Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  • A hypnotized person is always completely aware of his or her surroundings—although they can be instructed to ignore surrounding events, which creates the appearance of being unaware of them.

  ANOTHER FORM OF HYPNOSIS?

  Here’s some background on America’s most pervasive credit cards.

  American Express. Formed by American Express in 1958 to complement its lucrative travelers-check business. According to American Heritage magazine, “American Express came to dominate the field partly because it could cover the credit it was extending with the float from its traveler’s checks, which are, after all, a form of interest-free loan from consumers to American Express.”

  Visa. California’s Bank of America began issuing its BankAmericard in 1958. At first it was intended to be used at stores near Bank of America branches, but it was so profitable that the bank licensed banks all over the country to issue it. However, other banks hated issuing a card with B of A’s name on it. So in 1977 the card’s name was changed to Visa.

  MasterCard. Originally named Master Charge, the card was formed in 1968 by Wells Fargo Bank and 77 other banks, who wanted to end BankAmericard’s dominance of the credit card business. They succeeded: Thanks to mergers with other credit cards, it became the biggest bank card within one year. Can you remember why it changed its name to MasterCard in 1979? According to company president Russell Hogg, they wanted to shed the card’s “blue collar” image.

  Q. What was the name of the Wright brothers’ first plane? A. The Bird of Prey.

  JFK’s PRESIDENTIAL

  AFFAIRS

  You’ve heard about his liaison with Marilyn Monroe. But there’s more. A lot more. Here’s some of the gossip you probably haven’t heard.

  BACKGROUND

  Rumors of marital infidelity have plagued a number of Presidents, but perhaps none as much as John F. Kennedy.

  According to books like JFK: A Question of Character, many of the rumors are true. While he was president, Kennedy’s youth and charisma proved irresistible to scores of attractive young women who found themselves in his company—and JFK made the most of the opportunity. One member of the administration remembers: “It was a revolving door over there. A woman had to fight to get into that line.”

  As Traphes Bryant, a White House employee who served under the Kennedys and other first families, says, “Despite all the stories I’ve heard about other past presidents, I doubt we will ever have another one like Kennedy.”

  Here are a few of the tamer details that have surfaced since JFK’s infidelities became public in 1977.

  A LITTLE HELP FROM HIS FRIENDS

  • The White House staff were directly involved in Kennedy’s womanizing. Top aides such as Evelyn Lincoln, the President’s personal secretary, were responsible for sneaking women in and out of the White House unobserved by Mrs. Kennedy or the press.

  • According to Bryant, “there was a conspiracy of silence to protect his secrets from Jacqueline and to keep her from finding out. The newspapers would tell how First Lady Jacqueline was off on a trip, but what they didn’t report was how anxious the President sometimes was to see her go. And what consternation there sometimes was when she returned unexpectedly.”

  • The Secret Service was also in on the act. They helped remove traces of JFK’s affairs from White House bedrooms, and were responsible for ferrying Kennedy to and from “love nests” undetected during presidential trips. Charles Spaulding, one of Kennedy’s closest friends, remembers one such trip when the president was staying at the Carlyle Hotel in New York. He and Kennedy traveled to their mistresses’ nearby apartments via a network of underground tunnels beneath the hotel. “It was kind of a weird sight,” Spaulding remembers. “Jack and I and two Secret Service men walking in these huge tunnels underneath the city streets alongside those enormous pipes, each of us carrying a flashlight. One of the Secret Service men also had this underground map and every once in a while he would say, ‘We turn this way, Mr. President.’”

  Dieter’s nightmare: The baby blue whale gains 10 lbs. per hour.

  • On occasions when Kennedy felt he couldn’t trust his Secret Service detachment with his affairs—or simply didn’t want them around—he just ditched them. Once he even became separated from the army officer carrying the “football,” the briefcase containing the nation’s nuclear launch codes—and went to a party unescorted. “The Russians could have bombed us to hell and back,” one aide remembered, “and there would have been nothing we could have done about it.”

  JFK’s THOUSAND POINTS OF LIGHT

  • JFK liked to sleep with famous women—Marilyn Monroe and actor David Niven’s wife among them. According to one story, a White House staffer once asked Kennedy what he wanted for his birthday. According to another staffer’s diary entry, the President “named a TV actress from California....His wish was granted.”

  • In addition to actresses and models, Kennedy had relationships with numerous female employees on the White House staff. He also slept with female reporters in the White House Press Pool. He even had an affair with Judith Campbell Exner, the girlfriend of a reputed mob boss Sam Giancana. And according to some accounts, the Mafia recorded the President’s lovemaking sessions and used the tapes to blackmail the White House into going easy on them.

  • Kennedy loved to frolic nude with girlfriends in the White House pool and let his mistresses streak through the White House corridors. Once Bryant was riding in an elevator when it stopped on the President’s floor. “Just as the elevator door opened, a naked blonde office girl ran through the hall. There was nothing for me to do but get out fast, and push the button for the basement.”

  Michael Landon played the title role of I Was a Teenage Werewolf in 1957.

  DANGEROUS LIAISONS

  On at least one occasion, Kennedy’s romances came close to destroying his presidency. Not long after being elected president, he talked his wife into hiring Pamela Turnur, a striking 23-year-old brunette with whom he was having an affair, as her press secretary. “That way [Pamela would] be right there close at hand when he wanted her,” one friend remembers.

  Although Jacqueline apparently knew about their relationship from the beginning and seemed to grudgingly accept it, Turnur’s landlady, Mrs. Leonard Kater, did not. She waited and snapped a picture of Kennedy leaving Turnur’s apartment early one morning. Determined to expose the president as a “debaucher of a girl young enough to be his daughter,” Kater contacted the media and told them her story.

  But luckily for JFK, the photo she took didn’t actually show Kennedy’s face (he was covering it with his hands)—so nobody could be sure it was really the president. When the reporters refused to cover the story, Mrs. Kater wrote a letter to the Attorney General (Bobby Kennedy)—and when that failed, she marched up and down Pennsylvania Avenue carrying a sign that said, “Do you want an adulterer in the White House?” and gave away copies of her photograph. Kater was dismissed as a crackpot.

  KEEPING SECRETS

  No matter how hard he and the White House staff tried, Kennedy couldn’t prevent his wife from finding out about his numerous affairs. Mrs. Kennedy apparently became aware of JFK’s extracurricular activities soon after their marriage in 1953. And according to one close friend, she took the discovery hard. “After the first year they were together, Jackie was wandering around looking like the survivor of an airplane crash.”

  But as time went on she became resigned to Jack’s womanizing, and even a bit cynical. Once when she discovered a pair of panties stuffed into a pillowcase on their bed, she confronted him with the evidence. One witness remembers, “She delicately held it out to her husband between thumb and forefinger—about the way you hold a worm—saying, Would you please shop around and see who these belong to? They’re not my size.’”

  Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue was the first detective story ever written.

  STAR WARS

  “There’s a whole generation growing up without any kin
d of fairy tales. And kids need fairy tales—it’s an important thing for society to have for kids.” —George Lucas

  BACKGROUND. In July 1973, George Lucas was an unknown director working on a low-budget 1960s nostalgia film called American Graffiti. He approached Universal Studios to see if they were interested in a film idea he called Star Wars. Universal turned him down.

  It was the biggest mistake the studio ever made.

  Six months later, Lucas was the hottest director in Hollywood. American Graffiti, which cost $750,000 to make, was a smash. It went on to earn more than $117 million, making it the most profitable film in Hollywood history.

  While Universal was stonewalling Lucas, an executive at 20th Century-Fox, Alan Ladd, Jr., watched a smuggled print of American Graffiti before it premièred and loved it. He was so determined to work with Lucas that he agreed to finance the director’s new science fiction film.

  Star Wars opened on May 25, 1977, and by the end of August it had grossed $100 million—faster than any other film in history. By 1983 the film had sold more than $524 million in tickets worldwide—making it one of the 10 best-selling films in history.

  MAKING THE FILM

  • It took Lucas more than two years to write the script. He spent 40 hours a week writing, and devoted much of his free time to reading comic books and watching old Buck Rogers and other serials looking for film ideas.

  • Lucas insisted on casting unknown actors and actresses in all the important parts of the film—which made the studio uneasy. Mark Hamill had made more than 100 TV appearances, and Carrie Fisher had studied acting, but neither had had much experience in films. Harrison Ford’s biggest role had been as the drag racer in American Graffiti, and when he read for the part of Han Solo he was working as a carpenter.

  The first hot airplane meals were served on a Pan Am flight in 1935.

  THE CHARACTERS

  Luke Skywalker. At first Lucas planned to portray him as an elderly general, but decided that making him a teenager gave him more potential for character development. Lucas originally named the character Luke Starkiller, but on the first day of shooting he changed it to the less violent Skywalker.

  Obi-Wan Kenobi. Lucas got his idea for Obi-Wan Kenobi and “the Force” after reading Carlos Castaneda’s Tales of Power, an account of Don Juan, a Mexican-Indian sorcerer and his experiences with what he calls “the life force.”

  Darth Vader. David Prowse, a 6′7″ Welsh weightlifter, played the part of Darth Vader. But Lucas didn’t want his villain to have a Welsh accent, so he dubbed James Earl Jones’s voice over Prowse’s. Still, Prowse loved the part. “He took the whole thing very seriously,” Lucas remembers. “He began to believe he really was Darth Vader.”

  Han Solo. In the early stages of development, Han Solo was a green-skinned, gilled monster with a girlfriend named Boma who was a cross between a guinea pig and a brown bear. Solo was supposed to make only a few appearances in the film, but Lucas later made him into a swashbuckling, reckless human (allegedly modeled after film director Francis Ford Coppola).

  Chewbacca. Lucas got the idea for Chewbacca one morning in the early 1970s while watching his wife Marcia drive off in her car. She had their Alaskan malamute, Indiana, in the car (the namesake for Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark), and Lucas liked the way the large shaggy mutt looked in the passenger seat. So he decided to create a character in the film that was a cross between Indiana, a bear, and a monkey.

  Princess Leia. Carrie Fisher was a beautiful 19-year-old actress when she was cast to play Princess Leia, but Lucas did everything he could to tone down her femininity. At one point, he even ordered that her breasts be strapped to her chest with electrical tape. “There’s no jiggling in the Empire,” Fisher later joked.

  First words typed on a “practical” typewriter: “C. LATHAM SHOLES, SEPTEMBER 1867.”

  R2-D2. Lucas got the name R2-D2 while filming American Graffiti. During a sound-mixing session for the film, editor Walter Murch asked him for R2, D2 (Reel 2, Dialogue 2) of the film. Lucas liked the name so much that he made a note of it, and eventually found the right character for it.

  C-3P0. This droid’s name was inspired by a robot character in Alex Raymond’s science-fiction novel, Iron Men of Mongo. Raymond’s robot was a polite, copper-colored, robot who was shaped like a man and who worked as a servant. Lucas intended that C-3P0 and R2-D2 be a space-age Laurel and Hardy team.

  SPECIAL EFFECTS

  • The spaceship battles were inspired by World War II films. Before filming of the special effects began, Lucas watched dozens of war movies like Battle of Britain and The Bridges of Toko-Ri, taping his favorite air battle scenes as he went along. Later he edited them down to a 10 minute black-and-white film, and gave it to the special effects team—which re-shot the scenes using X-wing and TIE fighter models.

  • None of the spaceship models ever moved an inch during filming of the flight sequences. The motion was an optical illusion created by moving the cameras around motionless models. The models were so detailed that one of them even had Playboy pinups in its cockpit.

  MISCELLANEOUS FACTS

  • The executives at 20th Century-Fox hated the film the first time they saw it. Some of the company’s board of directors fell asleep during the first screening; others didn’t understand the film at all. One executive’s wife even suggested that C-3PO be given a moving mouth, because no one would understand how he could talk without moving his lips.

  • The underwater monster in the trash compactor was one of Lucas’s biggest disappointments in the film. He had planned to have an elaborate “alien jellyfish” in the scene, but the monster created by the special-effects department was so poorly constructed that it reminded him of “a big, wide, brown turd.” Result: The monster was filmed underwater during most of the scene—so that moviegoers wouldn’t see it.

  Some names rejected for Disney’s seven dwarfs: Gaspy, Doleful, Awful, Gabby, and Helpful.

  Q & A:

  ASK THE EXPERTS

  More random questions...and answers from America’s trivia experts.

  HIC!

  Q: What are hiccups...and why do we have them?

  A: “Hiccups...involve an involuntary contraction of the diaphragm, the muscle separating the abdomen and chest. When the diaphragm contracts, the vocal chords close quickly, which is what makes the funny ‘hiccuping’ sound.” Hiccups seem to be induced by many different factors. No one’s sure why people hiccup, but in some circumstances, hiccups are predictable: for example, eating or drinking too fast, nervousness, pregnancy, or alcoholism.

  “Most of the time hiccups...stop in a few minutes whether you do anything about them or not....There was, however, one case of hiccups listed in the Guinness Book of World Records that lasted for 60 years. Charles Osborne of Anthon, Iowa, started hiccuping in 1922 after slaughtering a hog, and he must have hiccuped at least 430 million times. He said he was able to live a fairly normal life, during which he had two wives and eight children. He did have some difficulty keeping his false teeth in his mouth.” (From Why Doesn’t My Funny Bone Make Me Laugh?, by Alan Xanakis, M.D.)

  BIRD POOP

  Q: What’s the black dot in the middle of bird droppings?

  A: “The black dot is fecal matter. The white stuff is urine. They come out together, at the same time, out of the same orifice. The white stuff, which is slightly sticky, clings to the black stuff.” (From Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise, and Other Imponderables, by David Feldman)

  ONCE IN A BLUE MOON

  Q: Is there really such a thing as a blue moon?

  A: Yes, occasionally it looks blue “because of dust conditions in the atmosphere. The most famous widely observed blue moon of recent times occurred on September 26, 1950, owing to dust raised by Canadian forest fires.” (From The Book of Answers, by Barbara Berliner)

  Number, in feet, of a Slinky if stretched out flat: 87.

  A BIRD ON THE WIRE

  Q: Why don’t birds get electrocuted when
they perch on electric wires?

  A: Because they’re not grounded. “There must be a completed circuit in order for the current to go through its body. If the bird could stand with one leg on the wire, and one on the ground, the circuit would be completed. In all cases where a person has been electrocuted, part of the body touched the wire and another part touched an uninsulated object, such as the ground, or something touching the ground.” (From How Do Flies Walk Upside Down?, by Martin M. Goldwyn)

  GRIN AND BEAR IT

  Q: Do bears really hibernate?

  A: Some bugs, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals do hibernate, but though the bear is known for it, it’s not a “true” hibernator. “It does gain fat and, when winter arrives, sleeps for long periods, but not continuously. At irregular intervals, it arouses and wanders about, but doesn’t eat much.” (From Science Trivia, by Charles Cazeau)

  ABOUT FIBER

  Q: What is fiber, and why is it good for you?

  A: Fiber—the ‘roughage’ found in fruits, vegetables, grains and beans—helps food move through the body. It’s been credited with a long list of preventive health benefits, including lowering blood cholesterol levels and reducing the risk of colon cancer.

  There are two types of fiber: Insoluble fiber is found mainly in whole grains and the outside, or skin, of seeds, fruits, and beans. Studies show that this fiber may help prevent colorectal cancer. It absorbs food like a sponge and moves it through the bowel, decreasing the amount of cancer-causing substances that come in contact with the bowel wall. Soluble fiber is found in fruits, vegetables, seeds, brown rice, barley, and oats. It may lower cholesterol by adhering to fatty acids and reducing the amount of fat absorbed into the bloodstream.

  At any one time, there are 1,800 thunderstorms taking place somewhere in the world.