Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (57 page)

Imagine what a kick it would have been to hang out with the King at Graceland. Well, it’s too late now—but here are some of the exciting moments you missed
.

A
T THE POOL
Want to go for a dip? According to David Adler in
The Life and Cuisine of Elvis Presley
, “Elvis enjoyed sitting around the pool eating watermelon hearts. For entertainment while he ate, he would float flashbulbs in the pool. Then he would take out a .22 and shoot at them. When they were hit, they would flash, and then sink to the bottom.”

ON THE FOURTH OF JULY

Every Independence Day at Graceland, Elvis had a “fireworks display.” His Memphis Mafia split into two teams, put on gloves and football helmets, and shot fireworks at one another. “They would level arsenals of rockets and Roman candles at each other and blast away at point-blank range for hours,” says Steve Dunleavy in
Elvis: What Happened
.

It was all laughs: “I’ve backed into burning rockets and had my ass burned half off,” laughs Elvis aide Red West. “I’ve seen Elvis bending over a giant rocket and watched the thing go off while he is leaning over it, nearly blowing his fool head off. [My brother] Sonny carries a scar on his chest to this day where one of us tried to blow a rocket through him. Roman candles would blow up in our hands. The house caught fire twice.”

DEMOLITION DERBY

You never knew what might happen when the King was bored. There was a beautiful little cottage in the corner of the Graceland property. One day, Elvis decided to demolish it...so he put on a football helmet and revved up his bulldozer. The only problem: His father, Vernon Presley, was sitting on the cottage porch.

According to Red West, “[He yelled] ‘You better move, Daddy.’ Vernon asks why and Elvis says, ‘Because I’m gonna knock the goddamn house down.’ ...Vernon gives one of those looks like ‘Oh, Lordie,’ but he doesn’t say anything...he just gets up and Elvis
starts roaring away.” To make it more interesting, Elvis and Red set the house on fire while they battered it with heavy machinery.

The bald eagle’s nest can weigh as much as a ton.

AT THE MOVIES

The King couldn’t just go out to the movies whenever he felt like it—he would have been mobbed. So he rented the whole theater instead. “Elvis had private midnight screenings at the Memphian Theater,” writes David Adler. “They were attended by about a hundred of his friends. Admission was free, and so was the popcorn, but you had to watch the movie on Elvis’s terms. Elvis made the projectionist repeat his favorite scenes. If the action got slow, such as during a love scene, the projectionist would have to skip to the next good part. Elvis once saw
Dr. Strangelove
three times straight, with a number of scenes repeated so he could figure out exactly what was going on.”

“Elvis liked James Bond and
Patton
, and any movie with Peter Sellers. His favorite movie of all time was
The Party
.”

WATCHING TV

And, of course, you could always stay home and spend a quiet evening watching TV...as long as Elvis liked the programs. If not, there was a good chance he’d pull out a gun and shoot out the screen. “Honestly,” Red West says, “I can’t tell you how many television sets went to their death at the hands of Elvis....He would shoot out television sets in hotel rooms and in any one of the houses he had. He shot out a great big one at Graceland, in Memphis, the one he had in his bedroom.”

A classic example: One afternoon in 1974, the TV was blaring while Elvis was eating his breakfast. His least favorite singer, Robert Goulet, came on. As Red related: “Very slowly, Elvis finishes what he has in his mouth, puts down his knife and fork, picks up this big mother of a .22 and—boom—blasts old Robert clean off the screen and the television set to pieces....He then puts down the .22, picks up his knife and fork and says, That will be enough of that s—,’ and then he goes on eating.”

Elvis Trivia:
On his way to meet Richard Nixon in 1970 (to pose for the famous photo), the King suddenly had a craving. He insisted that his driver pull over to buy a dozen honey-glazed donuts; then he polished them off as they drove to the White House.

There are three colors of blood: red, blue (lobsters), and yellow (insects).

A few odds and ends about almost everyone’s favorite subject
.

T
HE FDR DIME

Here’s how FDR wound up on our 10¢ coin:

• Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was crippled by polio in 1921, escaped from his disability by swimming whenever he could. One of his favorite swimming holes was Warm Springs, Georgia, a natural spring. In 1926 the future president donated enough money to start a polio foundation at the site, so that other polio sufferers could enjoy the waters too.

• Despite the large donation, the foundation was always running out of money.

• Singer Eddie Cantor (a popular radio personality) knew about Roosevelt’s concern for the foundation, and in 1937 he proposed to the president that he ask every American to send a dime to the White House to be used for polio research. Cantor suggested a name for the promotion: The March of Dimes.

• Roosevelt took his suggestion and made the appeal. The public response was enormous: on some days the White House was flooded with as many 150,000 letters containing dimes.

• The president became so closely associated with the March of Dimes that after his death in 1945, Congress voted to create the Roosevelt dime in his honor. The first ones were released to the public on January 30, 1946, Roosevelt’s birthday—and the traditional start of the March of Dimes annual fund-raising campaign.

• The vaccine for polio was announced on April 12, 1955, on the 10-year anniversary of Roosevelt’s death.

CATTLE CALL

• In about 2000 B.C., man began trading bronze ingots shaped like cows (which had about the same value as a real cow). The value of these “coins” was measured by weighing them—which meant that any time a transaction was made, someone had to get out a scale to measure the value of the money.

• Around 800 B.C., the Lydians of Anatolia—who traded bean-shaped ingots made of a gold-silver alloy called
electrum
—began
stamping the ingot’s value onto its face. This eliminated the need for a scale and made transactions much easier.

A productive life: A queen ant can lay 30,000 eggs a month for up to 10 years.

• But switching to countable coins from weighed ones increased the chances of fraud—precious metals could be chipped or shaved off the edges of the coins. One of the techniques designed to prevent this is still evident on modern U.S. coins, even though they no longer contain precious metals. What is it? Feel the edges of a dime or a quarter. Those grooves were originally a way to tell if any metal had been shaved off.

ARE YOUR BILLS REAL?

Here are some anticounterfeit features of U.S. paper currency you probably didn’t know about:

The currency paper is fluorescent under ultraviolet light.

The ink is slightly magnetic—not enough for household magnets to detect, but enough for special machines to notice.

The paper has thousands of tiny microscopic holes “drilled” into it. Reason: when the money is examined under a microscope, tiny points of light shine through.

COIN FACTS

• The Director of the Mint gets to decide who appears on our coins, but the decisions have to be approved by the Treasury Secretary—and changes on any coin can’t be made more than once every 25 years.

• Prior to the assassination of President Lincoln, it was a longstanding tradition
not
to have portraits on U.S. coins. Symbols of liberty were used instead. The only reason Lincoln’s face got the nod: he was considered a human embodiment of liberty.

• If you design a portrait that gets used on a coin, you get to have your initials stamped in the coin alongside it. That’s normally an innocuous addition to the coin, but there have been exceptions: When the Roosevelt dime was released in 1946, some concerned anticommunists thought the initials “JS” (for designer John Sinnock) stood for Joseph Stalin. And when the John F. Kennedy memorial half-dollar was issued in 1964, some conspiracy theorists thought the letters “GR” (for Gilroy Roberts) were a tiny rendition of the communist hammer and sickle.

What a kisser: A full-grown hippo’s lips are about two feet wide.

More blunders to make you feel superior
.

A
SLIGHT MISUNDERSTANDING

“At the end of World War II, the Allies issued the Potsdam telegram demanding that the Imperial Japanese armies surrender forthwith. The Japanese government responded with an announcement that it was withholding immediate comment on the ultimatum, pending ‘deliberations’ by the Imperial government.

“Unfortunately, the official Japanese government news agency, in the heat of issuing this critical statement in English, decided to translate the Japanese word that means ‘withholding comment for the time being’ as ‘deliberately ignore.’

“A number of scholars have suggested that if the ultimatum had not been so decisively rejected, President Truman might never have authorized the A-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

—From
David Frost’s Book of the World’s Worst Decisions

CONTROL FREAKS

“The March 21, 1983, issue of
Time
magazine featured Lee Iacocca on the cover, along with a tease for Henry Kissinger’s ‘New Plan for Arms Contol.’ After two hundred thousand of the covers had been printed, someone noticed a typographical error—the ‘r’ had been left out of ‘Control.’ It was printed as
Contol
.

“There had never been a misspelling on a
Time
cover in the history of the magazine. They stopped the presses, corrected the error, and withdrew all the
Contol
covers. The goof cost
Time
$100,000, and 40% of the newsstand copies went on sale a day late.”

—From
The Emperor Who Ate the Bible
, by Scott Morris

THE WICKED BIBLE

In 1631, two London printers left one word out of an official edition of the Bible. The mistake cost them 3,000 pounds and nearly led to their imprisonment. The word was “not;” they left it out of the Seventh Commandment, which then told readers, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” The book became known as “the Wicked Bible.”

Mark Twain coined the phrase “gossip column” in 1893.

TRICK-OR-TREAT

“Two Illinois skydivers, Brian Voss, 30, and Alfred McInturff, 50, were tossing a pumpkin back and forth on their 1987 Halloween skydive when they accidentally dropped it from 2,200 feet. It crashed through the roof of Becky Farrar’s home, leaving orange goo all over her kitchen walls and breaking the kitchen table. Said Farrar, ‘If this had happened an hour earlier, we would have been sitting at the table having lunch.’”

—From
News of the Weird

NAKED TRUTH

PORTLAND, OR. “Amtrak apologized and issued refunds to dozens of junior high students who took a train trip with a group of rowdy grown-ups playing strip poker.