Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (55 page)

•
William “Froggy” Laughlin:
Rear-ended and killed by a truck while delivering newspapers on his motor scooter in 1948. He was 16.

•
Richard “Mickey” Daniels:
Long estranged from his wife and children, Daniels died alone in a San Diego hotel room in 1970. Cause of death: cirrhosis of the liver. Years passed before his remains were identified and claimed by his family. Daniels was 55 when he died; he is buried in an unmarked grave.

•
Bobby Blake:
(He used his real name, Mickey Gubitosi, in the
Our Gang
films until 1942.) If you’re charged with murdering your wife and you beat the rap, does that count as
being
cursed or
beating
the curse? In the 1990s, Blake took up with a woman named Bonnie Lee Bakley. He didn’t know it at the time, but she was a celebrity-obsessed con artist who wanted to have a baby with a Hollywood star. Blake took the bait, and in 2000 Bakley gave birth to Blake’s daughter. Five months later they were married.

Mark Twain called the accordion a “stomach Steinway.”

On May 4, 2001, Bakley was shot in the head and killed while sitting in her car outside a restaurant where she and Blake had just eaten dinner. In April 2002, Blake was arrested and charged with Bakley’s murder; in March 2005, a jury found him not guilty. He beat the rap, but the media continues to doubt his innocence. Blake says that as a result of the ordeal, he’s now destitute.

OTHER RASCALS’ FATES

•
Robert “Bonedust” Young
. Fell asleep while smoking in bed in 1951; he died in the ensuing fire at the age of 33.

•
Jay “Pinky” Smith (aka the freckle-faced kid)
. Stabbed to death in 2002 by a homeless man he’d befriended, who then dumped Smith’s body in the desert outside of Las Vegas. He was 87.

•
“Dorothy” Dandridge
. Committed suicide in 1965 after losing all of her money in a phony investment scheme. She was 41.

•
Kendall “Breezy Brisbane” McComas
. Committed suicide in 1981, two weeks before being forced into retirement as an electrical engineer. He was 64.

•
Darwood “Waldo” Kaye
. Waldo was the rich kid with glasses who competed with Spanky and Alfalfa for Darla’s affections. In 2002 he was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver while walking on the sidewalk. He was 72.

•
Pete the Pup:
The first dog to play Pete was poisoned by an unknown assailant in 1930.

VOICE OF REASON?

Hal Roach, who outlived many of his child stars and died in 1992 at the age of 100, never believed that the kids were cursed. “Naturally, some got into trouble or had bad luck,” he told an interviewer in 1973. “They’re the ones that made the headlines. But if you took 176 other kids and followed them through their lives, I believe you would find the same percentage of them having trouble in later life.”

Six standard eight-post Legos can be combined in 102,981,500 different ways.

FICTIONAL VACATION

On
page 96
, we told you how you can visit the
Field of Dreams
baseball diamond. Here are some other tourist attractions based on fictional places
.

• Tourists can take a
Sopranos
tour in suburban New Jersey. Stops include Satriale’s Pork Store, the place where Livia Soprano is “buried,” and the Bada Bing nightclub. The tour includes cannolis and a meeting with actor Joe Gannascoli, who plays Vito on the show.

• Sam Spade, the detective in Dashiell Hammett’s
The Maltese Falcon
, kept his office in the Hunter-Dulin Building at 111 Sutter Street, San Francisco. The building is real; the office is fictional.

•
Gunsmoke
was filmed in California, but set in Dodge City, Kansas. Since the 1960s, about 100,000 people a year visit the real Dodge City to see replicas of buildings from the show.

• The house used for exterior shots of
The Brady Bunch
is at 11222 Dilling Street, North Hollywood, California. The current residents installed an iron fence to keep out fans hoping to catch a glimpse of the Bradys.

•
The Wizard of Oz
takes place in Kansas, but neither the book nor the movie say
where
in Kansas. So the town of Liberal decided that it was
there
, and in 1981 opened a museum they call Dorothy’s House—an old farmhouse that kind of looks like the one in the 1939 movie.

• The 1990s TV series
Northern Exposure
took place in the fictional town of Cicely, Alaska, but was filmed in the real town of Roslyn, Washington. The Roslyn Museum houses artifacts and memorabilia from the show.

• People still visit Fort Hays, Kansas, setting of the 1990 movie
Dances with Wolves
. Only problem: the movie was filmed in South Dakota.

•
Twin Peaks
was filmed in Snoqualmie, Washington, and North Bend, Washington. You can visit the show’s Mar-T Cafe in North Bend, where they sell cherry pie, “a damn fine cup of coffee,” and official Log Lady logs.

Cone heads? Australia is the world’s top consumer of ice cream.

• What do
The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
, and
Sixteen Candles
have in common? All were written by John Hughes and all take place in Shermer, Illinois. It’s a fictional place, based on Hughes’s hometown of North-brook, Illinois. Landmarks from the movie, however, are real. Fans can see the “Save Ferris” water tower and the high school used in
The Breakfast Club
.

• Visiting New York? Take the
Seinfeld
tour. It’s led by Kenny Kramer, who inspired Michael Richards’s Kramer character on the show. Stops include: the Soup Nazi’s restaurant, Monk’s Diner (Tom’s Restaurant in real life), and the building used to film exterior shots of the office where Elaine worked. It’s a great way to spend Festivus.

• Bedrock City in Custer, South Dakota, is a re-creation of the town of Bedrock from
The Flintstones
. It includes the Flintstone and Rubble homes, the main street (with a bank being held up by a caveman), and Mt. Rockmore, a mini Mt. Rushmore (with Fred, Barney, and Dino instead of presidents).

•
Little House on the Prairie
(the books and the TV show) is based on author Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life, growing up in the 1860s near Wayside, Kansas. People who visit Wayside can see modern replicas of the show’s schoolhouse, post office, and the Ingalls’s cabin.

• Fans of
Gone With the Wind
can’t visit Tara—it’s fictional. But they can visit the Road to Tara Museum in Clayton County, Georgia. Highlights include replicas of some costumes used in the 1939 movie, such as Scarlett’s drapery dress, two seats from the Atlanta movie theater where stars of the movie saw the film’s premiere, and a copy of the novel autographed by the author, Margaret Mitchell.

• Andy Griffith was born in Mt. Airy, North Carolina, which became the model for Mayberry on
The Andy Griffith Show
. Every September, Mt. Airy holds “Mayberry Days” (cast members attend). There’s a statue of Andy and Opie and replicas of Floyd’s Barber Shop, the jail, and Andy’s house. But don’t look for the fishing hole seen in the opening credits—that’s in Beverly Hills.

Count ’em yourself: There are about 1,750 Os in every can of SpaghettiOs.

SPY HUNT: GRAY DECEIVER, PART II

Here’s the second part of our intriguing tale of espionage, money, and politics. (Part I is on
page 110
.)

T
O TELL THE TRUTH
The map of dead drops (places where spies and their handlers exchange money and secret documents) that the FBI found in CIA agent Brian Kelley’s home was pretty incriminating, but it wasn’t enough to secure a conviction, so the Bureau decided to trick Kelley into taking a lie detector test. They arranged for him to be transferred to a “new assignment,” debriefing a non-existent Soviet defector. To be approved for the new assignment, Kelley’s CIA superiors explained to him, he had to take a polygraph test.

The results of the test stunned even the seasoned FBI mole hunters—Kelley passed with flying colors. There wasn’t a flicker of a guilty response anywhere on the test. Fooling a lie detector test so thoroughly takes a lot of skill. This guy was
good
.

KNOCK KNOCK

Next, they set up a “false flag” operation: an FBI agent masquerading as an SVR agent knocked on Kelley’s door and warned him that he was about to be arrested for spying and needed to leave the country. The agent then handed Kelley a written escape plan and told him to be at a nearby subway station the following evening. Then the man disappeared into the night…and the FBI waited to see what Kelley would do. If he made a run for the subway station, that would in effect be an acknowledgement that he was indeed a spy—people who aren’t spying for the SVR don’t need help fleeing the country.

The next morning Kelley went to work as usual and reported the incident to the CIA. He even gave an accurate description of the “SVR agent” to a sketch artist. Once again the FBI was astonished by Kelley’s skill under pressure. Somehow he must have detected that the SVR guy was a fake and was not taken in by the trick. He was so cool and collected that the investigators gave him a new nickname—the “Iceman.”

“Bubble gum” flavor originally was a combination of wintergreen, vanilla, and cinnamon.

IN YOUR FACE

The FBI still lacked enough evidence to get a conviction and was running out of options. They made a last-ditch attempt at tricking Kelley into incriminating himself. On August 18, 1999, he was called into a meeting at CIA headquarters and confronted by two FBI agents who told him that they knew everything about his spying, even his SVR code name, KARAT. Kelley professed astonishment and denied everything, so the FBI agents pulled out Kelley’s handwritten map. “Explain this!” one of them said.

“Where did you get my jogging map?” Kelley asked.

The interview did not go as the FBI had hoped. Kelley didn’t crack—he even offered to answer questions without his lawyer present and to take another polygraph test. The agents turned him down: if Kelley could fake one lie detector test, he could fake two.

After questioning him for more than seven hours, the agents gave up. Kelley was stripped of his CIA badge and security clearances, placed on paid administrative leave, and escorted out of CIA headquarters. But he wasn’t arrested or charged with spying—there still wasn’t enough evidence. He spent the next 18 months on leave while the FBI built a case against him. The mole hunters confronted his daughter, also a CIA employee, and told her that her father was a spy. She claimed to know nothing about her father’s spying. Neither did Kelley’s other children when they were confronted, nor did his colleagues and close friends when they were interviewed. No one had suspected a thing. Kelley was that good.

SHOPPING

By the spring of 2000 the FBI had compiled a 70-page report recommending that the Justice Department charge Kelley with espionage, which is punishable by death.

While the Justice Department considered the matter, the FBI expanded its search for evidence against Kelley to the former Soviet Union. They tracked down a retired KGB officer who they thought might have some knowledge of the case and lured him to the United States for a “business meeting.” Then, when the officer arrived in the United States, the FBI made its pitch—it was willing to pay him a fortune in cash if he would reveal the identity of the mole. The ex-KGB officer made a counteroffer: he had the mole’s entire case file in his possession and was willing to sell it outright to the FBI. He added that the file even contained a tape recording of a 1986 telephone conversation of the mole talking to his Russian handlers, so there was no question that the FBI would have the evidence it needed to win a conviction.

Q: What was the first record album to go gold in the U.S.? A:
Oklahoma!
in 1958.

VOICE RECOGNITION

The FBI eventually agreed to buy the file for $7 million. It also agreed to help the KGB officer and his family to relocate to the United States under assumed names. The money changed hands, and in November 2000 the file slipped out of Russia and arrived at FBI headquarters. There was enough material in it to fill a small suitcase—hundreds of documents, dozens of computer disks, a cassette tape, and an envelope with the words “Don’t Open This” written on it.

The FBI was convinced it finally had the evidence it needed to convict Brian Kelley on spying charges and to put him to death. All the agents had to do was read the files, listen to the recorded conversation on the tape, and build their case. They put the cassette in a tape recorder, pushed PLAY, and waited to hear Kelley’s voice. Their long campaign to bring him to justice was at an end.

AN UNEXPECTED DEVELOPMENT

Or was it? It quickly became obvious that the voice the FBI heard talking to the KGB agent wasn’t Brian Kelley’s. Once again, the FBI agents were in awe of Kelley’s abilities as a spy. Even when talking to his KGB handlers, he had had the good sense to protect his identity by having an intermediary—a “cut out,” as they’re known—make his call for him.