Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends

by Jan Harold Harold Brunvand

  “The Barrel of Bricks”

  I am writing in response to your request for additional information. In block number 3 of the accident reporting form, I put “Trying to do the job alone,” as the cause of my accident. You said in your letter that I should explain more fully, and I trust that the following details will be sufficient.

  I am a brick layer by trade. On the date of the accident, I was working alone on the roof of a new six story building. When I completed my work, I discovered that I had about 500 pounds of brick left over. Rather than carry the bricks down by hand, I decided to lower them in a barrel by using a pulley which fortunately was attached to the side of the building, at the sixth floor.

  Securing the rope at ground level, I went up to the roof, swung the barrel out, and loaded the brick into it. Then I went back to the ground and untied the rope, holding it tightly to insure the slow descent of the 500 pounds of brick. You will note in block number eleven of the accident report form that I weigh 135 pounds.

  Due to my surprise to being jerked off the ground so suddenly I lost my pressence of mind and forgot to let go of the rope. Needless to say, I proceeded at a rather rapid rate up the side of the building.

  In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel coming down. This explains the fractured skull and broken collarbone.

  Slowed only slightly, I continued my rapid ascent, not stopping until the fingers of my right hand were two-knuckles deep into the pulley.

  Fortunately, by this time I had regained my pressence of mind and was able to hold tightly to the rope in spite of my pain.

  At approximately the same time, however, the barrel of bricks hit the ground and the bottom fell out of the barrel. Devoid of the weight of the bricks, the barrel now weighs approximately fifty pounds.

  I refer you again to my weight in block eleven. As you might imagine, I began a rapid descent down the side of the building.

  In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel coming up. This accounts for the two fractured ankles and the lacerations of my legs and lower body. The encounter with the barrel slowed me enough to lesson my injuries when I fell onto the pile of bricks and fortunately, only three vertebrae were cracked. I am sorry to report, however, that as I lay there on the bricks—in pain—unable to stand, and watching the empty barrel swinging six stories above me—I again lost pressence of mind—and—let go of the rope. The empty barrel weighted more than the rope so it came back down on me and broke my legs. I hope I have furnished this information you require as how the accident occurred.

  Quoted verbatim from a faded, undated sheet produced on a dot-matrix printer and distributed in a San Antonio, Texas, insurance company. “The Barrel of Bricks”—one of the most-often reproduced pieces of typescript lore—has also been presented as a stage monologue and an oral announcement, in song and poetic form, as a cartoon, and in countless handwritten and printed copies distributed in person, on bulletin boards, via fax, and as E-mail. Some versions are organized with numbered points as a formal memo or report and may conclude, “I respectively request sick leave.” Besides insurance companies, this item has circulated in the military and in such trades as building construction, oil drilling, manufacturing plants, radio-tower erection, and even among collectors of old glass insulators for telephone poles. The American comedian Fred Allen turned it into a radio skit popular in the 1930s and ’40s, while the British humorist Gerard Hoffnung delivered his version from the stage and in recordings during the 1950s. The Down East humorists “Bert and I” recorded it in 1961. In 1966 a version purporting to be from a native workman employed by the U.S. Army in Vietnam was widely published, both in newspapers and in such periodicals as Playboy, Games, and National Lampoon. The song renditions of “The Barrel of Bricks”—titled either “Dear Boss” or “Why Paddy’s Not at Work Today”—have been performed and recorded by numerous “folk” and popular singers. A short version of the story in Irish dialect appeared in a 1918 joke book published in Pittsburgh, and some later treatments have preserved the ethnic stereotype; for example, a fake memo from Bethlehem Steel in 1984 gave two participant’s names as “Vito Luciano” and “Geovani Spagattini.” Cowboy poet Waddie Mitchell’s versified version, involving a whiskey barrel full of horseshoes, was published in Mother Earth News, January/February 1990. In Curses! Broiled Again! I furnish a detailed debunking of a version alleged to have been written by a Jewish Revolutionary War corporal to General Washington in 1776. Perhaps the ancestor of all of these stories is a traditional European folktale in which a wolf and two animals descend or arise from a well in two buckets strung at either end of a long rope hung over a pulley.

  “Up a Tree”

  Faustin in waggish mood early in the morning was transformed into Faustin the somber by the evening. He had heard news from the Côte d’Azur, which he told to us with a terrible relish. There had been a forest fire near Grasse, and the Canadair planes had been called out. These operated like pelicans, flying out to sea and scooping up a cargo of water to drop on the flames inland. According to Faustin, one of the planes had scooped up a swimmer and dropped him into the fire, where he had been carbonisé.

  Curiously, there was no mention of the tragedy in Le Provençal, and we asked a friend if he had heard anything about it. He looked at us and shook his head. “It’s the old August story,” he said. “Every time there’s a fire someone starts a rumor like that. Last year they said a water-skier had been picked up. Next year it could be a doorman at the Negresco in Nice. Faustin was pulling your leg.”

  Reprinted with special permission of King Features Syndicate

  From Peter Mayle’s popular book A Year in Provence, published in 1989. A version involving a scuba diver’s charred body found in a fire-blackened tree circulated in 1987 and ’88 with the locale specified as either the United States or Australia. The legend was suddenly revived in 1996 and discussed in newspapers and on the Internet as an incident that had supposedly occurred recently in Alaska, Oregon, California, or Mexico. An official from Canadair, the company that makes fire-fighting tanker planes, told Don Bishoff, a newspaper columnist in Eugene, Oregon, that this story is “very prevalent in France, Spain, Italy, Greece, even Yugoslavia,” all places where Canadair fire-fighting planes have been dispatched. He also assured Bishoff that the water intakes on these planes, as well as on fire-fighting helicopters, are far too small to scoop up a person.

  “The Last Kiss”

  This story was told to me when I worked for the Santa Fe railroad in Los Angeles back in the early ’70s.

  Being “coupled-up” means being caught between the couplers of two freight cars as they come together. This supposedly happened to a young brakeman on the night shift, and he lived for a time after the accident, so his supervisor called his wife, and she came and kissed him one last time as he stood between the two cars.

  Then, as the train crew was about to pull the cars apart, the man said, “Wait!” He requested a lantern, and he himself gave the signal to the locomotive engineer to reverse. So the cars separated, and the man toppled over dead. The idea was that, although the couplers had crushed his vital organs, they also held him together long enough for the man to see his wife one last time.

  The bit about the lantern is a touch of bravado showing how tough and enduring railroad men can be. It is almost certainly a fictional story since the accident described would be almost instantly fatal. Also, the width of a freight car is such that a person so trapped would have a great deal of difficulty in making his signal visible to an engineer on straight track. (A flat car without a load would be an exception.) But the story was related to me as fact.

  Told to me in 1990 by a retired railroad worker. Several other American railroaders sent me the same story, always set on a different line and in another state. In some versions a priest is sent for to administer last rites, and sometimes the dying man dictates his last will and testament to a lawyer. “The Last Kiss” is also told in the military services, usually involving a
n accident with a heavy vehicle, such as an armored personnel carrier, which overturns; the man stays alive until they turn the vehicle back over again, and sometimes he smokes one last cigarette before dying. As told to U.S. Army troops in Germany in the mid-1980s, a general had a field telephone patched to the civilian telephone system so the man could speak to his wife back in the States one last time. I heard “The Last Kiss” told in New Zealand concerning an accident in a large rock-crushing machine, and in Utah about an accident in a steel-rolling mill. Richard M. Dorson in his 1981 book, Land of the Millrats, quotes a harrowing account of “The Man Who Was Coupled” from the northern Indiana steel-making district. In this version a telephone is hooked to a radio so the man can call his wife, but the conversation gets picked up by the plant’s loudspeakers, and all of the other workers stop work to listen to the tragedy unfold. In his 1991 book, The Soul of a Cop, Paul Ragonese, “the most highly decorated police officer in New York City history,” gives a firsthand account of an actual “Last Kiss” accident. In September 1982, Ragonese responded to an accident call at the Grand Army Plaza subway station in Park Slope, Brooklyn; a man was squeezed at waist level in the two-inch space between a train car and the platform. While waiting for equipment to extricate him, the police ran a telephone line to the victim, a Vietnam veteran, so he could talk to his wife. He told her that he loved her, did not reveal his predicament, and ended the conversation with “a kissing sound into the phone.” Then he smoked a last cigarette. Seconds after the train car was moved, the man died. Another policeman held a body bag below him to catch the lower half of the man’s body as it fell.

  “The Death of Little Mikey”

  1. Have you ever heard any rumors or stories about the cute little kid named “Mikey” who appeared on the LIFE Cereal commercial?

  Yeah, poor kid. I heard he OD’d on them. You see, he was working terribly long hours on those cute little LIFE Cereal commercials. He drank lots of pop to keep awake. He was also snacking on Pop Rocks candy. When the two got together inside his body, they exploded. I hear it killed him.

  2. When, where, and from whom did you hear this?

  In 1979, I think, at school, from friends. The year may be wrong. The introduction of Pop Rocks to our society was not exactly a major event in my life.

  Response of an 18-year-old female student from Michigan in 1982 to a survey about “Little Mikey” and Pop Rocks stories made by student Randall Jacobs of Goshen College, Indiana, for a folklore class taught by Professor Ervin Beck. Pop Rocks, a General Foods fruit-flavored “Action Candy” that effervesced in the mouth with what the company described as “a carbonated fizz,” sold in phenomenal quantities after being introduced in 1974. However, rumors that the candies, eaten along with soda pop, had exploded in a child’s stomach led the company to take direct action in 1979 to counter the stories. General Foods ran full-page ads in many American newspapers and eventually withdrew the product. The long-running “Little Mikey” television commercials for the Quaker Oats Company’s LIFE Cereal first aired in 1971, when actor John Gilchrist, who played Mikey, was just 3 1/2 years old. Gilchrist did not speak in the commercial, but his two brothers—parts played in the commercial by his actual older brothers—offered the cereal to the youngster, saying, “He won’t eat it. He hates everything.” The key line in the commercial, after Mikey enthusiastically started eating the cereal, was, “Hey Mikey! He likes it!” The Pop Rocks rumor quickly attached itself to the “Mikey” character, although neither company ever mentioned the other in its advertising or press releases. Pop Rocks candy was reintroduced in 1989, but so far no further rumors or legends have sprung from that product.

  8

  Creepy Contaminations

  You’ve just enjoyed dinner with a friend in a nice restaurant and, after paying the bill, you reach toward the bowl of mints standing on the counter next to the cash register. “Don’t eat one of those!” your dining companion gasps. “Don’t you know that one of the main ingredients in those mints is urine?”

  That’s certainly enough to stop you in mid-reach; outside the restaurant your friend explains: “They did a study on this and found that 80 percent of men who use the toilet in restaurants don’t wash their hands afterwards. So when these men pick up mints, they leave traces of urine on the other mints, and it really adds up after a while.” Who’s the “they” who studied male hand-washing and mint-grabbing behavior? It’s not explained, but the rumor puts you off restaurant mints forever.

  This may remind you of the Great Corona Beer Scare of 1987. That was the year that the bright yellow Mexican-import brew sold in the clear bottle was rumored to be contaminated with urine by disgruntled, underpaid brewery workers. It was also the year that Corona was peaking as a fashionable brew. Bummer. But again, who was the “they” who had discovered this terrible trade secret, and where was the scientific report to back the rumors of anything from 2 to 22 percent urine per batch?

  Helping to debunk the story was Fredrick Koenig, a professor of social psychology at Tulane University, who while attending an August 1987 convention in Chicago was cornered by reporters. Koenig, author of the 1985 book Rumor in the Marketplace, had his picture taken by the Chicago Sun-Times while sipping a Corona beer and explaining the genesis and growth of such unsavory canards as this. In essence, his advice to companies plagued by rumors was first to try waiting them out, since few people believe such stories anyway, and rumors typically are short-lived. But if a story persists, and a company wants to go public, Koenig advised never to repeat the specific terms of the rumor, but instead to stress the positive facts that oppose it. In this instance, it was the documented health and cleanliness standards of Corona breweries that combatted the rumor. In truth, as another newspaper reported the story, these rumors were completely unfounded; thus, if you are a beer drinker, “urine no danger.” (That was the newspaper’s pun, not mine.)

  The Corona rumor behaved just like the textbooks said it should: the story was dead by the end of the year, and it developed just a few variable details, such as that the company had been unmasked on TV’s 60 Minutes (or 20/20), and that the label contained a confession of the pee-factor, but written in Spanish. Not true, as numerous published reports in 1987 asserted. You heard it here last.

  The biggest companies are often the specific targets of contamination rumors and legends, and, although their business may slump for a time, they can usually withstand the whispered assault. McDonald’s, for example, lived through the false stories during the late 1970s of worms, kangaroo meat, or cancerous cows supposedly being ground up for Big Macs. Smaller companies, like the makers of various soda drinks, including Mistic, Tropical Fantasy, A-Treat, and Top Pop, suffered a much higher percentage of loss, and some were even forced out of business. These particular victims of 1990s rumors were said to have included a secret ingredient that rendered black males sterile, a story that also fastened itself onto Church’s Chicken.

  Speaking of chicken tales, here’s a particularly vivid creepy contamination story from the letters column of the September/October issue of Spy magazine:

  I decided never again to dine on poultry after I heard a strange story in Chicago last weekend.

  A young woman ordered a broiled chicken sandwich from a fast-food joint, sans the mayo. Driving along in her car she took a bite out of the sandwich, only to discover that they had included the mayo after all. A dedicated dieter, she immediately threw the sandwich back in the bag and continued to drive.

  Later that evening, she checked herself into a local hospital, violently ill with food poisoning. Examination of the broiler found that the chicken contained a tumor and that the substance she mistook for mayonnaise was actually pus from the tumor.

  I love that story! Not only does it echo features of “The Kentucky Fried Rat” (see below), but it manages to revive a detail of the famous “Tumor in the Whale” legends of wartime Britain. And Spy got it just right in its reply:

  First of all, congratulations on the mos
t disgusting letter of the month. But, come on! That’s an urban legend if we ever heard one. Isn’t it?

  I found a suspicious contamination story in another published letter, this time written to the Lands’ End company by a reader from Palos Hills, Illinois, and printed in the 1988 Christmas catalog:

  Last summer I was visiting some relatives when I accepted an invitation to ride on a combine which was harvesting wheat. Somewhere in the field I lost my Lands’ End mesh knit shirt. (Unknown to me at the time, it had been picked by the combine.)

  Six months later, I purchased a loaf of bread at a Chicago area supermarket. Imagine my surprise when I found my undamaged shirt in the loaf of bread! The rugged mesh knit had survived the searing heat of the oven and the razor-sharp blades of the automatic slicer.

  I am convinced your knit shirts are perfect for a weekend trip to the farm or for loafing around Chicago.

  Although this story sounds like a tall tale, complete with a punning punch line, it actually borrows from a contamination legend. The item usually found inside a loaf of bread in legends is a rodent. Folklorists call this story “The Rat in the Rye Bread.”

  Of course, mice and other vermin do get into food, even in the best-regulated kitchens. It’s the reality of the situation that makes the folklorized legends so believable. (Ironically, I interrupted the writing of this very chapter to set traps to catch a persistent mouse in our kitchen. Turned out to be mice, and we got several!) Nebraska folklorist Roger Welsch, writing about pioneer foodways, described the strategy used by one Plains housewife who found a mouse in her butter churn. Wishing to serve her family “unmoused” butter, she offered to trade her own butter at a local grocery store for someone else’s. “The grocer agreed,” Welsch wrote, then he “took her butter to the back room, trimmed it, stamped it with his mark, took it back out to the counter, and gave it back to the woman as her trade.”