Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (35 page)

The 1600s were the height of the extremely conservative and religious Puritan movement in England. How did adults teach kids to fear hell? Pastor James Janeway’s
A Token for Children: An Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children,
published in 1671. It’s a collection of stories about kids (some as young as two) who commit sins, see the error of their ways, become pious, and then die. But because they repented, their deaths are accompanied by beautiful lights and the singing of angels. For the next two centuries,
A Token for Children
was one of the most popular children’s books in England and the American colonies.

By the mid-1700s, attitudes toward children were changing—they were allowed to be what we think of as kids for the first time.
Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book
, written by “M. Cooper” in 1744, was an early fun book, and is said to be the first published collection of nursery rhymes, many of them still familiar, including “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” and “Hickory Dickory Dock.” Only one copy of
Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book
exists today—in the British Museum in London.

First released in 1744, English author and publisher John Newbery’s
A Pretty Little Pocket Book: Intended for the Instruction and Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly
consisted of illustrations, rhymes, and instructions for various games. An example, titled “Base-Ball”: “The Ball once struck off / Away flies the Boy / To the next destin’d Post / And then Home with Joy.” Newberry was the first publisher to market literature just for kids, emphasizing education through entertainment. To honor Newbery for essentially creating modern children’s literature, the American Library Association’s award for the best children’s book of the year is named the Newbery Medal.

A
“shaggy dog story” is a classic style of joke—one that goes on for a long time and escalates in detail and scope before ultimately ending in a short, ironic punchline or pun. It gets its name from a joke that dates to the early 1940s—and it was actually about a shaggy dog. By increasing the level of detail, the storyteller can easily stretch it out 5 or 10 minutes (or longer), but be prepared: Your audience may think you’re the funniest person on Earth…or they may want to hurt you. Today, comedians still tell long, meandering “shaggy dog stories” about a number of topics. One famous example was the basis for the 2005 movie
The Aristocrats
. We can’t print that one (it’s X-rated), but here’s a brief version of the original shaggy dog story.

A wealthy man lost his beloved, valuable pet dog, an incredibly shaggy dog, maybe the shaggiest in the world. The man took out a newspaper advertisement that read, “Lost: World’s Shaggiest Dog. Large Cash Reward.” A young boy saw the ad and wanted the reward, so he decided he’d find the world’s shaggiest dog and return it. The boy combed his town, and the next town over, and the one after that, looking for shaggy dogs. He found some in pet stores and dog pounds, and they were shaggy…but not shaggy enough.

Finally, at the 30th dog pound he visited, the boy found an incredibly shaggy dog. The dog was so shaggy that he tripped over his own fur, because it covered both his paws and his eyes. When it barked, you couldn’t even hear the sound because it got lost in the dog’s layers of fur. It was the shaggiest dog the boy had ever seen in his life, and there was no way a dog could ever be shaggier.

So, the boy bought the dog and carried it all the way to the home of the wealthy man who’d placed the ad for the lost shaggy dog. (He had to carry it because the dog was so shaggy it couldn’t see or walk properly.) The boy went to the rich man’s home and rang the doorbell. The man answered the door, glanced at the dog, and then said to the boy, “Not
that
shaggy.”

Tillamook County is a fertile valley on the coast of Oregon that’s home to 150 dairy farms and more than 26,000 cows. The county was already an important milk-producing center in 1894 when T. S. Townsend opened the first Tillamook cheese factory, hiring a Canadian cheesemaker named Peter McIntosh to create high-quality cheddar. McIntosh, known as the “Cheese King of the Coast,” was so skillful that his cheddar won a national prize at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Local dairy farmers saw how profitable it might be to produce great cheese, which could be transported to market fairly easily and wasn’t as perishable as milk. And in 1909 ten of them started the cooperative Tillamook County Creamery Association; by 1968 all of the county’s cheese factories had united under the same roof.

What makes Tillamook cheese taste different? They use a proprietary process called “heat shocking,” which doesn’t heat the milk for as long or to as high a temperature as pasteurization. The process preserves the crucial enzymes in the milk, while cheese-makers who use pasteurization may have to add those enzymes back in.

Today the TCCA comprises about 110 family-owned dairy farms. The Tillamook cheese factories produce more than 78 million pounds of cheese annually. Their cheddar still routinely wins prizes at the National Milk Producers Federation annual cheese contest, and in 2005 Tillamook was named dairy Processor of the Year by
Dairy Foods
magazine.

Europeans first saw Monterey Bay, located on the California coast between San Francisco and Los Angeles, when Spanish explorers sailed into it in 1542. In 1770 Father Junípero Serra built California’s first cathedral, San Carlos Borromeo, in Monterey. The city
was the Spanish (and then Mexican) capital of Alta California. Sometime in the 1700s, Franciscan monks started making a mild cow’s-milk cheese that was called
queso de país
—“country cheese.” Local farmers continued to make it after the missionaries were gone, but it wasn’t until a sharp-eyed Scottish immigrant named David Jack recognized its commercial potential that the cheese’s popularity spread farther. In 1882 he began shipping his version of
queso de país
to other parts of California. The cheese was labeled “Jack’s Monterey,” which evolved into “Jack Monterey,” and in a final, unaccountable twist people began to call it “Monterey Jack.” The FDA made the name official in 1955, and today you’ll find it in every supermarket in the country. Variations: horseradish jack, pepper jack, salsa jack, Colby jack, cheddar jack, skim milk jack, dry jack, and even a jack from Vermont (it’s called Vermont Jack.)

When the Maytag Dairy Farms herd of Holstein cows began winning prizes in the 1930s, Maytag, Inc., was already famous for making washing machines. The Newton, Iowa, dairy was just a hobby for E. H. Maytag, son of the company’s founder; he only sold the milk and cream locally. But when his son, 29-year-old Fred Maytag II, took over the appliance operation in 1940, he began scouting around for a more profitable way to use the dairy’s high-quality milk. A year later, Fred and his brother Robert heard that two Iowa State University microbiologists had been working on a new process for making blue cheese. The scientists were trying to come up with a Roquefort-style blue-veined cheese that could be made with cow’s milk instead of the traditional sheep’s milk—and a recipe that would cut down on the long time it took to develop the flavor and color. They succeeded by using more rennet, which coagulates milk and turns it into the curds and whey needed for cheese-making. Result: a new kind of blue cheese that was consistent in color and quality, with a tangy flavor and a firm but crumbly texture. By agreement with the university, the Maytags began to produce the new cheese at their dairy. The Maytag corporation has changed hands, but Maytag Dairy Farms is still a family-owned, family-run business.

Emil Frey was a Swiss immigrant who started working as a cheesemaker for the Monroe Cheese Company in Monroe, New York, in 1888. Adolphe Tode, one of the owners, asked Frey to create a new cheese that tasted like Bismarck Schlosskäse (a Limburger-like cheese he imported), which often spoiled on the long trip from Germany. In 1891 Frey came up with something so good—a soft cheese with an edible crust and a very pungent flavor—that Tode told him to forget Bismarck and concentrate on making the new cheese. They named it “Liederkranz” after one of Tode’s most prestigious customers—a German-American men’s choral society called the Liederkranz of New York City (
liederkranz
means “wreath of songs”), and their endorsement helped the cheese become hugely popular.

Frey (who also invented Velveeta) kept close watch on the production of Liederkranz after the company was sold to Borden in 1929, and remained as general manager (and Liederkranz supervisor) of the plant in Van Wert, Ohio, until 1938. He died in 1951. Borden sold the factory to the Fisher Cheese Company in 1982, and Fisher expected to go on making Liederkranz forever. Unfortunately, in 1985 several of Fisher’s cheeses, including the Liederkranz, somehow suffered bacterial contamination…and that was the end of Liederkranz. The name and bacterial culture were sold off (it’s unknown whether the culture still exists), and the original Liederkranz cheese was never made again.

• In 1979, when Simon Cowell was 20 years old, he worked at Elstree Film Studios in England. One of his jobs was to polish the ax that Jack Nicholson used to break down a door in
The Shining
.

• The still-standing record for most field goals kicked in a season by a member of University High School’s varsity football team in Irvine, California, was set in 1986 by Will Ferrell.

• On July 1, 1967, as part of Canada’s 100th birthday celebration, the nation honored the first child born in Canada’s second century. That “Centennial Baby” grew up to be Pamela Anderson.