Wrong. Teams were still losing money and fans were losing interest. The style of play was more defensive than ever, which resulted in low-scoring games being played in cold, empty stadiums—one bad-weather game in New York drew exactly 83 fans.

And then came the Great Depression, which hit hardest against the working-class fan base that was the backbone of the professional leagues. Hardly anyone could afford the 50¢ it cost to see a game, least of all in the smaller cities, where many teams were located. By 1932 the NFL was down to eight teams.

It was time for yet another man to swoop in and save professional football from itself.

Illegal man downfield—five-yard penalty! Turn to
page 401
and read Part II
.

*        *        *

“You have to play this game like somebody just hit your mother with a two-by-four.”

—Dan Birdwell

The United States has more airports than any other country—14,801.

WHAT A DISH!

BRI writer Kyle Coroneos brought us this article on his favorite subject
(
really
)—
CorningWare. We found it fascinating. You will, too.

S
ERENDIPITY
In 1952 Donald Stookey, a scientist at the Corning Glass Works Company in Corning, New York, had two lucky accidents in the research lab.

•
Accident #1:
He was heating a piece of glass in a furnace when the temperature controller malfunctioned. It was only supposed to reach 900° C, but instead got much, much hotter. Stookey expected to find a molten lump of glass…but he didn’t. The glass was still intact and now had a creamy, white ceramic look to it.

•
Accident #2:
Stookey dropped the hot glass while he was removing it with a pair of tongs. Instead of breaking, it clanged to the floor like a plate of steel.

These two mishaps led Stookey to a new discovery: after molten glass was formed into an object, it could be “cooked” a second time at an even higher temperature to control the crystal growth within the glass, turning it into an extremely hard ceramic. The new material—which he patented as “Pyroceram”—could sustain drastic temperature changes better than glass or metal.

TAKING AIM

Although Corning already produced a type of glass cookware called Pyrex (the first glass cookware, introduced in 1915), they had a much different vision for Pyroceram: national defense. In fact, Corning had been making glass products for the military since the Civil War. Now it was the Cold War, and the United States and the Soviet Union were were both building and stockpiling nuclear missiles. The military was interested in any new technology that would allow weapons to withstand the rapid temperature changes to which they would be subjected while hurtling though the atmosphere. Pyroceram, it turned out, was the perfect material to use for the missiles’ nose cones, which took the brunt of the damage. Corning pitched the idea to defense companies such as Hughes Aircraft and Raytheon, and was awarded huge contracts. Over the next 20 years, thousands of nuclear and ballistic missiles with Pyroceram noses were built. In the 1970s, the same technology was adapted to build the heat tiles that now cover NASA’s fleet of space shuttles.

The ancient Romans used stingray stingers to treat toothaches.

COMING HOME

After winning the contracts, Corning started looking around for other uses for Pyroceram. In 1957 they decided to put it in America’s kitchens. CorningWare dishes were an easy sell: they were the only type of cookware that could be used in the oven or the freezer, or put directly from one into the other without cracking. In short, they were the most versatile dishes ever made.

CorningWare’s first product line consisted of only three saucepans and a skillet, and sales were modest. But it’s estimated that by 1980 there was at least one CorningWare dish in nearly every household in the United States.

END OF THE LINE

CorningWare had one major drawback: the dishes are so durable that they will last for 1,000 years…which doesn’t leave a lot of room for repeat business. After strong sales numbers that lasted into the 1980s, it seemed that everyone who wanted CorningWare already
had
CorningWare, and sales started to plummet.

By 1998 Corning had completely shifted from making home consumer products to developing new glass technology for communications and aerospace. It leased the rights to all of its cooking products to a century-old housewares company called World Kitchen, which kept the CorningWare name, but replaced the Pyroceram with stoneware, a much less durable material. Currently there is no cookware being made of Pyroceram. The original CorningWare dishes are now collectors’ items, not because they’re rare (millions were made) but because people who have them don’t want to give them up.