Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (104 page)
Read Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers' Institute
The U.S. Congress didn’t make “The Star Spangled Banner” the national anthem until 1931.
3. C)
Henning and “Beverly Hillbillies” producer Al Simon spent months hitting every hillbilly band and hoedown looking for an authentic hillbilly to play the part of Granny. “Finally,” he recalls, “we found someone and thought, ‘Gee, this woman’s great. This is gonna work out. She sounded great when we talked to her. She said she’d have her nephew, with whom she stayed, help her with the reading. When she came in and faced those cameras, she froze. She couldn’t read! She was illiterate, but she disguised it cleverly.”
Actress Bea Benaderet got ahold of the script and pleaded with Henning for an audition to play the part of Granny. He told her she was too “well built” for the part. “And when we did the test, she had seen Irene [Ryan] ready to go and do her thing. She said, #8216;There’s your Granny!’” Henning disagreed. “At first they said I was too young,” Ryan later recalled, “but I said ‘If you get anybody older than I am, she’ll be too old to do the series.’” She got the part—and Bea Benaderet got the part of Cousin Pearl. (
Note:
Did her voice sound oddly familiar to you when you watched the show? She also played the voice of Betty Rubble on “The Flintstones” cartoon show from 1960 to 1964.)
4. B)
Bailey “wasn’t happy anywhere he was,” Henning recalls. “He complained a lot, but he played the part perfectly.” The other cast members remember him as arrogant, publicity hungry, willing to argue over just about anything, and frequently insulting, even in public. Paul Henning’s wife Ruth remembers one particular incident:
We were going to a bank opening in Independence, Missouri....Ray got loaded on the plane and when we arrived at Paul’s sister’s house, a big, historical, Victorian-style home, Ray made a loud remark that it looked like a whorehouse. When Paul’s sister stepped out on the porch to greet us, Ray said, “Are you the madam?”
“He alienated himself from everybody,” one press agent recalls. “Sometimes people hated to be around him, he complained so much.” But according to one California bank official, he was popular in the banking industry nonetheless. “The bankers all love him,” the official told
TV Guide
in 1970, “which is unusual considering the way bankers have always been portrayed....I have yet to hear a banker complain about the character of Drysdale.” Even so, Bailey’s attitude may have cost him his career: according to news reports published after his death, Buddy Ebsen had refused to offer him work on his new series, “Barnaby Jones”. Bailey spent his last years unemployed and bitter. He died of a heart attack in 1980.
Fully 50% of the Netherlands—including its two largest cities—lie below sea level.
5. B)
During one break in shooting in 1966, Douglas starred opposite Elvis Presley in his film
Frankie and Johnnie...
and according to some reports, fell in love with the King. “She didn’t realize every girl he worked with fell in love with him. She really flipped out,” Paul Henning recalls.
6. B)
Critics almost uniformly hated the show. “We’re liable to be Beverly Hillbillied to death,” one observer sniffed, “please write your Congressman.” Another complained that “‘Beverly Hillbillies’ aims low...and hits its target.” But the show was an unprecedented hit with viewers. It shot to the #1 ratings slot after only five weeks on the air and quickly became the most-watched show in TV history.
7. A)
The part of Jed Clampett was made with Buddy Ebsen in mind, but he didn’t want the part. “My agent had mentioned the hillbillies,” he later recalled, “but I wanted to run the other way. I had played a lot of hillbillies, and I just didn’t want to get trapped again in that kind of getup with long hair and whiskers.”
8. B)
The owners were happy for the first three seasons...but only because they had insisted that Filmways keep their address a secret. But in the beginning of the fourth season,
TV Guide
got ahold of the address and published it, and the house, known as the Kirkeby Mansion, instantly became one of the hottest tourist stops in L.A. The wife of the owner went nuts. “She had been just beleaguered by tourists,” Henning later recalled. “She had to get security people, shut her gates...it was a terrible mess. People would actually walk into her house and ask for Granny. Can you imagine?...The tragedy was that we were just about to go to color. This broke before we had a chance to film the exteriors in color. That was a real blow. We had to promise to stay away.”
9. B)
Tate, who later became famous as one of the murder victims of Charles Manson, played typist Janet Trego in several episodes and even dated Max Baer (Jethro) for a time. She later won the part as one of Cousin Pearl’s daughters on “Petticoat Junction,” but was replaced by another actress when
Playboy
magazine published nude photos of her that had been taken before she got the part. “When we first got her,” director Joe Depew remembers, “She was very amateurish. It was hard for her to read a line. Then she went to [acting] school and she learned a lot. She was a very pleasant girl and extremely beautiful...a real tragedy.”
Average U.S. family income in 1915: $687 a year.
10. B)
Granny was Granny Moses...just like the painter.
1. (c)
Carnegie, the steel magnate (1835-1919).
2. (d)
Because liquor, as well as tobacco and profanity, was banished from the White House, Mrs. Hayes was also known as “Lemonade Lucy.” At one official dinner, it was said, “the water flowed like champagne.”
3 (a)
Our eighth president (and Andrew Jackson’s second vice president) was born in New York in Kinderhook in 1782 and inaugurated in 1837. The first seven presidents were, of course, born in English colonies.
4 (c)
By a special act of Congress, the former representative (North Carolina, 1811-1816) and senator (Alabama, 1819-1844, 1848-1852) took the oath in Havana as President Franklin Pierce’s vice president. King (1786-1853) died a month later, before the first session of the 33rd Congress was held, and so never got to preside over the Senate, the vice president’s principal role at the time.
5. (b)
The only president to sit on the high bench was appointed in 1921 by President Warren G. Harding. Ill health forced his resignation nine years later, a month before he died.
6. (b)
And only one president remained a bachelor: James Buchanan (1791-1868). Grover Cleveland (1837-1908), who had, as a young bachelor in Buffalo, fathered a child, was a bachelor still when he was first elected president in 1884, but married his ward midway through his first term.
7. (c)
“The more I see of the czar, the kaiser, and the mikado,” Roosevelt declared, “the better I am content with democracy.”
8. (d)
The polio-stricken governor of New York State flew in a flimsy trimotor airplane from Albany to Chicago in 1932 to accept his nomination.
It’s against the law to hunt camels in Arizona.
9. (b)
It was in 1906, after yellow fever had been licked in the Canal Zone. The 25th president was also the first president to ride in an automobile, fly in an airplane, and dive into the sea in a submarine. “You must remember,” a British diplomat sighed, “that the president is about six.” The Rough Rider (1858-1919) also wrote 40 books, and left politics for almost two years in bereavement when his mother and his first wife died on the same day in 1884.
10. (b)
George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Five other professional soldiers have been nominated for the presidency: Benjamin Lincoln, Winfield Scott, John Fremont, George McClellan, and Winfield Scott Hancock.
11. (a)
Abraham Lincoln.
1.
7 = Wonders of the Ancient World
2.
1001 = Arabian Nights
3.
12 = Signs of the Zodiac
4.
54 = Cards in a Deck (with the Jokers)
5.
9 = Planets in the Solar System
6.
88 = Piano Keys
7.
13 = Stripes on the American Flag
8.
32 = Degrees Fahrenheit, at Which Water Freezes
9.
90 = Degrees in a Right Angle
10.
99 = Bottles of Beer on the Wall
11.
18 = Holes on a Golf Course
12.
8 = Sides on a Stop Sign
13.
3 = Blind Mice (See How They Run)
14.
4 = Quarts in a Gallon
15.
1 = Wheel on a Unicycle
16.
5 = Digits in a Zip Code
17.
24 = Hours in a Day
18.
57 = Heinz Varieties
Nearly 40% of the people who get plastic surgery are between 35 and 55 vears old.
19.
11 = Players on a Football Team
20.
1000 = Words That a Picture Is Worth
21.
29 = Days in February in a Leap Year
22.
64 = Squares on a Chessboard
23.
40 = Days and Nights of the Great Flood
24.
2 = To Tango
25.
76 = Trombones in a Big Parade
26.
8 = Great Tomatoes in a Little Bitty Can
27.
101 = Dalmatians
28.
23 = Skidoo
29.
4 = He’s a Jolly Good Fellow (yes, it’s a trick)
30.
16 = Men on a Dead Man’s Chest
31.
12 = Days of Christmas
32.
5 = Great Lakes
33.
7 = Deadly Sins
34.
2.5 = Children in a Typical American Family
35.
1, 2, 3 = Strikes You’re Out at the Old Ball Game
36.
3 = Men in a Tub
37.
13 = Baker’s Dozen
1) B. Buried in a roadway.
By the time anyone looked for it, say the Whitcombs in
Oh Say Can You See
, “the rock was partially buried in the middle of a roadway leading to a wharf and had to be dug out and hauled to the town square. In the course of several additional moves, the rock fell from a wagon and had to be cemented together.”
Tourists were upset that the rock wasn’t at the ocean, where the pilgrims were supposed to have stepped onto it. So the citizens of Plymouth obliged them, and moved it near the water in 1920.
2) B. Thomas Jefferson/Monticello.
A northerner did buy Monti-cello and restore a part of it, but then the Civil War broke out, and the Confederates confiscated the property and stored grain and cows in it. In 1878 it was described as “desolation and ruin...a standing monument to the ingratitude of the great Republic.” Believe it or not, the real effort to save Monticello didn’t begin until 1923.
People in Salt Lake City eat more Jell-O than citizens in any other U.S. city.
3) A. The company that made Castoria laxative.
They agreed to give $25,000 “provided that for the period of one year you permit us to place across the top of the pedestal the word
Castoria
.” Imagine how the history of the United States might have been affected if immigrants entering New York harbor had seen, in that inspiring first glimpse of America, an ad for laxatives. What lasting impression would it have made? It boggles the mind. Fortunately, they were turned down.
4) C. A root beer stand.
One representative wrote at the time: “I look to see where (John C.] Calhoun sat and where [Henry] Clay sat and I find a woman selling oranges and root beer.” In 1864 they turned it into Statuary Hall.
5) A. The Alamo.
This landmark, where Davy Crockett and company died fighting against the Mexican Army in 1836, was originally a Spanish mission. When the Mexicans took the Alamo they tried to burn it down. Then they left it, and people who lived near-by took stones from the buildings whenever they liked. In the mid-1800s, the U.S. Army used the Alamo as a barracks. But in 1879, it was turned into a grocery/mercantile store. When a real estate syndicate tried to buy it in 1905, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas lobbied the state government to match the offer. They were turned down. It took a private donor—a 22-year-old cattle heiress—to come up with the funds to save it.
6) C. An angry mob that gathered after the assassination.
The federal government bought it from John Ford for $100,000 and used it as an office and a storage area. Unfortunately, Lincoln wasn’t the only one to die there. In 1893, twenty office workers were killed, and sixty-eight injured, when the building collapsed. It was unoccupied until 1964, when money was appropriated to restore the building to its 1865 condition.
A
snowstorm
becomes a
blizzard
when the temp drops below 20°F and wind speed hits 35 mph.
7) A. Schoolchildren contributed their pennies to save it.
The boat got its nickname not because its sides were made of iron, but because its thick wood sides seemed to deflect cannonballs during battle in the War of 1812. After the war, it was abandoned to rot—but in 1830, it was refurbished and used for training. Then, in 1927, it needed work again, and a drive to restore it was led by American schoolchildren.
