Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader®

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  MEANWHILE, BACK IN GERMANY

  Nike Waffles hit the market in 1974, the same year that Armin Dassler took the helm at Puma. It wasn’t long before some Waffles found their way to Herzogenaurach, along with warnings from alarmed Puma and Adidas distributors in America that the Nikes were a serious problem that needed to be dealt with immediately.

  Joan R. Ginther has won Texas Lottery jackpots 4 times. Odds: 1 in 18 septillion.

  Neither Horst Dassler at Adidas nor his cousin Armin at Puma saw the Waffle as much of a threat. It went against everything the companies understood about good athletic shoe design: They were too light, weighing little more than bedroom slippers; they were too flimsy; and the soles were made in a waffle iron. Both Horst and Armin gave Nikes a quick once-over, had a good laugh, and went back to fighting each other.

  LOSING GROUND

  Puma was the first company to feel the full impact of Nike’s rise. Armin waited five years before responding to the threat and then, in 1979, he replaced his U.S. distributor in an attempt to boost the company’s flagging American sales. When that failed he spent millions of dollars buying out the new distributors. That didn’t work, either, and when he tried to sell Pumas through mass-market discounters like Kmart, all it did was tarnish Puma’s image, which got even worse when Foot Locker and other athletic shoe retailers retaliated by dumping the brand.

  In 1986 Armin took Puma public, hoping that listing shares on the Frankfurt stock exchange would bring in money from outside investors. But as soon as outsiders realized how much money Puma was losing, thanks to crashing sales in the U.S., the company’s stock price collapsed. In September 1987, Deutsche Bank seized control of the company to prevent it from going under. Then it fired Armin Dassler and his sons Frank and Jörg. Puma was a Dassler company no more.

  DOUBLE TROUBLE

  By the time Adidas finally came up with a lightweight running shoe to compete against the Waffle in the late 1970s, Nike dominated the market. When Nike introduced the Air Jordan basketball shoe in 1985, it pushed Adidas off American basketball courts as well, racking up $100 million in Air Jordan sales the first year alone.

  When Reebok, a British shoe company with just $300,000 in sales in 1980, introduced a shoe designed especially for the aerobics craze, Adidas declined to offer a competing product, because aerobics was not a “sport.” By 1987 Reebok had grown into a $1.4 billion-a-year business. Two years later it was the largest athletic shoe company in the world.

  When General George S. Patton’s troops reached the Rhine River in WWII, he peed in it.

  AUF WIEDERSEHEN

  Horst Dassler didn’t live to see Adidas’s day of reckoning; he died of cancer in 1987 at the age 51. His death sparked another family battle for control of the company, this time between his two children (Adi Jr. and Suzanne), who owned 20 percent of Adidas shares, and his four sisters, who controlled the other 80 percent.

  Through 1988 Adidas was still the largest sporting goods company in the world, just slightly ahead of Reebok and Nike. But by the end of 1989 it had fallen behind both companies and even behind the Converse shoe company, and sales continued to fall. A plunge from first place to fourth in one year was more than Horst Dassler’s sisters could stomach. Mindful of what had happened to their cousins over at Puma, they decided to unload Adidas while they still had something to sell. On July 4, 1990, they sold their shares to a French industrialist for $273 million. By then Adi Jr. and his sister Suzanne had already sold most of their shares to pay their inheritance taxes. The Dassler era was over.

  LIFE AFTER DASSLERS

  Reebok’s reign at the top did not last. By the late 1990s, it had slipped to a distant third behind Nike and Adidas, and it never caught up again. In 2005 it was acquired by Adidas, but as of 2011 Nike is still larger than its two rivals combined. In 2007 Puma was acquired by the French conglomerate Pinault-Printemps-Redoute (PPR), which also owns Gucci, the Italian luxury-goods label.

  Both Adidas and Puma are still headquartered in Herzogenaurach, though shoes are no longer made in the village. Now that the factory jobs are gone, the rivalry that divided the town for decades has largely disappeared. Today Rudi’s grandson Frank Dassler, fired from Puma in 1987, works for Adidas.

  About the only time the rivalry resurfaces is when tradespeople hired to work in the Adidas or Puma headquarters show up wearing the wrong kind of shoes. That’s a tradition that dates back more than 60 years, when laborers deliberately wore the wrong shoes when working in Adi or Rudi’s homes—they knew that if Adi saw Pumas in his house or Rudi saw Adidas in his, they’d give the workers free pairs of the right kind of shoes. “Rudolf simply couldn’t stand the fact that someone was wearing an Adidas shoe in his private home,” Frank Dassler says.

  First North American city to have electric streetlights: Cleveland, Ohio (1879).

  CELEBRITY GHOSTS

  They may be gone, but they’re not forgotten. Come to think of it, are they really even gone? Ghost lovers claim that many of the famous dead are still among us...in spirit.

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706–90)

  Franklin helped establish the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia in the 1740s. His papers are housed there along with, according to some staff members, his ghost. Employees claim that Franklin hangs out in the library and likes to peruse its shelves. Aside from one nasty encounter with a cleaning lady, who claims he attacked her after hours, he’s usually in high spirits.

  KURT COBAIN (1967–94)

  In the days after Cobain committed suicide at his Seattle home, a handful of fans who gathered there for a vigil claimed to have seen the spirit of the Nirvana frontman in the windows and on the roof of the house. In August 2000, a bartender in Essex, England, told reporters that Cobain’s ghost had taken up residence in her laptop. She claimed Cobain’s face materialized on the screen one night, begged her for help, and then asked her to kiss him. She kissed the screen, and the image vanished. The laptop crashed and never worked again.

  RUDOLPH VALENTINO (1895–1926)

  A nasty case of peritonitis sent the silent-screen star to his grave at just 31 years of age. An excerpt from his diary revealed that he didn’t fear death: “I believe it to be merely the beginning of Life itself,” he wrote. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, then, when a stable hand at Valentino’s Beverly Hills mansion claimed he saw the “Latin Lover’s” spirit petting a horse. (The stable hand quit on the spot.) Sightings have also been reported both at Valentino’s former beach house in Oxnard, California, and in the costume department at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles.

  BUGSY SIEGEL (1906–47)

  Mobster Siegel helped build Las Vegas...and he seems determined to stay there. Guests and staff at the Flamingo Hotel, which he opened in 1946, reported seeing Siegel’s ghost, dressed in a smoking jacket, lingering in the Presidential Suite. He was also spotted loitering around the hotel’s pool late at night, and a maid reportedly quit after seeing Siegel’s ghost on the fifth floor. The last of the old Flamingo Hotel was torn down in 1993 to make room for the present-day Flamingo Hilton; today his ghost is said to haunt the memorial plaque that marks the spot where the old hotel once stood.

  American teachers work more hours than teachers in any other country: 1,097 hrs. per year.

  CASS ELLIOT (1941–74)

  Actor and comedian Dan Aykroyd lives in a Los Angeles home once owned by Elliot, of the Mamas and the Papas. Aykroyd claims Elliot’s ghost has snuggled up with him in bed, turned on his Stairmaster, and messes around in a jewelry box.

  MICHAEL JACKSON (1958–2009)

  Shortly after Jackson’s death, a TV crew from Larry King Live shot footage around Jackson’s Neverland Ranch estate. When the show aired, some fans noticed something eerie: A shadowy figure seems to be walking from left to right across a hallway. CNN claimed the image was a shadow caused by a crew member walking past an off-camera light fixture, but viewers had a spookier explanation: It was Jackson’s ghost. Since then, Jackson’s image has
been sighted dozens of times—everywhere from a Catholic school in Harare, Zimbabwe, to a reflection on the hood of a car in Stafford, Virginia.

  JOHN LENNON (1940–80)

  In 1995 the surviving members of the Beatles convened in a London studio to record a new song called “Free as a Bird,” built on a vocal demo that Lennon had recorded in the ’70s. According to Paul McCartney, Lennon’s ghost attended the reunion, too. “There were a lot of strange goings-on in the studio—noises that shouldn’t have been there and equipment doing all manner of weird things.” Another sighting: Lennon once told his son Julian that should he ever die, he would visit him as “a white feather floating evenly across the room.” About a year after Lennon’s death, Julian Lennon reported that his father kept his word.

  America’s lowest ZIP code, 00501, belongs exclusively to the IRS building in Holtsville, NY.

  LAW & SCANDAL

  Here are the stories of some of the worst police scandals in U.S. history.

  THE BECKER SCANDAL

  The Perp: Lieutenant Charles Becker of the New York City Police Department

  The Story: On July 15, 1912, Herman “Beansy” Rosenthal, owner of an illegal casino in New York’s notorious Tenderloin district (near what is now Times Square), told a district attorney a sensational story: Manhattan’s top anti-vice cop, Lieutenant Charles Becker, was part owner of his casino. Even worse, Becker and his “Strong Arm Squad,” who were supposed to be cleaning up the Tenderloin, were instead allowing hundreds of casinos and brothels to flourish—while extorting huge amounts of cash from them. Just hours later, four men jumped out of a gray Packard and shot Rosenthal dead on a Manhattan street.

  Outcome: The men who carried out the murder were arrested, and they all said that Becker had ordered the hit. The ensuing investigation revealed that Lieutenant Becker had taken more than $100,000 (about $2 million today) in extortion money in just nine months as head of the anti-vice unit. The story was a national sensation—and a major NYPD embarrassment—as the case dragged on for three years. The four hit men were convicted of murder and executed. Becker was also convicted, and on July 30, 1915, he became the first police officer in U.S. history to be executed for murder.

  THE SUMMERDALE SCANDAL

  The Perps: Eight Chicago police officers

  The Story: In July 1959, 23-year-old Richie Morrison was arrested while burglarizing a Chicago business. He wasn’t too worried about it at first, but when the help he seemed to expect didn’t arrive, he started talking. And what a story: The “Babbling Burglar,” as he became known across the nation, told investigators that over the previous 15 months he had carried out a string of burglaries...with the help of eight Chicago cops. They all worked the night shift at the city’s 40th, or “Summerdale,” police district. They had helped plan the robberies, Morrison said, and had even used their squad cars to take away the loot.

  If grasshoppers were the size of humans, they could leap the length of a basketball court.

  Outcome: The eight officers were arrested, and all of them were eventually convicted on various felony charges. Two paid fines, and the other six served time in prison. Unlike some other police scandals, Summerdale actually resulted in significant changes to the department, most importantly the establishment of the Chicago Police Board—a five-member civilian panel to oversee many aspects of police administration, including the handling of cases of misconduct. The board still exists today.

  THE MALDONADO SCANDAL

  The Perps: Agent Alejo Maldonado, head of Puerto Rico’s Criminal Investigations Corps (CIC), and several other cops

  The Story: In 1982 the son of a wealthy San Juan, Puerto Rico, jeweler was kidnapped. The FBI was brought into the case, and was on the scene when a group of men picked up the $300,000 ransom and drove off. When FBI agents pulled them over, they were surprised to discover that Maldonado, one of the most powerful cops in Puerto Rico, was driving the car.

  Outcome: A subsequent investigation revealed that for more than a decade Maldonado had led a gang of powerful and corrupt police officers that ran roughshod over the island, committing extortion, arson, robbery, murder—even murder-for-hire—and more. Their arrest and trial dominated the news in Puerto Rico for more than a year. Maldonado “explained” his actions by saying, “Police corruption is eternal. It was not something we made up, it was there and it still exists.” In 1983 Maldonado was sentenced to 40 years in prison; several of his cohorts went to prison as well.

  THE MIAMI RIVER COPS SCANDAL

  The Perps: Several officers in Miami, Florida

  The Story: On July 29, 1985, a group of men were attacked on a boat on the Miami River in the city’s Little Havana district. Several of the men were thrown (or jumped) overboard; three died by drowning. An investigation found that the men had been unloading roughly 400 kilos of cocaine when the attack occurred. Further investigation revealed that the attackers were Miami cops, and they were in uniform when they made the raid. But instead of arresting the suspects and taking the cocaine as evidence, they took the cocaine and sold it, making about $116,000 in the process. Still more investigation revealed that the same group of corrupt cops had been pulling off similar drug heists, as well as a host of other crimes, for years.

  The average American eats about 5 cows’ worth of ground beef in a lifetime.

  Outcome: Thirty-four members of the Miami PD were arrested, some of whom agreed to testify against the others in exchange for immunity. During the course of the trial, several of the arrested cops hired a hit man to murder the key witness against them. (The plot fell through.) When it was all over, 24 Miami cops were convicted, and 17 went to prison. The longest sentence went to the leader of the group, Officer Osvaldo Coello, who got 35 years.

  Extra: Writers for the television crime drama Miami Vice based several episodes on the Miami River Cops Scandal.

  THE CLEVELAND POLICE SCANDAL

  The Perps: Forty-four cops in Cleveland, Ohio

  The Story: On January 21, 1998, the FBI completed a two-year investigation into organized crime in Cleveland by staging the biggest sting operation in their history to date, and most of the people arrested were cops. What agents had discovered during the initial stages of the investigation was a network of police officers in several different agencies who had been taking payoffs to protect—and take part in—major drug-smuggling operations. The leader of the ring: corrections officer (and mobster wannabe) Michael “Guido” Joye, who once told an undercover agent, “These guys I have working for me, we’re a specialty, like a goon squad.”

  Outcome: The operation resulted in the felony convictions and prison sentences of 30 Cleveland-area cops, including Joye.

  Extra: During the course of the operation, the FBI staged a fake “Mafia” induction ceremony, during which Officer Joye had to kneel on the floor in front of a table covered with a white cloth and candles to be “sworn in” as a “made man.” A cop who later testified against Joye said, “He came out white as a ghost. He said he was in the Mafia now. He totally believed it.”

  Earth has the same amount of water today as it did 100 million years ago.

  THE RAMPART SCANDAL

  The Perps: Dozens of Los Angeles police officers

  The Story: Rafael Perez was an officer with the LAPD’s Rampart Division, located northwest of downtown L.A. (named after the area’s Rampart Boulevard). He was also a member of Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, or CRASH—an elite LAPD anti-gang unit. And on August 25, 1998, Perez was arrested for stealing six pounds of cocaine from an evidence room. He was offered a five-year sentence and immunity from further prosecution...in exchange for testimony against fellow officers. Perez agreed, and ended up giving more than 4,000 pages of testimony implicating dozens of his fellow CRASH officers in drug deals, murder, robbery (even a bank robbery), perjury, falsification of police reports, extortion, and more.

  Outcome: Of the 70 officers Perez implicated, seven resigned, twelve were suspended, and five were fired. Only
seven were tried on criminal charges, and just three of those were convicted—and their convictions were later overturned. But the city of Los Angeles ended up paying over $125 million to settle more than 140 civil suits against the city of Los Angeles. And more than 100 previous convictions related to the corrupt officers were overturned. In 2000 the CRASH unit was closed down for good.

  Extra: The investigation of the Rampart Scandal found that at least three CRASH officers were on the payroll of hip-hop mogul Marion “Suge” Knight, and his label, Death Row Records. In 2007 Perez and two other Rampart officers were named in a wrongful death lawsuit, alleging that they had carried out the drive-by murder of rapper Notorious B.I.G. That lawsuit was dismissed in 2010. (The murder of Notorious B.I.G. remains unsolved.)

  ANIMAL HOUSE

  David Roberts, 31, of Helston, England, runs a hotel...for chickens. Chicken owners who plan to be away from home can board their chickens with Roberts. The birds spend their days freely wandering the fox-proofed grounds during the day, and their nights in “5-star luxury coops.” Rates start at about $3 per night per chicken.

  Wash your hands! A single bacterium can multiply into a million bacteria in less than a day.

  SAVING FORD FROM FORD

  You may know the story of how Henry Ford put America on wheels. Here’s the story of how he nearly ran the Ford Motor Company into a ditch.

  WHEEL MAN

  If you’re a history buff or just like reading about automobiles, you probably already know how Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, used the moving assembly line and other mass-production techniques to revolutionize the auto industry. He drove the price of his Model T so low that ordinary people, even the workers on his assembly lines, could afford to buy cars for the first time. In the process, Ford, more than any other individual, ushered in the modern automobile age. By 1923, 57 percent of all cars manufactured in the United States, and half of all the cars on Earth, were Fords.