Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (42 page)

Lincoln was busy with the Civil War, so he turned the matter over to his wife, who spent every penny and went $6,700 over budget. Lincoln was furious, and refused to ask Congress to cover the balance. “It would stink in the nostrils of the American people,” he fumed, “to have it said that the President of the United States had approved a bill overrunning an appropriate [amount] for
flub dubs
for this damned old house, when the soldiers cannot have blankets.”

The new furnishings did not last for more than a few years. When Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, the White House fell into disarray. “Apparently,” writes The White House Historical Society, “no one really supervised the White House during the five weeks Mrs. Lincoln lay mourning in her room, and vandals helped themselves.”

SAVING THE HOUSE

Ironically, at the same time the White House was being ransacked, it was gaining a new respect with Americans...attaining an almost shrine-like status.

National tragedy turned the White House into a national monument. It wasn’t just the White House anymore—it was the place where the great fallen hero, Lincoln, had lived. Photography had only been invented about 30 years earlier. Now for the first time, photos of the White House circulated around the country. It became a symbol of the presidency...and America.

The Founding Fathers had assumed that future presidents would add to, or even demolish and rebuild the official residence as they saw fit. But after 1865, no president would have dared to suggest tearing it down.

Feeling patriotic? There’s more on the White House on
page 395
.

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“I’ll be glad to be going—this is the loneliest place in the world.”

—President William Howard Taft, on leaving the White House

Sometimes, answers are irrelevant—it’s the question that counts. These cosmic queries are from a variety of readers.

Why do psychics have to ask your name?

Why don’t sheep shrink when it rains?

How much deeper would the ocean be without sponges?

What happens if you get scared half to death twice?

Despite the cost of living, have you noticed how it remains so popular?

How do you tell when you run out of invisible ink?

Did ancient doctors refer to IVs as “fours”?

Why are they called “apartments” when they’re all stuck together?

If bankers can count, how come they have eight windows and only four tellers?

Is Dan Quayle’s name spelled with an
e
at the end?

Why do we play in recitals and recite in plays?

If the #2 pencil is so popular, why is it still #2?

If most car accidents occur within five miles of home, why doesn’t everyone just move 10 miles away?

Why can’t I set my laser printer on “stun”?

If all the world is a stage, where is the audience sitting?

Why do they call them “hemorrhoids” instead of “asteroids”?

Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?

If you write a book about failure and it doesn’t sell, is it a success?

Would a fly without wings be called a
walk?

If white wine goes with fish, do white grapes go with sushi?

If the funeral procession is at night, do folks drive with their lights off?

Here’s a look at two people who made great inventions, only to see the credit go to someone else.

F
ORGOTTEN INVENTOR
: John Fitch

CLAIM TO FAME:
He had been George Washington’s gunsmith at Valley Forge, and had skills as a silversmith, brass founder, surveyor and clockmaker. But he should have been known as the man who invented the steamboat—not Robert Fulton. He built his first model of a “boat propelled by steam” in 1785, and successfully tried out a full-size version the following year. He obtained exclusive rights in five states for mechanically-propelled boats and, by 1790, was operating regularly scheduled services between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Trenton, New Jersey.

HIS LEGACY:
Over the years Fitch’s debts piled up and squatters took over his lands. He died sad and broke in 1798 at the age of 55, five years before Fulton “invented” the steamboat. Congress later honored Fitch with a mural in the U.S. Capitol, but Fulton is still the one who gets all the credit.

FORGOTTEN INVENTOR:
Nathan B. Stubblefield

CLAIM TO FAME:
Stubblefield was the real inventor of the radio—not Marconi. He first demonstrated a “wireless telephone” for a few friends on his farm in 1890, when Marconi was still a teenager. He filed no patent at the time, he “just went on tinkering.” On January 1, 1902 (less than a month after Marconi had transmitted the letter “S” across the Atlantic in Morse code), he finally got around to doing a demonstration for the public. About 1,000 friends and neighbors watched as, “speaking softly into a two-foot-square box, he was heard at half a dozen listening [stations] around town.” Later that year, he gave a better-publicized and better-attended demonstration in Washington, D.C., from a steam launch on the Potomac River.

Marconi, known today as the father of radio, actually pioneered
wireless telegraphy
, the transmission of Morse code. Stubblefield sent
voices
and
music
(played by his son) over the air, and he did it years before Marconi sent his first dots and dashes. In a 1908 patent he described how to put radios in horseless carriages, making him the father of the car radio—another invention he did not capitalize on.

INTO THE DUSTBIN:
None of Stubblefield’s inventions, “including a battery devised for radios,” made him much money. His marriage broke up, his house burned down. Still he continued to work on new inventions. But we don’t know much about them—Shortly before his death Stubblefield destroyed all his inventions and burned their plans. He was a lonely, impoverished hermit when he was found starved to death in a shack near his hometown of Murray, Kentucky in 1928. His body went into an unmarked grave.

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AND SPEAKING OF THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY...

Here’s another historic figure who’s been swept out of the history books:

FORGOTTEN FIGURE:
Captain James Iredell Waddell, Confederate war hero and commander of the warship
Shenandoah.

CLAIM TO FAME:
Under Waddell’s command, the
Shenandoah
disrupted Yankee whaling operations in the Pacific, captured numerous Union vessels, destroyed over $1 million worth of shipping, and took more than 1,000 prisoners.

Much of this success came
after
General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Even when Waddell learned of the surrender, he chose to ignore it, believing the South would keep fighting a guerrilla war.

INTO THE DUSTBIN:
Waddell made plans to attack San Francisco by sea. But on his way there, the
Shenandoah
met up with a friendly British merchant ship, whose captain informed Waddell that the war was definitely over. Realizing he would be tried and probably hanged for piracy if he made port in America, Waddell and crew sailed for England. The
Shenandoah
surrendered to the British in Liverpool on November 6, 1865.

Here are a few celebrities who are remembered for not wearing any clothes. (Or for looking like they weren’t.)

C
HERI BRAND
, child model.

Famous For:
Posing for the original portrait of Little Miss Coppertone, the girl whose bottom is exposed because a dog is pulling down her bathing suit.

The Bare Facts:
In 1953, a Miami advertising agency hired graphic artist Joyce Ballentyne to design the logo for Coppertone suntan lotion. For models, she used her 3-year-old daughter Cheri and a cocker spaniel she borrowed from a neighbor. The image appeared in ads on billboards all over the U.S., accompanied by slogans like “Don’t be a paleface,” and “Tan, don’t burn.” The image became a pop icon, as well as one of the most recognized logos in the country. Today, it’s a reminder of innocent 1950s and of summer vactions past.

Brand, now a health club manager, is proud to be a part of pop culture. “If I get teased, I suppose I would blush,” she says, “but what child doesn’t have a photo like that in their album. Mine just happens to be more public.”

Little Miss Coppertone faded as a corporate symbol in the late 1970s as deep tanning became synonymous with skin cancer, but the company brought her back in 1987 when it launched Water Babies, a sunscreen for children. The character’s new role: “teaching the importance of sun protection to kids.”

ANNETTE KELLERMAN
, a Hollywood actess in 1916.

Famous For:
Being the first person to appear completely naked in a feature film, in 1916.

The Bare Facts:
The film was called A
Daughter of the Gods
, and was filmed on location in Jamaica. In one memorable scene Kellerman, formerly a professional swimmer, jumps from a 100-foot-high tower into a pool supposedly filled with alligators, then crashes against some rocks and falls down a waterfall. She is nude the entire time.

Amazingly, the film was so bad that not even the novelty of film nudity could save it. William Fox, head of the Fox Film Corporation, hated it so much that he re-edited it himself, then removed the director’s name from it and barred him from the premiere.

ADAH ISSACS MENKEN
, stage actress of the 1860s

Famous for:
Performing as the “Naked Lady” of the theater. She toured the world with a play called
Mazeppa
, in which she wore in a loose-fitting tunic that showed off her “uncovered” calves (actually flesh-colored tights).

The Bare Facts:
Ironically, the woman known internationally as the “Naked Lady” always appeared fully clothed. She wore a skimpy, loose-fitting tunic over flesh-colored tights, which, as Edward Marks writes in
They All Had Glamour
, “were completely unknown in 1861. The audiences thought they were gazing on bare skin.”

In 1860, a theater owner in Albany, NY decided to spice up the well-known play
Mazeppa.
Until then, the play’s highlight had always been when a live horse performed a stunt onstage. To make it more exciting, the theater owner tied the provocatively dressed Adah to the horse. A star was born. As one historian writes:

Adah, whose acting career had gotten off to a slow start due to lack of talent, found herself completely at home in the role of celebrity. She took
Mazeppa
to New York, where she opened to rave reviews, then went to wow ’em out west. Adah’s curvaceous calves did the trick. Neophyte journalist Mark Twain was smitten. Mormon leader Brigham Young, though expressing shock, managed to sit through the whole show.

Menken traveled to Europe, where she was equally popular. The
London Review
observed that Adah looked like “Lady Godiva in a slip,” noting that “of course, respectable people go to see the spectacle and not her figure.” At one performance Napoleon III, the King of Greece, the Duke of Edinburgh were all in attendance; Charles Dickens considered her a close friend.

Then in 1868, at the height of her fame, she collapsed onstage. A month later she was dead of tuberculosis.

BRI member and food editor, Jeff Cheek, contributed this fascinating history of the hamburger.

W
ILD HORSEMEN

In the 13th Century, wild, nomadic horsemen known as Tartars overran most of Asia and Eastern Europe. They had a distinct way of preparing meat: slice off a large chunk of horsemeat or beef and slip it under a saddle. A day of hard riding would tenderize it. Then it was chopped up and eaten raw.

This custom was introduced into the area we now call Germany by traders traveling down the Elbe River to Hamburg.

The German people did not eat horsemeat—but they did start serving ground, raw beef flavored with garlic, spices and a raw egg. (Today, it’s called
steak tartare
, and is still popular in Europe.) And for those who preferred cooked beef, the raw beef patties became the first hamburger steaks. But they weren’t the hand-held sandwiches we call hamburgers. Those came hundreds of years later.