Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader

by Michael Brunsfeld

  In 2000 Disney reversed its 43-year ban on employee mustaches.

  THE LAST CHAPTER

  In 1953—at the height of the United States’ anti-Communist era—Hammett was called before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy aide Roy Cohn repeatedly asked Hammett if he was a Communist. Hammett repeatedly said no. “Were you a Communist when you wrote these books?” “No.” “Has any of the money you made from these books financed any Communist organizations?” “Not to my knowledge.” Without an admission or evidence, McCarthy could do nothing to Hammett, but the damage had been done.

  Financially in ruin, Hammett had a major heart attack in 1955. He was unable to care for himself, and was taken in by a longtime friend and confidant, writer Lillian Hellman. She moved him into her Park Avenue apartment where she saw to his needs while he edited her plays. Hammett contracted lung cancer and died in 1961 at the age of 67.

  EPILOGUE

  “He very much wanted to be remembered as an American writer,” wrote his daughter Jo Hammett. “He was always very proud of his heritage, and it shows in his treatment of the language. Few people have written American speech as well as he did.”

  But more than just an American writer, Dashiell Hammett wanted to be remembered as a true American. As a veteran of two World Wars, he requested that he be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover objected but was overruled. Hammett’s headstone, located in Section 12 of the cemetery, simply reads:

  Samuel D. Hammett

  Sergeant, U.S. Army

  1894–1961

  * * *

  TOLD YOU!

  Research shows that when people see upside-down writing in a book, 99% of the time they will turn the book over.

  It takes 8,000 workers to run and maintain the Panama Canal.

  CLASSIC HAMMETT

  Dashiell Hammett’s style has inspired so many writers, actors, and filmmakers that it’s nice to go to the source himself to read some of his grittiest crime prose.

  Poisonville is an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of smelters’ stacks.

  —Red Harvest

  On Spade’s desk a limp cigarette smoldered in a brass tray filled with the remains of limp cigarettes. Ragged grey flakes of cigarette-ash dotted the yellow top of the desk and the green blotter and the papers that were there. A buff-curtained window, eight or ten inches open, let in from the court a current of air faintly scented with ammonia. The ashes on the desk twitched and crawled in the current.

  —The Maltese Falcon

  Out of the moving automobile a man stepped. Miraculously he kept his feet, stumbling, sliding, until an arm crooked around an iron awning-post jerked him into an abrupt halt. He was a large man in bleached khaki, tall, broad, and thick-armed; his grey eyes were bloodshot; face and clothing were powdered heavily with dust. One of his hands clutched a thick, black stick, the other swept off his hat, and he bowed with exaggerated lowness before the girl’s angry gaze.

  The bow completed, he tossed his hat carelessly into the street, and grinned grotesquely through the dirt that masked his face, a grin that accented the heaviness of a begrimed and hair-roughened jaw.

  “I beg y’r par’on,” he said. “’F I hadn’t been careful I believe I’d a’most hit you. ’S unreli’ble, tha’ wagon. Borr’ed it from an engi—eng’neer. Don’t ever borrow one from eng’neer. They’re unreli’ble.”

  The girl looked at the place where he stood as if no one stood there, as if, in fact, no one had ever stood there, turned her small back on him, and walked very precisely down the street.

  —Nightmare Town

  Geckos, when startled, make a noise that sounds like “Eeek!”

  I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had been sitting with three other people and came over to see me. She was small and blonde, and whether you looked at her face or at her body in powder-blue sports clothes, the result was satisfactory. “Aren’t you Nick Charles?” she asked.

  I said: “Yes.”

  She held out her hand. “I’m Dorothy Wynant. You don’t remember me, but you ought to remember my father, Clyde

  Wynant. You—”

  “Sure,” I said, “and I remember you now, but you were only a kid of eleven or twelve then, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, that was eight years ago. Listen: remember those stories you told me? Were they true?”

  “Probably not. How is your father?”

  —The Thin Man

  “Don Wilson’s gone to sit at the right hand of God, if God doesn’t mind looking at bullet holes.”

  “Who shot him?” I asked.

  The grey man scratched the back of his neck and said: “Somebody with a gun.”

  —Red Harvest

  “You ought to have known I’d do it.” My voice sounded harsh and savage and like a stranger’s in my ear. “Didn’t I steal a crutch from a cripple?”

  —The Continental Op, “The Gutting of Couffignal”

  “Do you think he’ll play ball with you after he’s re-elected?”

  Madvig was not worried. “I can handle him.”

  “Maybe, but don’t forget he’s never been licked by anything in his life.”

  Madvig nodded in complete agreement. “Sure, that’s one of the best reasons I know for throwing in with him.”

  “No it isn’t, Paul,” Ned Beaumont said earnestly. “It’s the very worst. Think that over even if it hurts your head. How far has this dizzy blond daughter of his got her hooks into you?”

  —The Glass Key

  The original recipe for Peking duck was 15,000 words long.

  AMAZING ESCAPES

  Disasters happen all the time—floods, crashes, etc. As the following stories indicate, it takes at least one of two things to survive an otherwise certain death: a clear head or a stroke of luck.

  SPIT BACK OUT

  When the British passenger ship Lusitania was sunk by a German sub off the coast of Ireland in 1915, less than half of the 1,959 people onboard survived. One who did was a woman named Margaret Dwyer. As the ship’s massive deck went underwater, hundreds of people started swimming for their lives. Unfortunately, most were sucked down by the undertow—including Dwyer. But unlike the others, she was pulled down into one of the smokestacks. When the rushing water hit the burning coal, it erupted into a huge explosion of steam, pushing Dwyer out of the water and up into the air. She landed back in the ocean, singed and sooty, but alive. She was then pulled to safety by a rescue boat.

  EXPRESS ELEVATOR

  July 28, 1945, was a foggy Saturday morning in New York City. Betty Lou Oliver, an elevator operator at the Empire State Building, was standing at her post on the 80th floor of the skyscraper. At 9:40 a.m., a B-25 bomber lost in the fog slammed into the 79th floor at more than 200 mph. The impact shook the entire building and sent flames and airplane parts flying throughout the offices. Fourteen people, including the plane’s three crewmen, were killed instantly. Yet Oliver, who was one floor above, survived the initial impact—only to be severely burned by the ensuing fire. When rescuers arrived, they told those who could still walk to take the stairs down, then they transported the injured in the elevators, believing they were still operating normally. They weren’t. One of the plane’s engines had fallen down the shaft, severely weakening the cables.

  Oliver was given first aid, taken to the 75th floor, and then placed in an elevator car by herself. Shortly after the doors closed, she heard a very loud snap and immediately felt the car picking up speed. The elevator’s cables had been severed in the crash. With little else to do, Oliver curled up in a ball and prayed as the elevator plummeted more than 1,000 feet down to the basement.

  Ancient Romans used lemons as mothballs.
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  An hour later, rescuers reached the mangled car and cut a hole in the top. To their amazement and relief, they found Oliver badly injured…but alive. What saved her? It was later determined that all the cables below the elevator bunched up as it approached the bottom, thereby cushioning her fall. She made a full recovery.

  FANTASTIC GYMNASTICS

  In 1933 a bus transporting seven Japanese acrobats on a mountain road near Tokyo went out of control and rolled off a high cliff. As the bus tumbled down the mountainside, it hit a large rock in the middle of the cliff. The impact slowed the bus just long enough for the agile acrobats to jump out of the windows to safety in a nearby tree. They clung for their lives as they watched the doomed bus, with the driver still inside, complete its descent to the rocks below.

  A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE

  Returning from a night raid over Germany in 1940, an RAF bomber was hit by gunfire and started going down. In the back of the plane, the gunner, Sgt. Roger Peacock, knew the plane was descending fast, but didn’t hear an order to bail out, so he asked over the interphone, “Should I bail out?” He got no reply. They must be too busy wrestling with the controls, he thought. So he asked again…and again. Still, no reply. By then, the bomber was in a nose dive. Peacock made his way to the front of the plane and discovered that he was alone. He quickly bailed out, but saw right away that he was barely 100 feet above the ground—too close for his parachute to fully open and slow him down.

  Peacock was sure he was going to die, but just then the bomber crashed into the ground below and exploded. The rush of heat from the fireball inflated Peackock’s parachute and pushed him high up into the air. He landed softly, a safe distance from the wreckage. Five minutes later, the dazed sergeant watched as two other crewmen floated down to earth. It turned out that the pilot had given the order to bail out, but Peacock hadn’t heard it.

  The president of the United States has a secret Zip Code for receiving personal mail. It’s…secret.

  FLY AWAY HOME

  At 10:00 p.m., Sunday, November 10, 2003, Carol Watts went to bed in her home in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama. Her husband, Walter, had decided to stay up and watch the news because severe thunderstorms were on their way. A short time later Walter went upstairs, got Carol out of bed, and helped her to a bathroom in the middle of the house. As the two huddled in the bathtub, the wind outside picked up and suddenly a deafening roar was heard, as everything began to shake and rattle. “The house just exploded,” Carol later recalled. “The next thing I remember I was sitting straight up in a field.” Disoriented, Carol didn’t know where she was until a bolt of lightning lit up her surroundings: she was across the street in a pasture, 250 yards from her home. Walter had landed nearby, and although he had a puncture wound in his head, he was still conscious. It took the couple a few minutes to realize the magnitude of what had just happened to them: they had been sucked up into the vortex of a tornado and lived to tell about it.

  The Watts were taken to a hospital, where they were treated for numerous burns, broken bones, and lacerations, but both made a full recovery. They built a new home just up the hill from where their old one used to stand.

  * * *

  CARS YOU’RE UNLIKELY TO SEE IN AMERICA

  Believe it or not, all these model names are real:

  Nissan Homy

  Toyota Deliboy

  Honda Life Dunk

  Volugrafo Bimbo

  Renault Twingo

  Nissan Sunny California

  Honda Vamos Hobio

  Isuzu Elf Van

  Suzuki Cappuccino

  Suzuki Mighty Boy

  Toyota Urban Supporter

  Daihatsu Naked

  Honda Today Humming

  Toyota Synus

  Mitsubishi Lettuce

  Isuzu Begin Funk Box

  Honda Fit

  Mazda Bongo Friendee

  Witchcraft was a criminal offense in the United Kingdom until 1951.

  THE MINISERIES

  The sweeping saga and disastrous demise of a once-grand television tradition.

  EPISODE ONE: THE ENGLISH INVASION

  American television series have traditionally followed a standard formula: each week characters get a problem, solve it, and learn a valuable lesson. A series could go on like that for hundreds of episodes. British TV was different: dramatic series were serialized and usually ran for about six episodes. Especially popular in this format were adaptations of classic novels.

  The first “novel for television” broadcast in the United States was 1967’s English-made The Forsyte Saga. The 26-part series—a decades-spanning story of a prominent British family—was a big hit for the young, struggling National Educational Television network (later PBS) and would lead to one of PBS’s signature shows, Masterpiece Theatre, a showcase for multiple-part literary adaptations, usually made in England.

  It also led American commercial networks to test the idea of long-format television with made-for-TV movies broken up into shorter episodes. Examples: a seven-hour adaptation of the Leon Uris novel QB VII (ABC, 1974) and the six-hour biblical epic Moses the Lawgiver (CBS, 1975).

  But the miniseries wouldn’t become a TV force until CBS’s vice president of programming, Fred Silverman, left to join rival network ABC in 1975. Silverman had a knack for predicting hit shows (he’d picked All in the Family, The Waltons, and Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?) and he thought the miniseries made great ratings sense. Unlike other TV shows, Silverman reasoned, viewers would have to watch every episode. He also figured that if the network aired a miniseries during Sweeps Week (when networks set advertising rates and try to lure the most viewers with splashy programming), it could provide a huge ratings boost. Silverman called it “Event Television.”

  EPISODE TWO: THE SAGA BEGINS

  Silverman and ABC produced the first American miniseries, Rich Man, Poor Man, which aired in 1976. The 12-hour saga told the story of two brothers over a period of 30 years and featured Nick Nolte in his first lead role. Silverman’s hunch paid off—Rich Man, Poor Man averaged a whopping 27 million viewers and was the second most watched show on TV for the year. Executives at all three broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) noticed; “Event Television” meant big ratings.

  EPISODE THREE: ROOTS

  Silverman’s next “event” would be the most popular miniseries of all time—and possibly the most memorable TV show ever—Roots. Based on Alex Haley’s autobiographical novel, Roots traced the history of an African family through slavery to the present day. The all-star cast included Ben Vereen, Lou Gossett Jr., O. J. Simpson, Robert Reed, Todd Bridges, Edward Asner, Maya Angelou, John Amos, Richard Roundtree, and LeVar Burton.

  Miniseries episodes were being run in regular weekly time slots, but Roots aired on eight consecutive nights because ABC executives didn’t think a program about African-American history could hold a broad audience over several weeks. They were wrong: more than 130 million viewers watched at least some of Roots. The final installment, airing on January 30, 1977, is still the third highest rated program in TV history.

  EPISODE FOUR: AFTER ROOTS

  From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, miniseries were common fare on television, though not all were as successful as Roots. The networks quickly learned what kinds of miniseries succeeded: stories about the Old West, the Bible, a powerful family, or a major war. Some of the most popular of the period include:

  • Holocaust (1978). One of the first American productions to address Nazi atrocities and also one of the first times schoolchildren were actually assigned TV viewing as homework.

  • Jesus of Nazareth (1977). A reverent film that was so well received that it was expanded from four to six hours and still runs on cable TV every Easter.

  • Shogun (1980). Based on James Clavell’s novel, starring Richard Chamberlain as an English captain shipwrecked in feudal Japan.

  Busiest McDonald’s in the world: Pushkin Square in Moscow.

  A 2½-hour version was released theatrically
in Japan.

  • The Thorn Birds (1983). Spanning 60 years, Richard Chamberlain played a priest torn between his vow of celibacy and his passionate love for a woman he raises from childhood.

  • V (1983). Alien spaceships loom over U.S. cities, planning to devour humanity in this sci-fi allegory of Nazism.

  EPISODE FIVE: THE END IS NOT THE END

  Two World War II miniseries adapted from Herman Wouk novels ended the heyday of the miniseries. The Winds of War was a 14-hour, $40 million project that took nearly a decade to film…and it only covered the first two years of World War II. It was a hit in the spring of 1983, so ABC approved a sequel. War and Remembrance (1988) was even bigger, costing a record $110 million, but its lackluster ratings told their own story: miniseries had become too expensive to produce; audiences were no longer captivated.

  By the late 1980s, broadcast TV networks were fighting for audiences against hundreds of new cable channels as well as home video. Result: very few major minis were produced after the War years. CBS and NBC aired a few small, four-hour miniseries, but nothing approaching a Roots. ABC, however, wasn’t yet ready to let go of the high-profile mini. Filming budgets shrank considerably, but ABC continued to make miniseries thanks to a partnership with horror author Stephen King. He would be the creative force behind seven moderately successful ABC miniseries in the 1990s, including It, The Tommyknockers, and The Stand.