Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (80 page)

Out of the moving automobile
a man stepped. Miraculously he kept his feet, stumbling, sliding, until an arm crooked around an iron awning-post jerked him into an abrupt halt. He was a large man in bleached khaki, tall, broad, and thick-armed; his grey eyes were bloodshot; face and clothing were powdered heavily with dust. One of his hands clutched a thick, black stick, the other swept off his hat, and he bowed with exaggerated lowness before the girl’s angry gaze.

The bow completed, he tossed his hat carelessly into the street, and grinned grotesquely through the dirt that masked his face, a grin that accented the heaviness of a begrimed and hair-roughened jaw.

“I beg y’r par’on,” he said. “’F I hadn’t been careful I believe I’d a’most hit you. ’S unreli’ble, tha’ wagon. Borr’ed it from an engi—eng’neer. Don’t ever borrow one from eng’neer. They’re unreli’ble.”

The girl looked at the place where he stood as if no one stood there, as if, in fact, no one had ever stood there, turned her small back on him, and walked very precisely down the street.

—Nightmare Town

Geckos, when startled, make a noise that sounds like “Eeek!”

I was leaning against the bar
in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had been sitting with three other people and came over to see me. She was small and blonde, and whether you looked at her face or at her body in powder-blue sports clothes, the result was satisfactory. “Aren’t you Nick Charles?” she asked.

I said: “Yes.”

She held out her hand. “I’m Dorothy Wynant. You don’t remember me, but you ought to remember my father, Clyde

Wynant. You—”

“Sure,” I said, “and I remember you now, but you were only a kid of eleven or twelve then, weren’t you?”

“Yes, that was eight years ago. Listen: remember those stories you told me? Were they true?”

“Probably not. How is your father?”

—The Thin Man

“Don Wilson’s gone
to sit at the right hand of God, if God doesn’t mind looking at bullet holes.”

“Who shot him?” I asked.

The grey man scratched the back of his neck and said: “Somebody with a gun.”

—Red Harvest

“You ought to have known I’d do it.” My voice sounded harsh and savage and like a stranger’s in my ear. “Didn’t I steal a crutch from a cripple?”

—The Continental Op
,
“The Gutting of Couffignal”

“Do you think he’ll play ball with you after he’s re-elected?”

Madvig was not worried. “I can handle him.”

“Maybe, but don’t forget he’s never been licked by anything in his life.”

Madvig nodded in complete agreement. “Sure, that’s one of the best reasons I know for throwing in with him.”

“No it isn’t, Paul,” Ned Beaumont said earnestly. “It’s the very worst. Think that over even if it hurts your head. How far has this dizzy blond daughter of his got her hooks into you?”

—The Glass Key

The original recipe for Peking duck was 15,000 words long.

AMAZING ESCAPES

Disasters happen all the time—floods, crashes, etc. As the following stories indicate, it takes at least one of two things to survive an otherwise certain death: a clear head or a stroke of luck
.

S
PIT BACK OUT
When the British passenger ship
Lusitania
was sunk by a German sub off the coast of Ireland in 1915, less than half of the 1,959 people onboard survived. One who did was a woman named Margaret Dwyer. As the ship’s massive deck went underwater, hundreds of people started swimming for their lives. Unfortunately, most were sucked down by the undertow—including Dwyer. But unlike the others, she was pulled down into one of the smokestacks. When the rushing water hit the burning coal, it erupted into a huge explosion of steam, pushing Dwyer out of the water and up into the air. She landed back in the ocean, singed and sooty, but alive. She was then pulled to safety by a rescue boat.

EXPRESS ELEVATOR

July 28, 1945, was a foggy Saturday morning in New York City. Betty Lou Oliver, an elevator operator at the Empire State Building, was standing at her post on the 80th floor of the skyscraper. At 9:40 a.m., a B-25 bomber lost in the fog slammed into the 79th floor at more than 200 mph. The impact shook the entire building and sent flames and airplane parts flying throughout the offices. Fourteen people, including the plane’s three crewmen, were killed instantly. Yet Oliver, who was one floor above, survived the initial impact—only to be severely burned by the ensuing fire. When rescuers arrived, they told those who could still walk to take the stairs down, then they transported the injured in the elevators, believing they were still operating normally. They weren’t. One of the plane’s engines had fallen down the shaft, severely weakening the cables.

Oliver was given first aid, taken to the 75th floor, and then placed in an elevator car by herself. Shortly after the doors closed, she heard a very loud
snap
and immediately felt the car picking up speed. The elevator’s cables had been severed in the crash. With little else to do, Oliver curled up in a ball and prayed as the elevator plummeted more than 1,000 feet down to the basement.

Ancient Romans used lemons as mothballs.

An hour later, rescuers reached the mangled car and cut a hole in the top. To their amazement and relief, they found Oliver badly injured…but alive. What saved her? It was later determined that all the cables below the elevator bunched up as it approached the bottom, thereby cushioning her fall. She made a full recovery.

FANTASTIC GYMNASTICS

In 1933 a bus transporting seven Japanese acrobats on a mountain road near Tokyo went out of control and rolled off a high cliff. As the bus tumbled down the mountainside, it hit a large rock in the middle of the cliff. The impact slowed the bus just long enough for the agile acrobats to jump out of the windows to safety in a nearby tree. They clung for their lives as they watched the doomed bus, with the driver still inside, complete its descent to the rocks below.

A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE

Returning from a night raid over Germany in 1940, an RAF bomber was hit by gunfire and started going down. In the back of the plane, the gunner, Sgt. Roger Peacock, knew the plane was descending fast, but didn’t hear an order to bail out, so he asked over the interphone, “Should I bail out?” He got no reply.
They must be too busy wrestling with the controls
, he thought. So he asked again…and again. Still, no reply. By then, the bomber was in a nose dive. Peacock made his way to the front of the plane and discovered that he was alone. He quickly bailed out, but saw right away that he was barely 100 feet above the ground—too close for his parachute to fully open and slow him down.

Peacock was sure he was going to die, but just then the bomber crashed into the ground below and exploded. The rush of heat from the fireball inflated Peackock’s parachute and pushed him high up into the air. He landed softly, a safe distance from the wreckage. Five minutes later, the dazed sergeant watched as two other crewmen floated down to earth. It turned out that the pilot
had
given the order to bail out, but Peacock hadn’t heard it.

The president of the United States has a secret Zip Code for receiving personal mail. It’s…secret.

FLY AWAY HOME

At 10:00 p.m., Sunday, November 10, 2003, Carol Watts went to bed in her home in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama. Her husband, Walter, had decided to stay up and watch the news because severe thunderstorms were on their way. A short time later Walter went upstairs, got Carol out of bed, and helped her to a bathroom in the middle of the house. As the two huddled in the bathtub, the wind outside picked up and suddenly a deafening roar was heard, as everything began to shake and rattle. “The house just exploded,” Carol later recalled. “The next thing I remember I was sitting straight up in a field.” Disoriented, Carol didn’t know where she was until a bolt of lightning lit up her surroundings: she was across the street in a pasture, 250 yards from her home. Walter had landed nearby, and although he had a puncture wound in his head, he was still conscious. It took the couple a few minutes to realize the magnitude of what had just happened to them: they had been sucked up into the vortex of a tornado and lived to tell about it.

The Watts were taken to a hospital, where they were treated for numerous burns, broken bones, and lacerations, but both made a full recovery. They built a new home just up the hill from where their old one used to stand.

*        *        *

CARS YOU’RE UNLIKELY TO SEE IN AMERICA

Believe it or not, all these model names are real:

Nissan Homy
Toyota Deliboy
Honda Life Dunk
Volugrafo Bimbo
Renault Twingo
Nissan Sunny California
Honda Vamos Hobio
Isuzu Elf Van
Suzuki Cappuccino

Suzuki Mighty Boy
Toyota Urban Supporter
Daihatsu Naked
Honda Today Humming
Toyota Synus
Mitsubishi Lettuce
Isuzu Begin Funk Box
Honda Fit
Mazda Bongo Friendee

Witchcraft was a criminal offense in the United Kingdom until 1951.

THE MINISERIES

The sweeping saga and disastrous demise of a once-grand television tradition
.

E
PISODE ONE: THE ENGLISH INVASION
American television series have traditionally followed a standard formula: each week characters get a problem, solve it, and learn a valuable lesson. A series could go on like that for hundreds of episodes. British TV was different: dramatic series were serialized and usually ran for about six episodes. Especially popular in this format were adaptations of classic novels.

The first “novel for television” broadcast in the United States was 1967’s English-made
The Forsyte Saga
. The 26-part series—a decades-spanning story of a prominent British family—was a big hit for the young, struggling National Educational Television network (later PBS) and would lead to one of PBS’s signature shows,
Masterpiece Theatre
, a showcase for multiple-part literary adaptations, usually made in England.

It also led American commercial networks to test the idea of long-format television with made-for-TV movies broken up into shorter episodes. Examples: a seven-hour adaptation of the Leon Uris novel
QB VII
(ABC, 1974) and the six-hour biblical epic
Moses the Lawgiver
(CBS, 1975).

But the miniseries wouldn’t become a TV force until CBS’s vice president of programming, Fred Silverman, left to join rival network ABC in 1975. Silverman had a knack for predicting hit shows (he’d picked
All in the Family, The Waltons
, and
Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?)
and he thought the miniseries made great ratings sense. Unlike other TV shows, Silverman reasoned, viewers would have to watch every episode. He also figured that if the network aired a miniseries during Sweeps Week (when networks set advertising rates and try to lure the most viewers with splashy programming), it could provide a huge ratings boost. Silverman called it “Event Television.”

EPISODE TWO: THE SAGA BEGINS

Silverman and ABC produced the first American miniseries,
Rich
Man, Poor Man
, which aired in 1976. The 12-hour saga told the story of two brothers over a period of 30 years and featured Nick Nolte in his first lead role. Silverman’s hunch paid off—
Rich Man, Poor Man
averaged a whopping 27 million viewers and was the second most watched show on TV for the year. Executives at all three broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) noticed; “Event Television” meant big ratings.

EPISODE THREE:
ROOTS

Silverman’s next “event” would be the most popular miniseries of all time—and possibly the most memorable TV show ever
—Roots
. Based on Alex Haley’s autobiographical novel,
Roots
traced the history of an African family through slavery to the present day. The all-star cast included Ben Vereen, Lou Gossett Jr., O. J. Simpson, Robert Reed, Todd Bridges, Edward Asner, Maya Angelou, John Amos, Richard Roundtree, and LeVar Burton.

Miniseries episodes were being run in regular weekly time slots, but
Roots
aired on eight consecutive nights because ABC executives didn’t think a program about African-American history could hold a broad audience over several weeks. They were wrong: more than 130 million viewers watched at least some of
Roots
. The final installment, airing on January 30, 1977, is still the third highest rated program in TV history.

EPISODE FOUR: AFTER
ROOTS

From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, miniseries were common fare on television, though not all were as successful as
Roots
. The networks quickly learned what kinds of miniseries succeeded: stories about the Old West, the Bible, a powerful family, or a major war. Some of the most popular of the period include:

• Holocaust
(1978). One of the first American productions to address Nazi atrocities and also one of the first times schoolchildren were actually assigned TV viewing as homework.

• Jesus of Nazareth
(1977). A reverent film that was so well received that it was expanded from four to six hours and still runs on cable TV every Easter.

• Shogun
(1980). Based on James Clavell’s novel, starring Richard Chamberlain as an English captain shipwrecked in feudal Japan.