Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (56 page)

In a version of the opera
Carmen
performed in Verona in 1970, 38 horses were used live on stage. All went well until the conductor gave a violent upswing of his baton, startling a horse and causing a stampede. Sole fatality: One of the horses jumped into the orchestra pit and landed on top of the kettledrum.

Lincoln survived two assassination attempts before being killed by John Wilkes Booth.

Here’s the part of our story on the history of football that “red-meat” sports fans have been waiting for: how one of America’s most violent sports became even more violent. So violent in fact, that for a time it looked like some colleges would ban it forever.

The “Hospital Box Score” printed by the
Boston Globe
following the Harvard-Yale game of 1894 (Yale won, 12–4):

By the mid-1890s, due in large part to the introduction of mass plays like the V-trick and the flying wedge, serious injuries had become such a routine part of football that newspapers began publishing injury reports as part of their sports coverage. How violent was it? In the early 1890s, a player was actually allowed to slug another player three times with a closed fist before the referee could throw him out of the game.

The situation was made even worse by the fact that players wore almost no protective padding—not even football helmets, which were not mandatory until 1939. The football players of the late 1880s and early 1890s wore little more than canvas or cotton knickers, a football jersey, high-top shoes with leather spikes, and hard leather shin guards worn underneath wool socks. They topped off the look with a knitted cap with a tassle or pom-pom on top. If a player was worried about getting his ears torn from the grabbing style of tackling popular at the time, he could wear earmuffs. “Anyone who wore home-made pads was regarded as a sissy,” early football great John Heisman remembered.

Football has more rules than any other American sport.

One acceptable piece of protective wear: If a player worried about breaking his nose, he could wear a black, banana-shaped rubber nose mask. “Sometimes all 11 players wore them,” Robert Leckie writes in
The Story of Football.
“They were indeed a ferocious sight with the ends of their handle-bar mustaches dangling from either side of that long, black, banana-like mask, and their long hair flying in the breeze.”

Thanks to the introduction of mass-momentum plays, the 1893 season was surprisingly brutal, even to hardened football fans. That year’s Purdue-Chicago game was so violent that the Tippecanoe County District Attorney, who was watching from the stands, ran out onto the field in the middle of the game and threatened to indict every single player on charges of assault and battery. The departments of the Army and Navy were so disturbed by the violent direction that football was taking that they abolished the annual game between their military academies.

Public sentiment was also beginning to turn sharply against mass-momentum plays—not just because people were being hurt and killed, but also because they made the games boring to watch (unless you were there to watch people break bones). So many players crowded around the ball during the mass plays that it was difficult for spectators to see what was going on.

In 1894 the University Athletic Club of New York invited the “Big Four” football powers—Yale, Princeton, Harvard, and Pennsylvania—to meet in New York to form new rules that would curb the violence in football.

Banning mass-momentum plays outright was out of the question—they were too popular with too many football teams—but the Big Four did agree to a few restrictions. They limited the number of players who could gather behind the line of scrimmage in preparation for a play, and they passed a rule requiring that a ball had to travel at least 10 yards at kickoffs to be considered in play, unless it was touched by a member of the receiving team.

They also made it illegal to touch a member of the opposing team unless the opponent had the ball, and reduced the length of the game from 90 minutes to 70, in the hopes that shorter games would mean less violence.

Seventy-five percent of all murder victims knew their killer.

The new restrictions effectively banned the flying wedge and similar plays during kickoffs, but in the end they were not very effective, because teams kept inventing new mass plays that got around the rules. Injuries continued to mount.

The following year, Princeton and Yale proposed banning mass-momentum plays altogether, by requiring a minimum of seven players on the line of scrimmage and by allowing only one back to be in forward motion before the snap. Harvard and Penn refused to go along, and rather than sign on to the new rules they broke off from the Big Four and drafted their own set of rules, allowing mass-momentum plays.

When the Big Four split in 1895, the presidents of Chicago, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Northwestern, Purdue, and Wisconsin universities stepped in to fill the breach by meeting and forming what grew into the “Big Ten” Western Conference. (Iowa and Indiana joined in 1899, and the 10th school, Ohio State, signed on in 1912.)

The rise of a competing football conference motivated the students of the Big Four to resolve their differences. In the summer of 1896, Harvard and Pennsylvania returned to the fold, and the Big Four moved a step closer to banning mass-momentum plays with a rule that forbade players from taking more than a single step before the ball was in play, unless they came to a complete stop before taking another step. But it wasn’t enough, as Robert Leckie writes in
The Story of Football:

As the twentieth century began, football was still a game of mass-momentum.… The flying wedge was not completely gone. Hurdling and the flying tackle were common. Slugging was still a familiar tactic up front, and the most acceptable method of getting the ball carrier through the line was to push, pull, or haul him through. Thus the only participant surviving the contest undamaged was apt to be the ball.

Fortunately, reading is not a contact sport, so while we go off to the infirmary to get a few bandages, you may turn to
page 389
for Part
V
of The History of Football.

Fastest action in the animal world: The common midge beats its wings 133,000 times/min.

Everyone’s
got a question or two they’d like answered
—
basic stuff, like “Why is the sky blue?” Here are a few of those questions, with answers from some of the nation’s top trivia experts.

Q:
Why are the oceans salty?

A:
One theory: “When rain falls on rocks it dissolves some of the minerals in them, particularly salt. The rainwater washes into streams and rivers, carrying away the salt with it. There is not enough salt in most rivers to make them taste salty, but after millions of years the salt carried to the oceans has made them quite salty. During all these years, ocean water has been evaporating, leaving the salt behind, increasing the saltiness of the oceans. There are beds of salt throughout the world, sometimes hundreds of feet thick, probably formed by the evaporation of ancient seas.” (From
The Question and Answer Book of Nature,
by John R. Saunders)

Q:
Why is there a crescent moon on outhouse doors?

A:
“The main reasons for carving anything into an outhouse door are light and ventilation.

“In olden times, outhouse builders used cutouts of the moon and sun to let people know which outhouse to use. The moon represented women, the sun represented men. The symbols also helped foreign travelers. It didn’t matter what language they spoke because the symbols were universal.

“But if one of the outhouses at an inn was damaged and could no longer be used, it was automatically assumed to be the men’s outhouse. The reasoning was that men could always go behind a tree, so the crescent moon was put on the remaining usable structure for use by women. For economy, many inns only constructed an outhouse for women. This custom soon became so widespread that eventually the moon became the symbol used for all outhouses.” (From
What Makes Flamingos Pink?,
by Bill McLain)

Hot commodity: Pound for pound, radium is worth more than gold.

Q:
Why do ice cubes crack?

A:
“They’re trying to shrink! When water freezes, it gets bigger and lighter. As soon as you put an ice cube in a drink, the outside of the cube wants to turn back into water. So the cube tries to shrink—quickly. The shrinking squeezes hard on the inside of the ice cube and, all of the sudden…the inside part goes crack.” (From
Why Does Popcorn Pop?,
by Catherine Ripley)

Q:
Why don’t birds sing in the winter?

A:
“One reason is that many species are gone, having migrated south for the winter. But some birds, such as starlings, mourning doves, and sparrows, are around all winter. Yet even they are silent.

“For birds, singing is associated with mating. As birds mate and begin to build their nests, one of their first tasks is to stake out a territory where other birds are not welcome. By keeping competitors away from a particular area, a nesting bird ensures that there will be enough food for both parents and the growing chicks. Singing is a very effective way of announcing to other birds, ‘This territory is occupied.’

“Since most birds set up territories and mate in the spring, this is the time you are most likely to hear birdsong.” (From 101
Questions and Answers About Backyard Wildlife,
by Ann Squire)

Q:
How come whenever
I
go out into bright light
I
sneeze?

A:
“You say you don’t have this problem? Well, between one-sixth and one-quarter of the population do. They have what’s known as photic sneeze reflex (‘sneeze caused by light’).

“What causes it? Nobody knows. What we do know is that the nerves for the eye and the nose run pretty close together. Some think what we’ve got here is a case of nerve signals getting crossed. If it bugs you…well, there’s always brain surgery. But personally, I’d learn to live with it.” (From
Know It All!,
by Ed Zotti)

If you feed a rhesus monkey a “typical American diet” it will die within 2 years.

Some thoughtful observations on womanhood from some of the world’s most interesting women.

“From birth to age 18 a girl needs good parents. From 18 to 35 she needs good looks. From 35 to 55 she needs a good personality. From 55 on, she needs cash.”

—
Sophie Tucker

“Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.”

—
Charlotte Whitton

“The hardest task in a girl’s life is to prove to a man that his intentions are serious.”

—
Helen Rowland

“My idea of a superwoman is someone who scrubs her own floors.”

—
Bette Middler

“We haven’t come a long way, we’ve come a short way. If we hadn’t come a short way, no one would be calling us ‘baby.’ ”

—
Elizabeth Janeway

“I refuse to think of them as chin hairs. I think of them as stray eyebrows.”

—
Janette Barbery