Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (73 page)

Exposed:
The Sir Francis Drake Association was the work of Iowa farmer-turned-conman Oscar Merrill Hartzell. But he didn’t invent the hoax—the first of hundreds of similar swindles took place within months of Drake’s death in 1596. Hartzell got the idea for his version after his mother was conned out of several thousand dollars in another Drake estate scam. When he tracked down the crooks who had swindled her and realized how much money they were making, Hartzell decided that rather than call the police, he would keep quiet… and launch his own scam. Using the money he’d recovered for his mother, Hartzell promptly sent out letters to more than 20,000 Drakes. Thousands took the bait. Hartzell eventually expanded the scam to target people who weren’t even named Drake.

Final Note:
By the time the feds caught up with him 20 years later, Hartzell had swindled an estimated 70,000 people out of more than $2 million. Rather than admit they’d been duped, many of the victims donated an additional $350,000 toward his legal defense. Hartzell was convicted of mail fraud and sentenced to 10 years in federal prison; a few years later he was transferred to a mental institution, where he died in 1943.

Deion Sanders is the only man to play in the World Series
and
the Super Bowl.

In 1971, Wallace Reyburn wrote a book called Bust-Up: The Uplifting Tale of Otto Titzling and the Development of the Bra. Is there any truth in Reyburn’s story? None whatsoever, cross our hearts. But it is so entertaining that we can’t restrain ourselves from retelling it (for the real story of the bra, turn to
page 167
.)

Otto Titzling was the son of a bridge builder, born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1884. The family emigrated to America when Otto was three. While his brothers followed their father into the bridge-building business, Otto was obsessed with women’s underwear and preferred to use his knowledge of load capacity to design new lingerie products.

The story goes that Titzling got his start in 1912 after befriending a heavily-endowed opera singer named Swanhilda Olafsen. “I get tired after hauling these things around all day,” she complained, so Otto came to her rescue with a new invention— the “chest halter.” When other similarly endowed women began requesting chest halters for themselves, Otto set up shop with a partner, a salesman named Hans Delving.

Obviously a marketing genius, Delving came up with the memorable slogan for padded bras: “What God has forgotten, we stuff with cotton.” And it was Delving who suggested they market a line of panties with the slogan, “Not the Best Thing in the World But the Next Thing to It.”

Together the two men came up with many innovations in breast support. After Swedish Olympic runner Lois Lung kicked herself in the breast while going over a hurdle, injuring herself and costing her the gold medal, Otto invented an inflatable bra designed for female athletes. (When the company received a letter of complaint from a woman who said her bra had been punctured by her boyfriend while pinning on a corsage, Delving suggested sending her a letter of condolence along with a copy of Gone
With the Wind.)

The buck stops here: the average American gives less than 1% of their total income to charity.

Next they unveiled a model with a change purse built into the cleavage. Delving suggested a front-fastening model that was dubbed the “Sesame” because it opened so easily. This model fell flat because it looked strange hanging on the laundry line, which women considered to be bad advertising for their assets. Titzling also came up with a special chest halter specifically designed for trapeze artists who spent a lot of time hanging upside down.

According to Reyburn, things were going along swell until Titzling came up against an unscrupulous dress designer named Philippe de Brassière. The Depression was in full swing, so nobody was buying de Brassière’s dresses—he decided he needed an item that ladies would buy even if they were broke. He stole Titzling’s idea, added some lace, and began presenting the product as his own. Titzling sued, but it was a hard-fought case because he had never patented his invention. After a lengthy and expensive trial, Titzling won only token damages. Broke and dispirited, he was unable to keep the business afloat and died a few years later. Hans Delving died in combat in World War II, and Philippe de Brassière went down in history, Reyburn declares, lending his name to the product he stole.

When Princess Victoria, eldest daughter of Queen Victoria, wed Prince Frederick William of Prussia, she picked out music of her two favorite composers. One was the “Bridal Chorus” from Richard Wagner’s opera “Lohengrin,” and the other was the “Wedding March” from Mendelssohn’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Copy cat brides in England chose the same music, thus starting a tradition that has spread across the globe. Wagner’s music is commonly known as, “Here comes the bride, all dressed in white…” and the bride and groom exit the church to the familiar strains of Mendelssohn: “DUM! DUM! da DUM dum dum dum DA da da DUM dum DUM!”

The upstroke of a bird’s wing moves it forward, the downstroke only keeps it airborn.

The bare bear asked the dear deer, “What do you call two words that sound alike but are spelled differently?” Of course, a deer can’t speak bear, but if it could it would have said, “A homophone.” The phrases below describe some of our favorite homophones. Can you figure out what they’re trying to say?

1.
Bad-smelling chicken

2.
Candy-coated hotel room

3.
Moby Dick’s cry

4.
Revenue on little nails

5.
Bullwinkle’s chocolate delight

6.
Rabbit fur

7.
Funny bone

8.
No Shakespeare allowed

9.
A bumpy way to go

10.
Counting your smells, sights, tastes, sounds, and feelings

11.
The scared guy hid low

12.
They talked about gross stuff

13.
Almost speechless Mr. Ed.

14.
Promised lyric poem

15.
Letterhead and envelopes going nowhere

16.
Spirit of a fish

17.
Worried wigwams

Answers

1.
Foul fowl;
2.
Sweet suite;
3.
Whale wail;
4.
Tacks tax;
5.
Moose mousse;
6.
Hare hair;
7.
Humorous humerus;
8.
Barred bard;
9.
Coarse course;
10.
Senses census;
11.
Coward cowered;
12.
Discussed disgust;
13.
Hoarse horse;
14.
Owed ode;
15.
Stationary stationery;
16.
Sole soul;
17.
Tense tents

James Madison was the first U.S. president to wear long pants.

Here’s the BRl’s cheesy tabloid section—a bunch of gossip about famous people.

Twenty-three-year-old landscaper Matthew Munnich filed a lawsuit against Martha Stewart, claiming that the design magnate had attacked him with her car. Reportedly, as Munnich and his crew worked on property next door to Stewart’s New York estate, she pulled up in a dark Suburban and asked if they had put up a fence. When Munnich replied, “No,” Stewart grew angry and began yelling things like “F***ing liar!” and “You and your f***ing illegal aliens are no good!” Looking directly at Munnich, Stewart then backed her Suburban into him, briefly pinning him against an electronic security box before tearing off. Stewart denies everything.

Burt Reynolds spends more on his toupees than most people make in a year. In late 1996, he filed for bankruptcy. Among his $4.5 million in liabilities was a $12,200 bill from Edward Katz Hair Design—his custom hairpiece designer.

In 1970 the actress, activist, and fitness guru was arrested for kicking a police officer when he found her with a large amount of pills. All charges were dropped when it was discovered that the pills Fonda was carrying were vitamins.

William Shatner once starred in a movie filmed entirely in the failed “universal language,” Esperanto.

When Seinfeld went onstage for his first-ever stand-up performance, he was paralyzed by stage fright and forgot his entire routine. He ran off the stage in a panic, mumbling a few lines to the crowd: “The beach. Driving. Shopping. Parents.”

Your liver—the largest organ inside your body—processes about a quart of blood a minute.

Observations from William O. Douglas, one of America’s greatest Supreme Court justices (1939–1975), and a defender of free speech.

“The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.”

“It was against a background poignant with memories of evil procedures that our Constitution was drawn.”

“As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air—however slight—lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”

“An arrest is not justified by what the subsequent search discloses.”

“The framers of the Constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They had lived in dangerous days; they knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty.”

“Those who won our independence believed…liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.”

“Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.”

“Whatever the reason, words mean what they say.”

“What a man thinks is of no concern to government.”

“A requirement that literature or art conform to some norm prescribed by an official smacks of an ideology foreign to our system.”

“Words uttered under coercion are proof of loyalty to nothing but self-interest.”

“Common sense often makes good law.”

“When a man knows how to live dangerously, he is not afraid to die. When he is not afraid to die, he is, strangely, free to live.”

Floods cause more death and destruction in the U.S. than any other natural disaster.

Part II of our story on the creation of a truly American form of storytelling…and soap peddling. (See
page 277
for Part I.)

In 1949 Procter & Gamble formed an entire corporate division to “produce, or acquire, and produce, radio, television and motion picture shows, programs, and other forms of entertainment.” And by the early 1950s, they were producing more content than any of the major Hollywood studios. TV airwaves were filled with Procter & Gamble–produced shows, including
Truth or Consequences, This Is Your Life,
Westerns, sitcoms, adventure shows, variety shows, and children’s shows.

But not a single TV soap opera.

TV shows cost so much more to make than radio shows that Procter & Gamble preferred to focus on programs that would be broadcast in the evening, when viewing audiences were largest. Furthermore they wondered whether women would stop doing their housework long enough to sit down and watch a televised soap. And even if they did, some executives worried, was it right for the company to encourage them to do so? “It was almost a decadent implication that we were taking housewives away from their work and families,” said P&G executive Ed Trach.