If you’re anywhere in Michigan, you’re no more than 85 miles from one of the Great Lakes.
ADIDAS VS. PUMA, PART II
Here’s part two of our chronicle of one of the most bitter family squabbles in business history. Part I of the story is on page 110.
STRIPS ’N STRIPES
Now that Adi and Rudi Dassler had split their shoe company into two new ones, both men wanted to be sure that customers would be able to tell Adidas and Puma shoes apart. It had been common practice for many shoemakers, the old Dassler Brothers company included, to sew vertical strips of leather onto the sides of shoes to give them structure and strength. The strips weren’t too noticeable, because they were the same color as the rest of the shoe.
Adi Dassler decided that the strips—which were painted white or some other color to make them look like stripes—would be the Adidas trademark. He made up sample shoes with two, three, four, five, and six stripes apiece, then asked his wife Käthe and her sister Marianne to pick which ones they liked best. Two-stripe shoes were out: Some Dassler Brothers shoe designs had used two strips of leather, so Rudi would have grounds to fight a two-stripe trademark if he wanted to.
Käthe and Marianne felt that the shoes with four or more stripes looked too busy. They picked three stripes, and Adidas shoes have been made with them ever since. Over at Puma, Rudi played with a few designs, including a puma jumping through a capital “D,” before eventually settling on the company’s signature “formstripe,” a horizontal stripe that begins at the back of the shoe, then widens as it moves forward along the side of the shoe before turning down toward the sole.
SPLIT PERSONALITIES
When the Dassler brothers divided their company in two, the employees had to choose whether they wanted to work for Adi at Adidas, or for Rudi at Puma. Most of the technical people stayed with Adi; most of the sales force and administrators went with Rudi. That might seem like a formula for faster growth at Puma, since Rudi’s people knew how to move the merchandise, but it wasn’t. Adi’s constant tinkering in the factory and also on the playing field, especially when the teams he supplied had really important games, proved the deciding factor. Adidas developed a reputation for superior designs that helped it grow into a major European brand. Puma was left to play catch-up. It grew too, but at a slower pace, and remained primarily a national brand with strong ties to German soccer clubs.
On average, left-handed women enter menopause 5 years sooner than right-handed women.
THE TOWN OF BENT NECKS
As the years passed and Adidas and Puma loomed ever larger over the economy of tiny Herzogenaurach, the entire town was drawn into their feud. Nearly everyone worked at one company or the other (or was related to someone who did), so few people could avoid choosing a side. Dating, even socializing, across company lines was frowned upon. Marrying someone from the other side was out of the question. Herzogenaurach became known as “the town of bent necks,” because people looked down to see which shoes people were wearing before engaging them in conversation.
Adidas people bought their bread from bakers who sided with Adidas, bought their meat from Adidas-friendly butchers, and drank in Adidas-only beer halls. Puma workers did the same. Which bus a child took to school depended on whose side their parents were on, and so did the gang a kid joined. The rivalry that started soon after birth went all the way to the cemetery: Each side had its own tombstone carvers. And when Adi and Rudi Dassler died four years apart in the 1970s, they were buried in opposite corners of the Herzogenaurach cemetery, as far apart as possible. They had carried their feud to the end of their lives, and the same was expected of everyone else.
THE ENEMY IS US
Had Adi and Rudi been able to patch up their differences in their lifetimes, and had their descendants not carried the feud into the next generation, the global athletic shoe business might look very different today. But they didn’t. The brothers couldn’t even limit themselves to fighting with each other. Adi fought with his son and heir, Horst Dassler, finally banishing him to France, where Horst was put in charge of a shoe factory that was losing money. Horst turned it into a moneymaker, then built Adidas France into an operation that rivaled the rest of Adidas. But none of it was good enough for Adi. Writing from Herzogenaurach, Adi disowned his son in one angry letter after another.
Scientific term for insect poop: frass.
Horst was so certain that Adi would throw him out of the company that he began diverting millions of Adidas dollars into his own sporting-goods businesses, so that he’d have somewhere to go when he got tossed out. He concealed his activities behind shell companies and front men for several years. And though his scheming eventually was exposed, he never did get thrown out of Adidas. After Adi died in 1978, Horst battled his four sisters for control of Adidas, winning the fight in 1984 when his mother sided with him against his sisters.
THE CUB
Over at Puma, Rudi’s relationship with Armin Dassler, his oldest son and heir, was no better. Rudi routinely belittled him in front of other company executives, and Armin chafed at his father’s overbearing nature and outmoded ways of doing business. Armin could see what his cousin Horst was accomplishing at Adidas, and it drove him crazy that he couldn’t do the same at Puma. Armin finally banished himself to Salzburg, Austria, to run a Puma factory there. When the Austrian athletic shoe market proved less profitable than expected, Armin started selling shoes to the U.S. market, something Rudi had expressly forbidden. Armin actually had to go behind Rudi’s back to introduce his father’s own shoes to the largest sporting goods market in the world.
The relationship between father and son never did improve. When Rudi died in 1974, Armin was stunned to learn that Rudi had written him out of the will. Only a legal technicality allowed Armin to inherit a controlling 60 percent interest in Puma against his father’s dying wishes. Armin’s younger brother Gerd inherited the other 40 percent.
While the two families were consumed with their own squabbles, a shoe-nami was on the way from overseas. For Part III of the story, turn to page 477.
Over 8 Harry Potter movies, actor Daniel Radcliffe went through 70 wands and 160 pairs of glasses.
NASTY MUSICIANS
Who are the harshest music critics? Other musicians.
On Lady Gaga: “I’m not quite sure who this person is, to be honest. I don’t know if it is a man or a woman.”
—Christina Aguilera
On Christina Aguilera: “She is one of the most disgusting human beings in the entire world. She looks like a drag queen.”
—Kelly Osbourne
On the Beatles: “They were peripheral. If you had more knowledge about music, they didn’t really mean anything.”
—Van Morrison
On Elvis Costello: “Music journalists like him because music journalists look like him.”
—David Lee Roth
On Rod Stewart: “He has kind of a female voice.”
—Tony Bennett
On Red Hot Chili Peppers: “I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What is this garbage?’ And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”
—Nick Cave
On Jack White (of the White Stripes): “He looks like Zorro on doughnuts.”
—Noel Gallagher (Oasis)
On Chuck Berry: “I love his work but I couldn’t warm to him even if I was cremated next to him.”
—Keith Richards
On Keith Richards: “It’s like a monkey with arthritis, trying to go onstage and look young.”
—Elton John
On Mick Jagger: “I think he would be astounded and amazed if he realized to how many people he is not a sex symbol, but a mother image.”
—David Bowie
On former bandmate Slash: “I consider him a cancer and better avoided.”
—Axl Rose
On Bruce Springsteen: “He plays four and a half sets. That’s torture. Does he hate his audience?”
—John Lydon (Sex Pistols)
The campy Batman TV show was inspired by a Batman-themed party Hugh Hefner threw in 1965.
A BORING PAGE
Does everything have to be exciting?
YAWN
The “Boring 2010” conference took place in London. About 200 people attended. Among the activities: milk-tasting, a PowerPoint presentation of a man’s changing tastes in necktie colors, and a speech called “My Relationship with Bus Routes.”
WHATEVER
In 1964 artist Andy Warhol released what is possibly the most boring movie ever made. Called Empire, the grainy, black-and-white silent film is just one continuous shot of New York City’s Empire State Building on a night when nothing happened. Warhol filmed the building for six hours, but to make the movie even less interesting, he recorded it at a slower speed so it lasts eight hours.
YUP
To many, the phrase “boring museum” is redundant, but some museums are more boring than others. Examples: the Cement Museum in Spain, the Wallpaper Museum in France, and the Occupational Health and Safety Museum in Germany.
MEH
What’s the world’s most boring city? It could be Brussels, Belgium. According to a poll of 2,400 travelers conducted by the website TripAdvisor.com, aside from the famous waffles, there’s not much of interest there.
ARE WE DONE YET?
In 2010 British researcher William Tunstall-Pedoe designed a computer program that scanned all the news from every single day in the century to determine the most boring day of the 20th century. The “winner”: April 11, 1954. On that day, no one famous was born, no one famous died, and there were no big news events. According to Tunstall-Pedoe, even the weather was boring.
NASA slang for floating space poop: “escapees.”
THE FORBIDDEN
ISLAND, PART II
Here’s Part II of our story about what could be the most isolated people on Earth. (Part I is on page 163.)
STRANGERS BEARING GIFTS
The first real threat to the natives of North Sentinel Island appeared in 1858, when the British established a penal colony at Port Blair on nearby South Andaman Island, and set about trying to pacify the local tribes—the Great Andamanese, the Onge, the Jarawa, and eventually the Sentinelese. One technique the British used was to kidnap a member of an unfriendly tribe, hold him for a short period, treat him well, and then shower him with gifts and let him return to his people. In so doing, the British hoped to demonstrate their friendliness. If the first attempt didn’t work, they’d repeat the process with as many tribesmen as it took to turn an unfriendly tribe into a friendly one.
In 1880 a large, heavily armed party led by 20-year-old Maurice Vidal Portman, the British colonial administrator, landed on North Sentinel and made what is believed to be the first exploration of the island by outsiders. Several days passed before they made contact with any Sentinelese, because the tribe members disappeared deeper into the jungle whenever the strangers approached.
Finally, after several days on the island, the party stumbled across an elderly couple who were too old to run away, and several small children. Portman brought the two adults and four of the children back to Port Blair. But the man and the woman soon started to get sick and then died, probably from exposure to Western diseases like smallpox, measles, and influenza, to which they would have had little or no resistance. So Portman returned the four children to North Sentinel island and released them with gifts for the rest of the tribe. The children disappeared into the jungle and were never seen again.
The world’s largest sea cave is near Florence, Oregon. It’s the height of a 12-story building.
INDIA’S TURN
After this experience, the British left the Sentinelese more or less alone, and focused their pacification efforts on the other tribes. When India won its independence from Great Britain in 1947, the Andaman Islands were handed over to India, but the Indians ignored the Sentinelese, too, for about 20 years.
Then in 1967, the Indian government launched its own large-scale expedition to North Sentinel Island, complete with plenty of armed policemen and naval officers for protection. The visit was less aggressive than the British had been 87 years earlier (no kidnapping), and it was more scientific (an anthropologist named T. N. Pandit was a member of the party). But they never made contact with a single Sentinelese soul—once again, the tribe members vanished deeper into the jungle whenever the outsiders approached.
RE-GIFTING
That began a decades-long policy of “contact visits” by the Indian government to North Sentinel Island. From time to time during the short calm-weather season, an Indian naval vessel would anchor outside the coral reefs and dispatch small boats through the openings in the reefs to approach the beaches. Approach the beaches, but not land. The boats had to be sure not to come within an arrow’s flight of the beach or risk being attacked by the Sentinelese.
These strangers, like the British before them, came bearing gifts—usually bananas and coconuts, which do not grow on the islands, and sometimes other gifts, including bead necklaces, rubber balls, plastic buckets, and pots and pans. Once the visitors approached as closely as they felt was safe, they would toss the items overboard to wash up on the beach. Or, if the party was large enough to frighten the Sentinelese into retreating into the jungle, it might even land on the beach, but only long enough to drop off the gifts and beat it out of there before the Sentinelese attacked. When a National Geographic film crew lingered a little too long during one such visit in 1975, a Sentinelese warrior with a bow and arrow shot the director in the thigh, and then stood there on the beach laughing at his accomplishment.
The world’s 10 most developed countries all speak Germanic languages.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
It wasn’t until the early 1990s, after more than 20 years of such visits, that the Sentinelese finally relaxed their guard—just a bit—and allowed the boats to come closer. Sometimes unarmed tribesmen stood on the beaches while the people on the boats tossed the coconuts overboard. A few times, they even waded out into the water to collect the coconuts in person. Even so, they did not allow the visitors to stay long. After just a few minutes, the Sentinelese would signal with menacing gestures or “warning shots”—arrows fired with no arrowheads attached—that the visit was over.
LEAVE ’EM ALONE
That was about as close as the Sentinelese ever came to opening up to the outside world. In the mid-1990s, the Indian government decided that its policy of forcing contact with the Sentinelese made no sense, and it ended the visits in 1996.
The visits made no sense to India, but they were actually dangerous for the Sentinelese. With so little resistance to Western diseases, the islanders risked not just the death of individuals with each contact with outsiders, but the extinction of the entire tribe. That was the experience of the other Andaman Island tribes: When the British established their penal colony on South Andaman Island in 1858, the native population of the Andaman Islands was nearly 7,000 people. But the British arrival was followed by a succession of epidemics, including pneumonia, measles, mumps, and the Russian flu, which decimated the tribes. After more than 150 years of exposure to Western diseases, their numbers have dropped to fewer than 300 people, and continue to decline. Some tribes have gone completely extinct. The Sentinelese, by refusing contact with the outside world, are the only tribe that has avoided this fate.
WAVE GOODBYE
The Sentinelese even survived the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the deadliest in recorded history, with few or no casualties. Though the tsunami killed more than 230,000 people in surrounding countries, it appears that the Sentinelese were able to sense the coming of the tsunami and escape to higher ground before it arrived. When an Indian Navy helicopter arrived three days later to check on their well-being and drop food parcels on the beach, a Sentinelese warrior came out of the jungle and warned the helicopter off with bow and arrow, a clear sign that the Sentinelese did not want help from outsiders.
Moving fact: The U.S. Posta
l Service processes about 38 million address changes a year.
KEEP OUT
Today the Indian government enforces a three-mile exclusion zone around North Sentinel Island with regular sea and air patrols. Heavy fines and jail time await anyone caught trespassing into the zone. And if that isn’t enough of a deterrent, the Sentinelese continue to defend their island as fiercely as ever. In 2006 two poachers who’d spent the day fishing illegally inside the exclusion zone dropped anchor near the island and went to sleep, apparently after a night of heavy drinking. Sometime during the night the anchor came loose and the boat drifted onto the coral reefs. The Sentinelese killed both men and buried their bodies on the beach. At last report the bodies were still there; when an Indian Navy helicopter tried to recover them from the beach, the Sentinelese fought it off with bows and arrows.
EYE IN THE SKY
Today anyone with a laptop and Internet access can use Google Earth to spy on places that are not meant to be seen by outsiders. You can look at satellite photos of Area 51, the secret military air-base in the Nevada desert. You can look at Mount Weather, a secret facility in Virginia that is rumored to be the place where members of Congress are evacuated in times of national emergency. You can even peer down on secret waterslides on the outskirts of Pyongyang, North Korea, that are the playground of that country’s Communist Party elite.
But when you look down on North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal, all you can make out is the wreck of the Primrose, still stuck on the reef where it ran aground in 1981. You can’t see the Sentinelese, their dwellings, or anything else that might shed light on how many people there are on the island, or how they live their lives. The dense jungle canopy that covers every inch of the island except the beaches conceals everything: Even when viewed from outer space, the Sentinelese remain free from prying eyes.
Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® Page 40
