Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (22 page)

UNCLE FESTER
,
crazed character from the
Addams Family
TV series

Birth:
The ghoulish family in Charles Addams’
New Yorker
cartoons was never identified by (first) name—so it was never clear exactly who the bald fiend in the family portraits was. But in 1963, Addams agreed to let ABC make a TV sitcom out of his characters. All he had to do was give the characters names and family relationships. The bald guy officially became Morticia’s Uncle Fester.

Everyone’s Uncle:
The TV show was a Top 20 hit in 1964–65. Fester was brought to life by Jackie Coogan, who had been the first child star of the silent film age. In 1923, he was the biggest box office star in the country, but his appeal faded as he got older. By 23 he was broke and out of work. After a tragic life that included arrests for drugs and booze, Coogan made a comeback. He showed up for the
Addams
audition with a huge walrus mustache and hair on the sides of his head. Told that Fester was hairless, he returned the next day shaved completely bald and got the part.

Are Bud and Miller too bland ? You can always try one of these...

CALLING HOMER SIMPSON...

“A brewery in Bulgaria recently announced that brewmaster Yordan Platikanov has developed a beer that neutralizes any residual uranium 134 or strontium in the bodyafter exposure to nuclear radiation. Platikanov said the new beer should be urged on nuclear power plant workers relaxing at the end of a shift.”

—Universal Press

BEER FOR THE BATH

“The Kloser brewery in Nuezelle, Germany, announced it would soon begin selling dark beer concentrate for foam baths and eczema treatment. The new product differs from beer only in that the yeast is left in, creating its skin-soothing quality. Said owner Helmut Fritsche, ‘You can bathe in it or drink it. Whoever wants to, can do both.’”

—The Edge, Portland
Oregonian

ANCIENT BEER

“An Egyptologist, two scientists and Britain’s largest brewer announced plans to brew an ale from a recipe dating back 3,500 years to the time of Tutankhamun. ‘Tutankhamun Ale’ will be based on sediment from old jars found in a brewery housed inside the Sun Temple of Nefertiti....The team gathered enough materials to produce just 1,000 bottles of the ale. ‘We are about to unveil a great Tutankhamun secret,’ said a spokesman at Newcastle Breweries. ‘—the liquid gold of the Pharaohs. It’s a really amazing inheritance they have left us—the origins of the beer itself.’”

—San Francisco Examiner

HEAVY METAL BEER

“Mötley Crüe promoted a new album with a bright, blue-colored beverage called Motley Brüe, a drink ‘for people who are done with the whole drugs and alcohol thing but still want to have fun.’”

—TV Guide

U.S. vice presidents are the forgotten men of politics...and sometimes that’s just as well; some pretty strange characters have been elected vice president over the years. Ever heard of any of these ex-veeps? We’ll bet you haven’t.

R
ICHARD MENTOR JOHNSON
(served with Martin Van Buren, 1837–41)

Background:
Democratic congressman from Kentucky. Described by one witness as “the most vulgar man of all vulgar men in this world.” His personal affairs scandalized Washington society. He married three times, each time to a slave woman. When his second wife ran off with the man she truly loved, Johnson had her captured, then sold her at a slave auction.

VP Achievements:
The only VP ever elected by Congress rather than by popular vote (he was so disliked that he couldn’t get enough electoral votes). He was ahead of his time in one way—he cashed in on his newfound celebrity by opening a tavern and spa on his Kentucky farm. During his term, he chose to stay there and manage it most of the time, rather than live in Washington.

WILLIAM RUFUS DE VANE KING
(served with Franklin Pierce, 1853)

Background:
Democrat from Alabama. Known more for his effeminate clothing and demeanor than his politics. In 1834, he struck up a lasting friendship with future president James Buchanan, with whom historians speculate he had a homosexual relationship.

VP Achievements:
On Inauguration Day, he was in Cuba trying to recover from tuberculosis, and was too sick to make it to Washington. He did make it to his home state for a victory celebration—and then died. The length of his term as VP: six weeks. This made him the only bachelor VP, the only VP to be sworn in outside the country, and the only one never to enter Washington, D.C., during his term. No one lost any sleep finding a replacement. The VP position remained vacant until the next election, which Buchanan won.

HANNIBAL HAMLIN
(served with Abraham Lincoln, 1861–64)

Background:
Republican senator from Maine. Described by one historian as “a keen opportunist with a short attention span.” Once Lincoln was nominated, the Republicans needed someone from the east to balance the ticket. Hamlin’s qualifications: He had political experience but wasn’t controversial. In fact, he had almost no legislative record. He looked forward to the vice presidency, because it would “be neither hard nor unpleasant.”

VP Achievements:
Perhaps the most invisible VP ever. Being Lincoln’s VP during the Civil War should have earned him a prominent spot in history books. But Lincoln quickly lost faith in his colleague’s political skills and completely ignored him. Hamlin went home to his farm in Maine, sulking, “I am the most unimportant man in Washington.” He only went back there once each year to open each new session of Congress, then returned to Maine. Lincoln dumped him in 1864 in favor of Andrew Johnson.

GARRET AUGUSTUS HOBART
(served with William McKinley, 1897–99)

Background:
Republican from New Jersey. Lost in his only bid for office (U.S. Senate) before becoming VP. Got the nomination because, as one of the richest men in the country, he had been willing to spend a lot of money on Republican causes.

VP Achievements:
According to some historians, Hobart was one of the most influential VPs ever. No one has ever heard of him because he preferred wielding power behind the scenes. Most of his deals went down during intimate parties at his rented D.C. mansion, where senators were treated to cigars, liquor, and poker in exchange for their votes.

WILLIAM ALMON WHEELER
(served with Rutherford B. Hayes, 1877–81)

Background:
Republican congressman from New York. According to one historian, “The most boring of all the Republican vice presidents, and friends, that is saying something.” Had a reputation for complete honesty—which made him a rarity in 1876.

VP Achievements:
The only VP nominated as a joke. According to Steven Tally in
Bland Ambition:

Because presidential nominee Rutherford B. Hayes was from Ohio, the delegates to the Republican convention of 1876 needed to pick someone from the important state of New York. They really didn’t care who it was; it was just the vice presidency, after all, and most of the delegates had to be getting home. The delegates from New York began joking about which of them would take the nomination. Somebody yelled to future vice president Chester Arthur, “You take it, Chet!” and somebody else said, “You take it, Cornell!” The delegates were nearly beside themselves with merriment when one of the delegates said, “Let’s give it to Wheeler!”

They thought this was such a good one that they presented the nomination to the floor. Wheeler’s nomination was approved by acclamation, and according to a newspaper account of the event, “the delegates did not wait to continue the applause, but rushed off in every direction for the hasty dinner...and the out-speeding trains.” This prompted the presidential nominee Hayes to write to his wife, “I am ashamed to say, who is Wheeler?”

THOMAS MARSHALL
(served with Woodrow Wilson, 1912–1920)

Background:
Democratic governor from Indiana. Diminutive man described as “120 pounds of ‘glad to see ya, how ya doin’?’...a shorter version of George Bailey from
It’s a Wonderful Life.”
He claimed he wasn’t surprised to be nominated vice president, because “Indiana is the mother of vice presidents, the home of more second-class men than any other state.”

VP Achievements:
First vice president to publicly treat the office as a joke. Asked how he got elected, he credited an “ignorant electorate.” After the election, he sent President Wilson a book inscribed, “From your only vice.” (Wilson was not amused.) When groups visiting the Capitol peered into his office, he would tell them to “be kind enough to throw peanuts at me.”

According to
Bland Ambition
, however, Marshall’s major achievement “came after a particularly tedious catalog of the nation’s needs by a particularly bellicose senator—What this country needs is more of this! What this country needs is more of that! Marshall leaned toward an associate and said, ‘What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar!’ The coining of this phrase may stand as the greatest accomplishment of a vice president in the nation’s history.”

On
page 50
, we told you the story of Elisha Graves Otis, inventor of the world’s first safety elevator—which makes him one of the fathers of the modern skyscraper. Here’s the story of another key figure in the quest to touch the sky...without ever leaving the ground.

B
OOMTOWN

If ever a city needed tall buildings in a hurry, it was Chicago in the 1880s. Located in the center of America’s farmland, with rail links to every coast, it was a natural hub of commerce for the entire continent, and one of the fastest growing cities in the country. The population more than doubled between 1880 and 1890, and commercial land prices shot up even faster: An acre of prime commercial real estate that cost $130,000 in 1880 was worth $900,000 by 1890. Building across the landscape became so expensive that people were forced to begin thinking of ways to build straight up into the air.

Out of the Ashes...

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 made the need for tall buildings urgent even before the 1880s. The fire raged for only two days, but it wiped out one-third of all the buildings in the city—including most of the financial district. The fire was so devastating that when architect William LeBaron Jenney began work on the Home Insurance Building twelve years later, rebuilding was still underway.

MAN OF STEEL

Jenney was an uninspired architect—“a rather heavy-handed designer,” one critic says, “who never turned out anything of great beauty.” And if he hadn’t had a noisy parrot, he might be forgotten today. Instead, he is the man historians consider the father of the modern skyscraper.

According to legend, Jenney was working on his design for the Home Insurance Building one afternoon in 1883 when the bird began making so much noise that he couldn’t concentrate. He got so
angry that he grabbed the heaviest book he could find and pounded furiously on the bird’s steel-wire cage to shut it up.

The cage should have broken after such abuse, Jenney thought afterwards, but it didn’t. It didn’t even dent. If steel cages were so strong, he realized, why not make buildings out of steel? Why not build the Home Insurance Building with steel?

BRICK BY BRICK

By the early 1880s, buildings were still rarely taller than six or seven stories, and it wasn’t just because people hated slow elevators or climbing stairs. Bricks, the standard construction materials of the time, were too heavy to build much higher than that. To support a tall structure, the lower walls would have to be so thick that there would be little floor space left. Besides, why use so many bricks to add just one floor when the same number of bricks could be used to construct an entire building someplace else?

Steel, on the other hand, is so much lighter and can carry so much more weight than brick that you can build more than 100 floors before you run into the same type of problem.

REACH FOR THE SKY!

Jenney was one of the first people to realize that steel made it possible to construct buildings with a strong inner “skeleton” to support the building’s weight from the inside—so the outer walls didn’t have to be built heavy and thick. As George Douglas writes in
Skyscrapers: A Social History in America
,

In this great decisive step in architectural history, Jenney had perceived the advantages of a building whose exterior wall becomes a mere curtain or covering that encloses the building but does not support it. All the support is provided by the interior framing...in a way, one might say this was a new kind of building that had no wall, only a skin.