WINNER: Bruce “Blue Eyes” Janu, a social science teacher at Riverside-Brookfield High School in Illinois
CREATIVE APPROACH: When his students misbehave, Mr. Janu enrolls them in his Frank Sinatra Detention Club—he makes them stay after school and listen to his beloved Sinatra albums for half an hour. “You’ve got a Frank,” he tells them.
REACTION: It works. “The kids hate it,” he says. “This is the worst thing that has ever happened to them.”
The Beta Israel temple in Los Angeles is home to the Shrine of Weeping Shirley Maclaine.
AMERICA’S FIRST PRIVATE EYE
If you’re a fan of detective stories—which includes everything from The Maltese Falcon to The Pink Panther to CSI—then you might be interested in this guy: he was the real thing.
WHERE THERE’S SMOKE...
One day in June 1846, Allan Pinkerton, a 27-year-old barrel maker from Dundee, Illinois, climbed onto his raft and floated down the Fox River looking for trees that he could use for lumber. He found a lot more than that—when he went to chop down some trees on an island in the middle of the river, he discovered a smoldering fire pit hidden among them.
If someone found a fire pit in such a beautiful spot today, they probably wouldn’t suspect anything unusual. But as Pinkerton explained in his memoirs, life was different in the 1840s: “There was no picnicking in those days; people had more serious matters to attend to and it required no great keenness to conclude that no honest men were in the habit of occupying the place.”
GOTCHA!
Pinkerton went back to the island a few more times during daylight, but no one was ever there. So a few days later, he snuck back in the middle of the night and waited to see if anyone would show up. After about an hour he heard a rowboat approaching the island. He waited awhile and then crept close to the fire pit to see several shady-looking characters sitting around the campfire.
The next morning he went to the sheriff. After a few nights they went back to the island with a small posse and caught the men by surprise. Pinkerton’s suspicions were correct—the men were a gang of counterfeiters, and the posse caught them red-handed with “a bag of bogus dimes and the tools used in their manufacture.”
Counterfeiting was rampant in the 1840s: In those days each bank issued its own bills, and with so many different kinds of paper floating around, fakes were easy to make and difficult to detect. Less than a month after the dime bust, somebody passed fake $10 bills to two shopkeepers in Dundee. The shopkeepers were pretty sure that a farmer named John Craig had something to do with it, but they had no proof. Pinkerton had done a good job catching the last bunch of counterfeiters, so they asked him to look into it.
A guide dog’s career lasts, on average, 8 to 10 years.
Pinkerton set up a sting: He met Craig, struck up a conversation, and convinced him that he was looking to make some dishonest money on the side. Craig sold him $500 worth of the fake bills, but rather than have the sheriff arrest him right there, Pinkerton decided to bide his time. He got Craig to reveal the location of his headquarters (a hotel in Chicago) then made an appointment to buy more counterfeit bills. A few days later, Pinkerton met Craig in the hotel bar. Then, just as Craig was passing him $4,000 worth of fake bills, two plainclothes police officers stepped out of the shadows and arrested him.
CAREER CHANGE
Had Pinkerton been left alone, he might have remained a barrel maker, but the Craig bust changed everything. “The affair was in everybody’s mouth,” Pinkerton later wrote, “and I suddenly found myself called upon from every quarter to undertake matters of detective skill.” He quit making barrels and worked a number of different law-enforcement jobs over the next few years: deputy sheriff, Chicago police detective (the city’s first), and finally as a U.S. Post Office investigator.
Then in 1850, he decided to go to work for himself—he and a lawyer named Edward Rucker formed what would become the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Rucker dropped out after a year or two, but Pinkerton stayed with it for the rest of his life.
THE EYE HAS IT
For his company motto, Pinkerton chose “We Never Sleep.” For his logo, he chose a large, unblinking eye. His agency wasn’t the world’s first private detective agency—a Frenchman named Eugène François Vidocq beat him by 17 years when he founded the Bureau des Renseignements (Office of Intelligence) in 1833. But it was Pinkerton who gave private detectives their famous nickname. Thanks to his choice of logo, they’ve been known as “private eyes” ever since.
Q: When do cannibals leave the dinner table? A: When everyone’s eaten.
TRAIN OF THOUGHT
Pinkerton’s timing was perfect. Railroads were beginning to transform the American way of life—in both good ways and bad. As rails began to link major American cities, people could travel greater distances in less time and at less cost than ever before. But criminals could, too: a bank robber could knock over a bank in one state, then hop a train and by the next morning be hundreds of miles away in another state.
Have you ever seen a movie where the sheriff chases a bad guy and has to stop at the county line? That really was the way things worked back then—law-enforcement agencies were organized locally, and a police officer’s or sheriff’s powers ended as soon as he crossed the city or the county line. There were few if any state police in those days, and no national police to speak of, either. The Bureau of Investigation, predecessor to the FBI, wouldn’t come into existence until 1908. Pinkerton’s private detectives had no formal police powers, but they were free to chase criminals across county and state lines and then work with local law enforcers to arrest criminals and bring them to justice.
With no one else to turn to protect their interests, the railroads went to Pinkerton. By 1854 the agency was earning $10,000 a year (about $200,000 today) on railroad company retainers alone.
UNDERCOVER
Pinkerton’s agency achieved its greatest successes by sticking to the principle that Pinkerton himself had used to catch the counterfeiter John Craig back in 1846: The best way to catch a thief was by pretending to be a thief—a detective had to win the bad guy’s confidence, then get him to spill the beans. The agents infiltrated organized gangs of all types: Confederate spy rings, unions, even the Mafia.
The Pinkerton agency was ahead of their time in many areas. They pioneered the use of the mug shot and by the 1870s had the largest collection in the world. Their centralized criminal filing system has since been emulated by the FBI and other law enforcement organizations worldwide. The agency hired a female detective, a 23-year-old widow named Kate Warne, in 1856; by comparison, the New York City Police Department did not hire its first female investigator until 1903.
Australia is home to more than 750 different kinds of reptiles.
After the Civil War, the Pinkerton Detective Agency helped bring the Wild West era to a close by sending manhunters into the field to hunt down infamous train and bank robbers: Jesse James, the Missouri Kid, the Reno brothers, and the Cole Younger gang. Why did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid abandon their life of crime and flee to Argentina in 1901? Because Pinkerton detectives were hot on their trail. With the agency’s “wanted” posters and mug shots circulating throughout the United States, there was no place in the country left for them to hide.
END OF AN ERA
After suffering a stroke in 1869, Pinkerton began turning more and more of his responsibilities over to his sons, Robert and William. But he never retired, and he was still working at the agency in June 1884 when he tripped and bit his tongue while taking a walk. In the days before antibiotics, such injuries were very serious—a few days later gangrene set in, followed by blood poisoning, and on July 1, Pinkerton died.
The world of law enforcement has changed a great deal since the Pinkerton National Detective Agency opened its doors in 1850, and if anything, the pace accelerated following Allan Pinkerton’s death. The biggest change of all: in 1908 the Bureau of Investigation opened for business. The Pinkerto
n agency’s detective services became increasingly redundant—why pay good money to hire private detectives when the FBI, backed by the resources of the federal government, would investigate crimes for free? As the crime detection side of the business dried up, the agency’s security guard division, founded in 1858, came to assume a larger share. By the late 1930s, only a fraction of the company’s revenue came from its original detective services. In 1965 Allan Pinkerton’s great-grandson, Robert Allan Pinkerton II, acknowledged the inevitable by dropping the word “Detective” altogether and renamed the company Pinkerton’s, Inc. He was the last Pinkerton to head the Pinkerton Agency.
So can you still hire a Pinkerton agent today, at least as a security guard? No—in 1999 an international security company headquartered in Sweden, Securitas A.B., bought the firm and stopped doing business under the Pinkerton name.
For some of Pinkerton’s famous cases see page 499.
The ancient Greeks ate cheesecake.
SAY GOODNIGHT, GRACIE
With her husband George Burns, Gracie Allen was a star of vaudeville, radio, movies, and television...and one of the funniest women of the 20th century. Here are some of her one-liners and comedy bits.
George: Gracie, let me ask you something. Did the nurse ever happen to drop you on your head when you were a baby?
Gracie: Oh, no, we couldn’t afford a nurse, my mother had to do it.
George: Gracie, what day is it today?
Gracie: Well, I don’t know.
George: You can find out if you look at that paper on your desk.
Gracie: Oh, George, that doesn’t help. It’s yesterday’s paper.
“They laughed at Joan of Arc, but she went right ahead and built it.”
George: This letter feels kind of heavy, I’d better put another three-cent stamp on it.
Gracie: What for? That’ll only make it heavier.
Gracie: The baby my father brought home was a little French baby. So my mother took up French.
George: Why?
Gracie: So she would be able to understand the baby.
Gracie: On my way in here, a man stopped me at the stage door and said, “Hiya, cutie, how about a bite tonight after the show?”
George: And you said...?
Gracie: I said, “I’ll be busy after the show but I’m not doing anything now,” so I bit him.
Harry Von Zell: Gracie, isn’t that boiling water you’re putting in the refrigerator?
Gracie: Yes, I’m freezing it.
Harry: You’re freezing it?
Gracie: Mmm-hmm, and then whenever I want boiling water, all I have to do is defrost it.
“This recipe is certainly silly. It says to separate two eggs, but it doesn’t say how far to separate them.”
Gracie: Don’t give up, Blanche. Women don’t do that. Look at Betsy Ross, Martha Washington—they didn’t give up. Look at Nina Jones.
Blanche Morton: Nina Jones?
Gracie: I’ve never heard of her either, because she gave up.
All of Japan’s highways are toll roads; it costs more than $300 to go cross-country.
LIMERICKS
Limericks have been around since the 1700s. Here are a few of the more “respectable” ones that our readers have sent in.
An accident really uncanny
Occurred to my elderly granny;
She sat down in a chair
While her false teeth lay there,
And bit herself right in the fanny.
“There’s a train at 4:04,” said Miss Jenny.
“Four tickets I’ll take. Have you any?”
Said the man at the door,
“Not four for 4:04,
For four at 4:04 is too many.”
A painter who came from Great Britain
Accosted two girls who were knittin’.
He said with a sigh,
“That park bench—well,
I Just painted it, right where you’re sittin’.”
A funny old bird is the pelican,
His beak holds more than his belican.
He can take in his beak
Enough food for a week.
I’m damned if I know how the helican!
There was a young lady who tried
A diet of apples, and died.
The unfortunate miss
Really perished of this:
Too much cider inside her inside.
There was an old skinflint named Green,
Who grew so abnormally lean
And flat and compressed,
That his back squeezed his chest,
And sideways he couldn’t be seen.
There was an old man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
His daughter, named Nan,
Ran away with a man
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.
A daring young lady of Guam
Observed, “The Pacific’s so calm
I’ll swim out for a lark.”
She met a large shark...
Let us now sing the 90th Psalm.
A man with the surname of Beebee
Wished to marry a lady named Phoebe,
But he said, “I must see
What the minister’s fee be
Before Phoebe be Phoebe Beebee.”
A bather whose clothing was strewed
By winds that had left her quite nude,
Saw a man come along...
And unless we are wrong,
You thought the next line would be lewd.
Among army ants, the “general” is always female.
THEY FELT THE PASSION
In February 2004, Mel Gibson’s much-anticipated and controversial film The Passion of the Christ opened around the world. Within weeks it had changed people’s lives.
JOHNNY OLSEN, OSLO, NORWAY: Olsen was known as a neo-Nazi and one of Norway’s most notorious criminals; he had served 12 years for the murder of two youths in 1980. In March he walked into the offices of the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet and made a confession: he was the person who had twice bombed the Blitz House, an anti-racism center in Oslo, in 1994. “It was the film that made him realize that he had to show his hand,” said his lawyer, Fridtjof Feydt. “It has been a long process, but the Jesus film made the difference.”
MELISSA AND SEAN DAVIDSON, GEORGIA: The Davidsons, who had been married for 10 years, left a theater in Bulloch County, Georgia, after seeing the movie. As they walked home, they discussed whether “the Father” referred to in the film was symbolic or human. By the time they got home, the discussion had turned into an argument...and then into a fistfight. When police arrived, Mrs. Davidson had bruises on her face and her husband had a stab wound on his hand from scissors. Both were arrested. “It was the dumbest thing we’ve ever done,” Mr. Davidson said. “We called the law on each other. It was one of those stupid things.”
DAN R. LEACH, RICHMOND, TEXAS: Leach, 21, saw the film, talked it over with a family friend, and then paid a visit to the Fort Bend County Sheriff. The recent death of a 19-year-old woman that had been ruled a suicide was actually a murder, he told police, and he had done it. The young woman was carrying his child, but he didn’t want to raise the baby, he told officers. So he killed her and carefully made the death look like a self-strangulation. Then he saw the movie. “(It was) something the friend said. Between that and the movie, he felt in order for him to have redemption he would have to confess his sin and do his time,” Detective Mike Kubricht told reporters. Leach was arrested the next day.
Heavy drinkers: Elephants love to drink alcohol.
JAMES ANDERSON, PALM BEACH, FLORIDA: The 53-year-old Anderson walked into a sheriff’s office in Palm Beach and confessed to having robbed a bank in the city two years earlier. He had gotten away with $25,000, and police had no leads on the case at all. Anderson said he decided to come clean after seeing the movie (although police suspect he may have also wanted the free health care of prison—he had recently been diagnosed with prostate
cancer).
A WOMAN IN NEW BRITAIN, CONNECTICUT: Someone called police to say they had seen a car drive into a creek in New Britain. When police arrived, the woman driver, whose name was not released, told them she had driven her Chevy Lumina into the water on purpose—to reenact a scene from The Passion. The woman wasn’t hurt and no property was damaged, so no charges were filed. Police said they didn’t know which scene it was that she was trying to reenact.
RONALD ANTHONY, WASHINGTON, D.C.: Anthony, a teacher at Malcolm X Elementary School, showed excerpts from Gibson’s R-rated (and extremely violent) movie to his sixth-grade class. “I saw Jesus getting beaten,” said upset 11-year-old Cutairra Ransom. “Needles were going in his arms.” Children must have parental permission to see an R-rated film, yet no parents—or the principal—had been notified. Principal Vaughn Kimbrough suspended Anthony, saying, “You don’t show the rated R, you don’t show the religious.” And if Anthony showed the film as a lesson in morality, he chose an ironic way to do it: it was a pirated copy.
TYLER WENDELL, EVANSVILLE, INDIANA: Wendell, 19, went to the Country Cinemas in Evansville specially dressed to see the movie—he wore a red devil costume. Angry audience members, many from local church organizations, threw food at the University of Southern Indiana student, and theater manager Brian Fitzgerald, who called Wendell “a misguided and deranged person,” asked him to leave. Wendell later told reporters that he’d been trying to provoke a reaction. “If God really existed, he would have struck me down for dressing as the devil,” he said. The cinema said they planned to write new admission rules: nobody dressed as “evil beings” would be allowed in the theater.
In 1994 German movie theater ushers beat a man to death for bringing his own popcorn.
BATHROOM TIME KILLERS
This article was originally slated to go in Uncle John’s Top Secret Bathroom Reader for Kids Only, but then we thought, why should kids have all the fun?
TOILET TENPIN
What You Need: Ten golf tees, or other objects that can serve as bowling pins, and a few rubber bands to serve as bowling balls. Set the golf tees up in a triangle like bowling pins as far from the toilet as you can while still having them within reach—that way you can set them up over and over again and bowl as long as you want.
Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader Page 30
