Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  —Buddy Sorrell,

  The Dick Van Dyke Show

  ON BANKERS

  “Why do they call them tellers? They never tell you anything. They just ask questions. And why do they call it interest? It’s boring. And another thing—how come the Trust Department has all their pens chained to the table?”

  —Coach Ernie Pantusso,

  Cheers

  Claim to fame: Grand Rapids, Michigan, was the first city to fluoridate its water supply.

  AUNT LENNA’S

  PUZZLES

  Some adventures with my favorite aunt. Answers are on p. 663.

  MURDER AT THE BIG HOTEL

  My Aunt Lenna loves puzzles. Not complicated ones—just the kind people call brain teasers. “I don’t like those puzzles where you have to be a genius at math,” she often says. “I want simple puzzles of logic.”

  One day she was reading a mystery, and she began musing out loud: “It was a very large, fancy hotel. The hotel detective was making his rounds, walking in the hallway...when suddenly he heard a woman cry, ‘Please! Don’t shoot me, Steve!’ And a shot rang out!”

  “Sounds original, Aunt Lenna.”

  “Well now, hold on, Nephew. The detective ran as fast as he could to the room the shot came from, and pushed his way in. The body of a woman who’d been shot lay in a corner of the room; the gun that had been used to kill her was on the floor near her. On the opposite side of the room stood a postman, an accountant, and a lawyer. For a moment, the detective hesitated as he looked at them. Then he strode up to the postman and said—‘You’re under arrest for murder.’

  “A little hasty, wasn’t he? Or was there some evidence you’re not mentioning?”

  “He wasn’t hasty, and there was no other evidence...and the detective made the right choice.”

  “Weil, how did he know?”

  How did he?

  Aunt Lenna likes word games, too. Some are real groaners. Like she once asked me, “What word is it that when you take away the whole, you still have some left?” Another time she asked, “Can you make one word out of the letters DRENOOW?”

  Got the answers?

  Owls are the only birds that can see the color blue.

  THE DEATH OF

  VICKI MORGAN

  Was Vicki Morgan murdered by her mentally disturbed housemate—or by her powerful enemies in the Republican establishment?

  Suspicious Death: Vicki Morgan, model and longtime mistress of Alfred Bloomingdale, one of the wealthiest men in America. (He was heir to the Bloomingdale department store fortune, and a member of Ronald Reagan’s Kitchen Cabinet.)

  How she died: On July 7, 1983, Morgan was found dead in her apartment, beaten to death with a baseball bat. The man who shared her Studio City condo, Marvin Pancoast, confessed.

  BACKGROUND

  • Morgan was Bloomingdale’s mistress for twelve years—from 1970 to 1982, when Bloomingdale contracted terminal throat cancer. Once Alfred was hospitalized, his wife, Betsy, long furious about the affair, cut off Morgan’s income—which was reportedly between $10,000 and $18,000 a month.

  • In response, Morgan decided to go public about the affair. She first tried to place her memoirs, Alfred’s Mistress, with the William Morris Agency. When that attempt fizzled—allegedly because of White House pressure—she filed a $10 million palimony suit against Bloomingdale in which she revealed all of Bloomingdale’s indiscretions, from his taste for kinky sex—she once described him as “a drooling sadist” with a fondness for bondage and beatings—to his loose talk about “secret and delicate matters such as campaign contributions for Mr. Reagan.”

  • The case was thrown out, but the trial was an enormous embarrassment to Betsy Bloomingdale—Nancy Reagan’s close friend—as well as to Bloomingdale’s highly placed Republican cronies.

  Not just for kids: Nintendo estimates that 42% of the people who use its games are over 18.

  SUSPICIOUS FACTS

  Marvin Pancoast

  • Pancoast had a history of mental illness. (In fact, Morgan had met him four years earlier when they were both patients in a mental institution.) He had previously confessed to crimes he hadn’t committed. At one point he even confessed to the Tate-LaBianca murders committed by the Manson family.

  • The room in which Morgan was killed was spattered with blood—but, according to John Austin, author of Hollywood’s Unsolved Mysteries, when Pancoast turned himself in, he did not have a spot of blood on him anywhere. No bloodstained clothes of his were ever found.

  Kissing and Telling

  • Morgan may have been more than just Bloomingdale’s mistress—Bloomingdale may have used her to gather dirt on top-level Republican officials. According to Austin, Bloomingdale had his Hollywood house wired with “state-of-the-art video cameras in every room and hidden behind false walls. Even the three johns were ‘wired’ behind two-way mirrors....Vicki and Pancoast would often ‘share’ a high ranking member of the [Reagan] Administration....Anyone who was important in the pre-Administration and the Administration of Ronald Reagan and who wanted divertissement called on Alfred, regardless of what his or her fetish might be.” And Bloomingdale allegedly got it all on tape.

  • If the tapes existed, what happened to them? Five days after Morgan’s death, attorney Robert Steinberg held a press conference in Los Angeles announcing that he had received three videotapes showing “Bloomingdale and Miss Morgan engaging in group and sadomasochistic sex with top government officials.” The sex tapes, Steinberg asserted, could “bring down the Reagan government.” But when a court ordered Steinberg to turn them over to police, he suddenly declared that they had been stolen from a bag in his office during the press conference. The media denounced the whole thing as a hoax.

  • Morgan’s apartment wasn’t sealed by the L.A. Police Department until more than 24 hours after the murder. According to author Anne Louise Bardach, “This is really a story of police negligence. People could just walk in and walk out. And they did. If there were any ‘sex tapes’ in the condo, then they could easily have disappeared during those 24 hours.”

  McDonalds hired 45 Ph.D. scientists to help it develop “carrot sticks” in 1991.

  • Morgan may have sensed that the end was near. The night before she was killed, according to her friend Gordon Basichis, “Vicki confided in me that she was afraid of being murdered. I have a feeling that someone with knowledge of the Bloomingdale ‘tapes’ had approached her, possibly through Pancoast, with a proposal for blackmail.”

  POSSIBLE CONCLUSIONS

  • Pancoast killed her. After all, he confessed and was sentenced in the case.

  • Someone in power had Morgan killed. She could have been killed to silence her. If the videotapes did exist, they would have been severely damaging to the Reagan administration. Bloomingdale was a close personal friend of the president and an appointee to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

  RECOMMENDED READING

  • Encyclopedia of American Scandal, by George C. Kohn (Facts On File, 1989)

  • Hollywood’s Unsolved Mysteries, by John Austin (Shapolsky Publishers, Inc., 1990)

  TALES OF THE CIA

  The ultimate in insider trading was described in Warren Hinkle and William Turner’s book Deadly Secrets: “When the White House gave the green light for the [Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961], a number of CIA insiders began buying the stocks of Francisco and other sugar companies, the earnings of which had been depressed by the loss of Cuban plantations. Stockbrokers became curious about the sudden influx of orders as friends were cut in on the tip that cheap sugar shares might prove a sweet gamble.”

  Hooters, a Las Vegas company, charges $57 an hour to have topless women clean your home.

  SHAKESPEARE SAYETH...

  Here’s the “high culture” section of the Bathroom Reader.

  “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

  “Neither a borrower, nor a lender be; For oft loses both itself and friend.”


  “He is well paid that is well satisfied.”

  “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.”

  “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”

  “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.”

  “When Fortune means to men most good, she looks upon them with a threatening eye.”

  “Remuneration! O! that’s the Latin word for three farthings.”

  “Words pay no debts.”

  “You taught me language; and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse.”

  “Talkers are not good doers.”

  “The saying is true, the empty vessel makes the loudest sound.”

  “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

  “If all the year were playing holidays / To sport would be as tedious as to work.”

  “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.”

  “A politician....One that would circumvent God.”

  “When my love swears that she is made of truth / I do believe her, though I know she lies.”

  “Let me have no lying; it becomes none but tradesmen.”

  “If it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul.”

  “One may smile, and smile, and be a villan.”

  “Time is come round, and where I did begin, there shall I end.”

  In the average film, male actors utter 10 times as many profanities as female actors.

  EVERYDAY ORIGINS

  Some quick stories about the origins of everyday objects.

  SCOTCH TAPE. Believe it or not, the sticky stuff gets its name from an ethnic slur. When two-toned paint jobs became popular in the 1920s, Detroit carmakers asked the 3M Company for an alternative to masking tape that would provide a smooth, sharp edge where the two colors met. 3M came up with 2-inch wide cellophane tape, but auto companies said it was too expensive. So 3M lowered the price by only applying adhesive along the sides of the strip. That caused a problem: the new tape didn’t stick—and company painters complained to the 3M salesman, “Take this tape back to your stingy ‘Scotch’ bosses and tell them to put more adhesive on it!” The name—and the new tape—stuck.

  BRASSIERES. Mary Phelps Jacob, a teenage debutante in 1913, wanted to wear a rose-garlanded dress to a party one evening. But, as she later explained, her corset cover “kept peeping through the roses around my bosom.” So she took it off, pinned two handkerchiefs together, and tied them behind her back with some ribbon. “The result was delicious,” she later recalled. “I could move much more freely, a nearly naked feeling.” The contraption eventually became known as a brassière—a name borrowed from the corset cover it replaced. (Jacob later became famous for riding naked through the streets of Paris on an elephant.)

  DINNER KNIVES. Regular knives first had their points rounded and their sharp edges dulled for use at the dinner table in 1669. According to Margaret Visser, author of The Rituals of Dinner, this was done “apparently to prevent their use as ‘toothpicks,’ but probably also to discourage assassinations at meals.”

  WRISTWATCHES. Several Swiss watchmakers began attaching small watches to bracelets in 1790. Those early watches weren’t considered serious timepieces, and they remained strictly a women’s item until World War I, when armies recognized their usefulness in battle and began issuing them to servicemen instead of the traditional pocket watch.

  “Smut” gets its name from a fungus that lives on corn kernels.

  FORKS. Before forks became popular, the difference between refined and common people was the number of fingers they ate with. The upper classes used three; everyone else used five. This began to change in the 11th century, when tiny, two-pronged forks became fashionable in Italian high society. But they didn’t catch on; the Catholic Church opposed them as unnatural (it was an insult to imply that the fingers God gave us weren’t good enough for food), and people who used them were ridiculed as effeminate or pretentious. Forks weren’t generally considered polite until the 18th century—some 800 years after they were first introduced.

  PULL-TOP BEER CANS. In 1959 a mechanical engineer named Ermal Cleon Fraze was at a picnic when he realized he’d forgotten a can opener. No one else had one either, so he had to use the bumper guard of his car to open a can of soda. It took half an hour, and he vowed he’d never get stuck like that again. He patented the world’s first practical pull-top can later that year, and three years later, the Pittsburgh Brewing Company tried using it on its Iron City Beer. Now every beer company does.

  REFRIGERATOR MAGNETS. Mass-produced magnets designed for refrigerators didn’t appear until 1964. They were invented by John Arnasto and his wife Arlene, who sold a line of decorative wall hooks. Arlene thought it would be cute to have a hook for refrigerator doors, so John made one with a magnet backing. The first one had a small bell and was shaped like a tea kettle. It sold well, so the Arnastos added dozens of other versions to their lines. Believe it or not, some of the rare originals are worth more than $100.

  TOOTHPASTE TUBES. Toothpaste wasn’t packaged in collapsible tubes until 1892, when Dr. Washington Wentworth Sheffield, a Connecticut dentist, copied the idea from a tube of oil-based paint. Increasing interest in sanitation and hygiene made the new invention more popular than jars of toothpaste, which mingled germs from different brushes. Toothpaste tubes became the standard almost overnight.

  Believable Quote: “I was not lying. I said things that later on seemed to be untrue.”

  —Richard Nixon

  Top 4 presidential religions: Episcopal (12), Presbyterian (9), Baptist and Unitarian (tied at 4).

  REEFER MADNESS

  After being widely cultivated for 10,000 years, marijuana was suddenly outlawed in America in 1937. Was it because it was a threat to the American public—or only to certain business interests?

  For thousands of years, hemp (cannabis sativa) has been one of the most useful plants known to man. Its strong, stringy fibers make durable rope and can be woven into anything from sails to shirts; its pithy centers, or “hurds,” make excellent paper; its seeds, high in protein and oil, have been pressed for lighting and lubricating oils and pulped into animal feed; and extracts of its leaves have provided a wide range of medicines and tonics.

  HEMP & AMERICA

  • Hemp also has a notable place in American history:

  Washington and Jefferson grew it.

  Our first flags were likely made of hemp cloth.

  The first and second drafts of the Declaration of Independence were written on paper made from Dutch hemp.

  When the pioneers went West, their wagons were covered with hemp canvas (the word “canvas” comes from canabacius, hemp cloth).

  The first Levi’s sold to prospectors were sturdy hemp coveralls.

  Abraham Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd, came from the richest hemp-growing family in Kentucky.

  • After the Civil War, hemp production in the States declined steeply. Without slave labor, hemp became too expensive to process. Besides, cotton ginned by machines was cheaper. Still, hemp fabric remained the second most common cloth in America.

  • The plant’s by-products remained popular well into this century. Maple sugar combined with hashish (a resin from hemp leaves) was sold over the counter and in Sears Roebuck catalogs as a harmless candy. Hemp rope was a mainstay of the navy. Two thousand tons of hemp seed were sold annually as bird feed. The pharmaceutical industry used hemp extracts in hundreds of potions and vigorously fought attempts to restrict hemp production. And virtually all good paints and varnishes were made from hemp-seed oil and/or linseed oil.

  Which George Washington portrait is more accurate, the $1 bill or the quarter? The quarter.

  WHAT HAPPENED

  • In the 1920s and 1930s, the American public became increasingly concerned about drug addiction—especially to morphine and a “miracle drug” that had bee
n introduced by the Bayer Company in 1898 under the brand name “Heroin.” By the mid-1920s, there were 200,000 heroin addicts in the United States alone.

  • Most Americans were unaware that smoking hemp leaves was intoxicating, however, until William Randolph Hearst launched a campaign of sensational stories that linked “the killer weed” to jazz musicians, “crazed minorities,” and unspeakable crimes. Hearst’s papers featured headlines like:

  MARIJUANA MAKES FIENDS OF BOYS IN 30 DAYS: HASHEESH [SIC] GOADS USERS TO BLOOD-LUST

  NEW DOPE LURE, MARIJUANA, HAS MANY VICTIMS

  • In 1930, Hearst was joined in his crusade against hemp by Harry J. Anslinger, commissioner of the newly organized Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). Hearst often quoted Anslinger in his newspaper stories, printing sensational comments like “If the hideous monster Frankenstein came face to face with the monster marijuana he would drop dead of fright.”

  • Not everyone shared their opinion. In 1930, the U.S. government formed the Siler Commission to study marijuana smoking by off-duty servicemen in Panama. The commission found no lasting effects and recommended that no criminal penalties apply to its use.

  • Nonetheless, Hearst and Anslinger’s anti-hemp campaign got results. By 1931, twenty-nine states had prohibited marijuana use for nonmedical purposes. In 1937, after two years of secret hearings—and based largely on Anslinger’s testimony—Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act, which essentially outlawed marijuana in America.

  • Because Congress wasn’t sure that it was constitutional to ban hemp outright, it taxed the plant prohibitively instead. Hemp growers had to register with the government, sellers and buyers had to fill out cumbersome paperwork, and, of course, it was a federal crime not to comply.

  The original Gotham City was a mythical English town whose residents were extremely stupid.