Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (23 page)

And thanks to the invention of the safety elevator, for the first time it was possible to transport people to the upper floors quickly and safely.

Ugly Duckling

The Home Insurance building stood ten stories tall when finished,
but that was the only thing interesting about it. Otherwise, it was plain and undistinguished. It didn’t even inspire other architects, let alone the public. However, even if it had been beautiful, it wouldn’t have attracted much attention: Ten-story buildings didn’t tower over their neighbors the way modern skyscrapers do. Douglas writes:

By a strange irony of history, the importance of the Home Insurance Building did not dawn on either the general public...or the Chicago architects working with Jenney on other building projects....It was only years later that that critics and historians came to view the Home Insurance Building as the first real skyscraper.

CHICAGO STYLE

Nevertheless, the Home Insurance Building was the right building in the right city at the right time.

Chicago needed to replace as much office space as quickly, as economically and as efficiently as possible, and skyscrapers were made to order for the task: buildings like the Home Insurance Building provided more usable floor space for the money, materials, and land spent than was possible with any other construction method.

There was another bonus: Since the steel skeleton reduced the number of interior walls to a minimum, the precious office space inside could be partitioned however the tenants wanted it; when they moved away, the office space could be re-partitioned to suit the new tenants. That kind of versatility was ideal for a city that was reinventing itself day by day.

Numerous skyscrapers were built in Chicago over the next several years, including the Tacoma Building, the Rand McNally Building, and the tallest of them all, the Masonic Temple—a 21-story edifice that stood an amazing 302 feet high. It was the tallest building in the world.

Into the Dustbin...

It turned out that these large buildings created new problems: they didn’t allow in as much light and air as smaller buildings, and they could be unsafe in fires. Landlords of smaller buildings were afraid skyscrapers would suck tenants away and cause rent prices to collapse.

By 1892, even the city government had turned against skyscrapers. Not long after the Masonic Temple was finished, the city passed a
new height limitation of 130 feet on all future buildings—less than half the height of the temple. The limit was raised to 260 feet in 1900, but the die was cast: Chicago, birthplace of the skyscraper, would soon take a back seat to New York as home to the tallest buildings on earth.

As for the Home Insurance Building, it was demolished in 1934 to make way for the Field Building, the last skyscraper built in Chicago before the Great Depression halted new construction for more than a decade.

Part III of the World’s Tallest Buildings is on
page 186
.

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DID YOU HEAR THE ONE ABOUT...

Muriel B. Mihrum sent us this article from the Wilmington
, N.C. Star News.
It’s by Dave Peterson, their outdoor columnist.

Did you hear the one about the black bear caper in Louisiana?

It seems that someone reported a bear clinging to small branches in the top of a tall pine. County officers responded and confirmed that there was, indeed, a bear in that tree.

Meanwhile, game wardens and wildlife biologists had been alerted, because the black bear is not common in that part of the state and has even been considered for the endangered list....To save the bear, wildlife people said they needed a veterinarian, a tranquilizer gun, and a substantial net beneath the tree.

The vet arrived and delivered the tranquilizer darts, but there was no visible reaction from the bear. We were now into about the eighth hour of rescue efforts and the area was ringed with 50 or more avid spectators.

After the tranquilizer darts failed, they decided that the only reasonable option was to cut the tree in a manner that would cause it to fall slowly to soften the blow to the bear.

When the tree came down, everyone rushed to secure the bear and it was at that point when faces turned red. It wasn’t a bear! They had spent over eight hours rescuing a large black garbage bag that had blown into the tree.

Here are a few more real-life examples of unusual legal battles.

T
HE PLAINTIFF:
Gloria Sykes, 25-year-old resident of the San Francisco Bay area.

THE DEFENDANT:
The City of San Francisco.

THE LAWSUIT:
Sykes was hit by a San Francisco cable car while crossing the street. The only visible injuries were a few cuts and bruises. But later, she claimed, she realized that the accident had turned her into a nymphomaniac. She sued, seeking compensation for neurological and psychological damages.

VERDICT:
She was awarded $50,000.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Anoki P. Sultan.

THE DEFENDANT:
Roman Catholic Archbishop James Hickey.

THE LAWSUIT:
Sultan blamed the church for allowing the devil to take over his body. He knew the devil was present, because he hadn’t been able to hold a job, had dropped out of school, smoked cigarettes, and had committed other unspeakable acts. He sued, asking for either $100 million or an exorcism.

VERDICT:
Case dismissed.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Mukesh K. Rai, a devout Hindu living in California.

THE DEFENDANT:
Taco Bell.

THE LAWSUIT:
In January 1998, Rai ordered a bean burrito at a Ventura, California Taco Bell. They gave him a beef burrito instead. He took a bite, then realized the mistake. When he complained, he was told: “So you ate meat. What’s the big deal?” He sued for severe psychological damage and emotional distress because cows are sacred in the Hindu religion, and may not be eaten. “This is the equivalent of eating his ancestors,” his lawyer told reporters.

VERDICT:
Not settled out of court yet (but it will be).

Cable television was introduced in the 1950s as a way to bring distant TV signals to rural areas. It wasn’t until the 1970s that people thought of using it to expand programming—and even then, experts said it would never have a large audience; after all, who would pay for TV when they could get it for free? Today, most of us who watch cable TV don’t realize how new it is...or where the stations we watch came from. Maybe in a future
Bathroom Reader
we’ll do a long piece on how cable made its big breakthough. In the meantime, here are thumbnail histories of some of the better-known cable channels. (There’s more on
page 318
.
)

H
OME BOX OFFICE (HBO)

Background:
In 1965, a small company called Sterling Communications won the exclusive rights to provide cable service to lower Manhattan. Their selling point: Better reception. But people weren’t buying. After spending $2 million in two years—and still picking up only a few hundred customers—the company was in trouble. Time, Inc., a minor partner in the operation, loaned Sterling enough money to keep it afloat. But in 1970, Time decided the company was losing too much. Desperate to keep his business going, Sterling’s founder came up with a new concept: “The Green Channel.”

On the Air:
The idea was simple: rent first-run movies from Hollywood studios, the way theaters do—but show them on television. Add in some sports events, and consumers would finally have a reason to pay for cable service. The cost of the movies would be high but could be covered by selling the service to other cable companies. Intrigued, Time gave Sterling enough money to test the idea, and the channel (now called HBO) went on the air in 1972. It started with a market-test of 325 homes in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. By the 1980s, it had become Time’s largest source of profit.

TURNER BROADCASTING SYSTEM (TBS)

Background:
Ted Turner was twenty-four in 1963 when his father committed suicide. He took over the family’s billboard/advertising company and saved it from bankruptcy. In 1970, he bought a small Atlanta UHF television station that ran network reruns and old movies.
A few years later, he purchased the rights to Atlanta Braves baseball games and built his network around them. Meanwhile, in 1975 the FCC issued a ruling that independent TV stations could send their signals outside local areas to distant markets. This opened the door for the growth of cable, and Turner walked through.

On the Air:
He immediately bought space on the first orbiting telecommunications satellite (owned by RCA) and began broadcasting his newly-christened TBS “SuperStation” to cable systems from coast to coast. Almost overnight, his little UHF station doubled its audience to two million households. Baseball was TBS’s main attraction, and Turner realized that he couldn’t afford to lose the rights to the Braves. So he bought the team. With them, he flourished.

USA NETWORK

Background:
In 1975, United Artists and Columbia Cablevision joined forces to create an all-sports station, the Madison Square Garden Sports Network.

On the Air:
They hired a 34-year-old consultant, Kay Kaplovitz, to set the network up. Two years later, the station made history by naming Koplovitz its president—the first woman to head a national TV network. She changed its name to USA and moved to diversify programming. Her strategy was a success. In 1981, she proudly announced that USA had become the first advertiser-based cable network to turn a profit, having earned “a few pennies” that year. Today, sports aren’t a part of their programming at all.

THE ENTERTAINMENT AND SPORTS PROGRAMMING NETWORK (ESPN)

Background:
Before cable, sports fans had to wait until the weekend to find sports on TV. William Rasmussen, the announcer on local Connecticut broadcasts of the World Hockey Association’s Hartford Whalers, guessed that die-hard fans would pay to have sports brought into their living rooms every day. So he signed up for space on the RCA telecommunications satellite (which beamed signals to cable stations). Then he tried to raise money to pay for it. By the time ESPN debuted on September 7,1979, the Getty Oil Company had bought 85% of the network for $10 million.

On the Air:
ESPN’s first broadcasts were of University of Connecticut
games, but plans were in the works for bigger things: The network contracted with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to telecast hundreds of NCAA events nationally. College athletics remain the station’s bread and butter, though it now provides some coverage of professional sports and off-the-wall events like the Strong Man competition. It’s now owned by Disney.

LIFETIME

Background:
Billed as “the first woman’s cable network,” Lifetime arose in 1984 out of the ashes of two failing cable stations: Daytime (a diet and talk-show channel) and the Cable Health Network.

On the Air:
Lifetime premiered as a mixed bag of talk and call-in shows featuring, among others, Regis Philbin, Richard Simmons, and sex therapist Ruth Westheimer. Dr. Ruth was a hit, but little else was. Losses of $36 million in the first two years proved that women weren’t interested. In fact, a poll of viewers revealed that some believed Lifetime was a religious channel. In 1988, Lifetime hired a new head of programming, who switched the focus to drama and reruns of shows like
Moonlighting
and
L.A. Law.
The formula worked. Today, about 70% of Lifetime’s viewers are female.

TURNER NETWORK TELEVISION (TNT)

Background:
TBS and CNN were well-established in the mid-1980s when Ted Turner made two financial decisions that sent him deep into debt. First, he failed in a hostile takeover attempt of CBS. Then he paid $1.6 billion to acquire 3,650 films from the MGM library, including
The Wizard of Oz
and
2001: A Space Odyssey.
Some analysts estimated he’d overpaid for the films by a half-billion dollars.

On the Air:
Beleaguered by unpaid bills, on the verge of losing control of his empire, Turner made a surprising decision: He started yet another cable channel—TNT—and offered many of the MGM movies on it. One problem: Many of the films were in black and white, and contemporary audiences prefer color. So Turner colorized the films, over the objections of directors like Woody Allen and Steven Spielberg. (Congress even held hearings on the subject.) The controversy turned into the fledgling network’s biggest publicity break. It debuted in 1988 with
Gone with the Wind
, carried by more cable systems than any new network in history.