Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (11 page)

T
HE PLAINTIFF:
Mortimer Hetsberger, a 22-year-old bank robber.

THE DEFENDANT:
Laura Gonzalez, a teller at the Fleet Bank in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

THE LAWSUIT:
In July 1998, Hetsberger handed Gonzalez a note at her teller window. It said: “I want the money now.” According to Gonzalez, he also told her “Now, or I’ll shoot.” She handed him $4,000. He was captured the same day. When he heard that Gonzalez had accused him of threatening her, he filed a $1.5 million lawsuit for slander, explaining that he’d never even spoken to her.

VERDICT:
No ruling yet.

THE PLAINTIFF:
A 25-year-old mortuary driver.

THE DEFENDANT:
A California Highway Patrol officer.

THE LAWSUIT:
The driver was stopped in Orange County and given a ticket for driving in a carpool lane with no passengers. He protested that he had four passengers—the frozen corpses he was transporting. He went to court to overturn the ticket.

VERDICT:
He had to pay the fine.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Kevin McGuinness.

THE DEFENDANT:
The University of New Mexico.

THE LAWSUIT:
When McGuinness flunked out of the University of New Mexico Medical School, he sued for reinstatement under the Americans with Disabilities Act. What’s his disability? He gets very anxious when he takes exams, and doesn’t do well on them.

VERDICT:
Unknown.

THE PLAINTIFF:
David Earl Dempsey, a 27-year-old inmate at the Pima County, Arizona jail.

THE DEFENDANT:
Pima County and state prison officials.

THE LAWSUIT:
In February 1998, Dempsey tied a sheet around his neck and jumped out the jailhouse window, trying to commit suicide. The sheet broke, and he plummeted to the concrete below. He sued for negligence.

VERDICT:
Case dismissed. While waiting for the trial, Dempsey tried suicide again. This time he succeeded.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Carol Ann Bennett.

THE DEFENDANT:
Warren Woodrow Bennett, her husband.

THE LAWSUIT:
When Ms. Bennett moved out of their condo, she left her breast implants behind. She sued to get them back.

THE VERDICT:
Implants returned.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Sheila Tormino.

THE DEFENDANT:
Montclaire Bowl, in Edwardsville, Illinois.

THE LAWSUIT:
While she was bowling, Torino got a piece of popcorn caught in her shoe, and during her approach, she slipped and fell. She sued for $50,000, claiming the alley was negligent for not putting up warnings about popcorn on the floor.

THE VERDICT:
Unknown.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Eric Edmunds.

THE DEFENDANT:
Humana Hospital Bayside, in Virginia Beach.

THE LAWSUIT:
In 1987, Edmunds went into the hospital to get his stomach stapled, making it smaller. According to reports, “within 48 hours of the surgery, he snuck out of his room and raided the hospital refrigerator and ate so much he burst his staples.” Edmunds sued the hospital for $250,000 for “failure to keep its refrigerator locked.”

VERDICT:
Unknown.

It wasn’t a huge hit in the 1960s, when it first aired...but 30-plus years later
, I Dream of Jeannie
is still airing in reruns all over the world. How did the beautiful female in harem pants wind up living, unmarried, with her “master” in suburbia? Here’s the story.

H
OW IT STARTED

Before Sidney Sheldon was one of America’s bestselling schlock authors, he applied his talents to screenplays and television scripts.

He arrived in Hollywood in 1939, when he was 22. By 1947, he’d won an Oscar for best original screenplay, for
The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer
, starring Cary Grant and Shirley Temple. In 1962, he gave up film work to write and create
The Patty Duke Show
for Screen Gems. The one-joke sitcom about identical cousins was an immediate hit—the #18 show for the 1963–64 season. So Screen Gems asked him for another sitcom and all but guaranteed they’d air anything he created.

Sheldon worked fast. It took him two days to come up with a whole new show. As he told Richard Barnes in
Diary of a Genie
, it was a Saturday, and he was planning to fly from New York to L.A. the next day to meet with studio execs. “I decided to bring them an outline of [the] show that I wanted to do....On Saturday I started dictating the outline of
I Dream of Jeannie
.” It started out as a few ideas, but “as I started dictating, it began to get fuller and fuller....[So] I decided to turn it into an entire script.”

He handwrote most of the script the next day on the plane heading west and presented it at the meeting. Screen Gems bought it as the pilot for
Jeannie.
“The moral of the story,” Sheldon says, “is that when you get an idea, write it down immediately.” The show aired for five years, from 1965 to 1970.

INSIDE FACTS

The inspiration for
Jeannie
was the 1964 Universal motion picture,
The Brass Bottle.
The familiar plot: A portly ancient genie (Burl Ives) appears from a lamp to serve his master (Tony Randall). Though he’s
filled with good intentions, the genie keeps getting Randall into trouble. Sheldon said: “I thought that it would be fun to make the genie a beautiful young girl who says, ‘What can I do for you, Master?’”

Sheldon got one other thing from the film—his star. Barbara Eden played Randall’s girlfriend. Sheldon thought she’d be perfect for what he described as “the all-American fantasy,” and never even considered anyone else for the part.

THE GREAT NAVEL WAR

Although Sheldon and the network censors had no objection to Barbara Eden’s sexy costume or the fact that the unmarried Jeannie was living with a man for whom she would do
anything
, they refused to let her show her navel on network TV.

The solution: She put a flesh-colored cloth plug in it during filming. The joke on the set was that genies weren’t born with navels.

When George Schlatter, producer of TV’s
Laugh-In
wanted to debut Eden’s navel on his program, Sheldon and NBC censors stopped him. It wasn’t until the reunion movies that Jeannie ever appeared on TV with a belly button.

THE NASA CONNECTION

The astronauts in
Jeannie
were often bumbling idiots, but NASA was happy to cooperate fully with the show. All they really cared about was eliminating anything that smacked of militarism. They wanted to guarantee that the show would “project the image of the space program as a peaceful, scientific exploration of space.”

BOTTLED UP

The recognizable “Jeannie bottle” used in the series was originally made from a 1964 Jim Beam liquor decanter that had been given to producer Sidney Sheldon for Christmas. It was painted by the show’s prop department. In October, 1995, a bottle used on the series was auctioned off for $10,000.

FLOP TREATMENT

Screen Gems didn’t think
Jeannie
was going to be a hit, so they decided to save money and shoot the first season in black and white. It was one of NBC’s last black-and-white shows ever.

We’ve all heard of these products before. Here’s where they come from.

E
X-LAX

In 1906 Max Kiss (that’s his real name), a Hungarian-born pharmacist living in the U.S., came up with an over-the-counter version of a new prescription laxative called
phenolphthalein.
Kiss called his new chocolate tablets Bo-Bos, but one afternoon he happened to read in the local Hungarian language newspaper about a deadlock in Hungary’s parliament. The Hungarian words for “parliamentary deadlock” are sometimes shortened to “ex-lax” in print. Kiss thought it sounded like “excellent laxative.”

PAY TOILETS

So few people owned indoor toilets in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1910, that when the Pennsylvania Railroad installed some at the train station, they became one of the town’s major attractions. Some locals came to use the facilities, others, merely to marvel. But the restrooms were so jammed with admirers that when the trains pulled into the station, passengers literally had no place to go. So the railroad installed coin-operated locks, and gave the stationmaster a key to let ticket holders in for free.

WASH ‘N DRY MOIST TOWELETTES

Ross Williams served in the Navy during World War II, and one of the things he hated most about life onboard a ship was that during water shortages he could not wash up before going to bed at night. Unfortunately for him, it wasn’t until 1953 that he finally figured out a solution to the problem: paper towels soaked in liquid soap and sealed in tinfoil. According to Colgate-Palmolive, makers of Wash ‘n Dry, one towelette provides as much cleaning power as a quart of water.

Everything has a history—even jigsaw puzzles. They started as a toy for rich kids...became a hobby for wealthy adults...and then, when mass production made it possible, became a pastime for the rest of us.

T
HE FIRST JIGSAW PUZZLE

Jigsaw puzzles were one of Western Europe’s first educational toys. In 1762, a London mapmaker/printer named John Spilsbury glued a few of his maps onto thin wood panels. Then, using a small hand-saw, he cut them up along the borders of each country. He called them “dissected maps,” and sold them to well-to-do parents “for the edification of the young.” It was the beginning of an industry.

Spilsbury’s timing was excellent—the first children’s books had been published only a year earlier, and there was a blossoming interest in new ways to educate the young. By 1800 twenty different London publishers were cranking puzzles out. Most featured historical subjects and moral lessons—and Bible stories. Religious puzzles were an especially popular diversion on Sundays, when ordinary “secular” play was not permitted.

REAL
JIGSAW PUZZLES

Until the late 19th century, jigsaw puzzles were made one at a time, gluing expensive prints to fine mahogany or cedar. Each piece was cut out with a hand saw, and each puzzle had no more than 50 pieces. Only the border pieces interlocked; anything more complicated would have cost too much money—and there was a limit to what even wealthy parents were willing to pay. Early jigsaw puzzles cost the equivalent of a week’s wages for a common laborer.

Then, in 1876, the power scroll saw, also known as the
jigsaw
, was exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. It was inexpensive (some foot-powered treadle saws sold for as little as $3), and was capable of making incredibly intricate cuts. It immediately revolutionized furniture design. By the 1890s it had an impact on puzzles, too: craftsmen began making completely interlocking puzzles with smaller pieces...which could challenge adults as well as children.

PUZZLE-MANIA

The new puzzles were a hit in high-society circles. Their popularity grew until, in 1908, a jigsaw puzzle craze swept America. No one was left out; if you couldn’t afford to buy puzzles, there were puzzle lending libraries, and even puzzle
rental
companies. Sales were so strong that Parker Brothers gave up manufacturing games for a year to focus exclusively on puzzles (It was during the 1908 craze that the company pioneered the idea of cutting the pieces into shapes that people could recognize—stars, ducks, dogs, flowers, snowflakes, etc.).

THE GOLDEN AGE OF PUZZLES

When the craze died down, jigsaw puzzles had become a part of American life. By the 1920s, they were so cheap that just about anyone could afford them...manufacturers were using softer woods, which were easier to saw, and fancy engraving had been replaced by black and white lithographs that kids could paint with stencils and watercolors. By 1930, wood and jigsaws had given way to cardboard and die-cutting, so it was possible to buy a beautiful puzzle for as little as 10¢.

As America got deeper into the Great Depression, these inexpensive puzzles became increasingly attractive family entertainment. The result: people went on another puzzle-buying binge. For about six months in the early 1930s, the U.S. could not get enough puzzles. At the peak of the fad, Americans were purchasing 6 million puzzles
a week.
Things got so frantic that newsstands began offering a service called “puzzle-a-week,” with new puzzles hitting the shelves every Wednesday. In less than a year, manufacturers sold more than $100 million worth of jigsaw puzzles (in 1930s money!).