Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (44 page)

 

When Georgie Met Martha:
In 1758 Martha Dandridge Custis was 27 and recently widowed, and a very wealthy woman. That year George Washington, also 27 and already a colonel in the Virginia militia—and not at all wealthy—met Martha via the Virginia high-society social scene and proceeded to court her. Courtship was quick, and they were married in January 1759, in what at the time was viewed as a marriage of convenience. They were, however, happily married for 41 years. (Note: The marriage took place at the plantation that Martha owned, in what was called the “White House.”)

 

When Johnny Met Louisa:
Louisa Catherine Johnson, who was born in London, met John Quincy Adams at her home in Nantes, France, in 1779. She was 4; he was 12. Adams was traveling with his father, John Adams, who was on a diplomatic mission in Europe. The two met again in 1795 in London, when John was a minister to the Netherlands. He courted her, all the while telling her she’d have to improve herself if she was going to live up to his family’s standards (his father was vice president at the time). She married him anyway, in 1797—and his family made it no secret that they disapproved of the “foreigner” in their family. Nevertheless, they were married until John Quincy Adams’s death in 1848. Louisa remains the only foreign-born First Lady in U.S. history.

 

When Jimmy Met Ann:
In the summer of 1819, James Buchanan, 28, became engaged to Ann Coleman, 23, the daughter of a wealthy iron magnate in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He spent very little time with her during the first months of the engagement, being extremely busy at his law office, and rumors swirled that he was seeing other women and was only marrying her for her money. The rumors are believed to be untrue, but Ann took them to heart, and in November, after several distraught weeks, she wrote to him that the engagement was off. On December 9 she died of an overdose of laudanum, possibly in a suicide. Buchanan was devastated, and even more so when her family refused to allow him to see Ann’s body or attend her funeral. He disappeared for some time
but eventually returned to his work in Lancaster. After Ann’s death, Buchanan vowed that he would never marry. He didn’t…and remains the only bachelor president in American history.

 

When Gracie Met Calvin:
One day in 1903, Grace Anna Good-hue was watering flowers outside the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she taught. At some point, she looked up and saw a man through the open window of a boarding house across the street. He was shaving, his face covered with lather, and dressed in his long johns. He was also wearing a hat. Grace burst out laughing, and the man turned to look at her. That was the first meeting of Grace and Calvin Coolidge. They were married two years later.

 

When Harry Met Bessie:
Harry Truman met Bess Wallace in 1890, at the Baptist Church in Independence, Missouri. They were there for Sunday school—he was six; she was five. Truman later wrote of their first meeting: “We made a number of new acquaintances, and I became interested in one in particular. She had golden curls and has, to this day, the most beautiful blue eyes. We went to Sunday school, public school from the fifth grade through high school, graduated in the same class, and marched down life’s road together. For me she still has the blue eyes and golden hair of yesteryear.” Bess and Harry were married in 1919.

 

When Lyndie Met Lady:
Lyndon Baines Johnson met Claudia “Lady Bird” Taylor in 1934, a few weeks after she’d graduated from the University of Texas. Johnson was a 26-year-old aide to Texas congressman Richard Kleberg, and was in Austin, Texas, on business. They went on a single breakfast date, at the end of which Johnson proposed marriage. She said she’d think about it. He returned to Washington, and sent her letters and telegrams every day until he returned to Austin 10 weeks later, when she accepted. “Sometimes,” she later wrote about her husband, “Lyndon simply takes your breath away.”

 

When Richie Met Pattie:
Thelma “Pat” Ryan graduated from the University of Southern California in 1937 at the age of 25. She got a job as a high school teacher in Whittier, a small town near Los Angeles, and became a member of the amateur theatrical group the Whittier Community Players. In 1938 Richard Nixon, a 26-year-old
lawyer who had just opened a firm in nearby La Habra, joined the theater group, thinking that acquiring acting skills would help him in the courtroom. In their first performance, Nixon was cast opposite Ryan. He asked her out—and asked her to marry him on their first date. They were married three years later.

 

When Ronnie Met Nancy:
Ronald Reagan wrote in his autobiography that he first met Nancy Davis when she came to him for help. He was president of the Screen Actors Guild, and she couldn’t get a job acting in movies because another Nancy Davis’s name had shown up on the Hollywood blacklist of alleged communists. Nancy. But according to Jon Weiner’s book
Professors, Politics, and Pop
, SAG records show that Nancy’s blacklist problem occurred in 1953—a year after the Reagans were married. So how did they meet? Reagan biographer Anne Edwards says that in 1949 Nancy, who had just become an MGM contract player, told a friend of Reagan’s that she wanted to meet him. The friend invited the two to a small dinner party, and the rest is history.

 

When Georgie Met Laura:
Joe and Jan O’Neill lived in Midland, Texas, and were childhood friends of Laura Welch. In 1975 another childhood friend, George W. Bush, came back to Midland after being away for a few years. The O’Neills bugged Laura to go out with George, but she didn’t want to. She later said that the O’Neills were only trying to get them together “because we were the only two people from that era in Midland who were still single.” She finally agreed to meet him at a backyard barbecue in 1977, when she was 30 and he was 31. George was smitten; Laura was, too. They were married three months later.

 

When Barry Met Michelle.
In 1989 Michelle Robinson was working at a Chicago law firm when she was assigned to mentor a summer associate from Harvard with a “strange name”—Barack Obama. Not long after, Barack, 27, asked Michelle, 25, on a date. She later said she was reluctant to date one of the few black men at the large firm because it seemed “tacky.” She finally relented and after dating for several months, she suggested they get married. He wasn’t interested. One night in 1991, during dinner at a Chicago restaurant, she brought it up again. Again he said no. But when dessert showed up, there was an engagement ring in a box on one of the plates. They were married in 1992.

School:
Webster University Gorloks

Story:
Gorlok
? There’s no such thing as a “gorlok.” The word was invented by Webster staff and students in a name-the-team contest. According to the school, the gorlok has “the paws of a speeding cheetah, the horns of a fierce buffalo, and the face of a dependable St. Bernard.”

 

School:
Whittier College Poets

Story:
The college was founded by the American poet John Greenleaf Whittier.

 

School:
Presbyterian College Blue Hose

Story:
Blue hose are the socks traditionally worn by some Scottish clans with their kilts. Really, it’s no different from, say, the Red Sox (although “sox” is more intimidating than “hose”).

 

School:
Scottsdale Community College Fighting Artichokes
Story:
When the school opened in 1970, a student-written school constitution put a limit on how much money could be spent on athletics. The administration diverted funds to sports anyway and asked the student body to propose a mascot. In protest, the student government came up with the Artichokes.

 

School:
Amherst College Lord Jeffs (and Lady Jeffs)

Story:
Named after Lord Jeffrey Amherst, a British army officer best known for giving smallpox blankets to Native Americans during the French and Indian War in the 1760s.

 

School:
Rhode Island School of Design Nads

Story:
The prestigious art school plays some semiformal hockey games against other art schools. Obviously it doesn’t take its mascot name too seriously—“nads” is a slang term for male genitalia. (The basketball team has a different name. They’re called the Balls.)

In the 1960s, as NASA was preparing to send astronauts to the moon aboard giant Saturn V rockets, two inventors in San Ramon, California, were hard at work trying to prove that tiny rockets, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, could do big things, too. Robert Mainhardt and Art Biehl were partners in a company called MB Associates that worked mostly on classified military projects. But in 1965, they patented a product intended for sale to the public as well as the military: the “Gyrojet,” a handgun that fired rockets instead of bullets.

The Gyrojet looked a lot like an ordinary handgun: At first glance the only obvious difference was the holes that were drilled down the length of the left and right sides of the barrel—vents for the rocket exhaust. But the gun’s performance was nothing like that of an ordinary pistol.

A typical round of ammunition—what is commonly called a “bullet”—has several parts: the actual bullet (the projectile), a metal casing, the gunpowder inside the casing, and a primer. The bullet is attached to the casing at one end, and the primer is at the opposite end. When you pull the trigger of a handgun, the hammer—the part you cock when you’re getting ready to shoot—strikes the primer, causing it to explode. The exploding primer ignites the gunpowder, which also explodes. The rapidly expanding gases given off by the exploding gunpowder are what separate the bullet from the cartridge and propel it out the barrel of the gun.

Gyrojet rocket rounds, by comparison, were not filled with loose gunpowder. They contained a carefully shaped piece of solid
rocket fuel. The rocket fuel was ignited by a primer, just like ordinary ammunition, but that’s where the similarity ended. The rocket fuel
burned
for a short period of time instead of exploding in an instant, and expelled the resulting hot gas through four tiny holes in the base of the rocket. These holes, which served the same purpose as rocket nozzles, were slightly angled so that the escaping gases would cause the rocket to spin rapidly enough to keep it on a straight course as it blasted out of the gun barrel.

So why even bother with rocket guns when ordinary handguns were perfectly good for the task? One of the limitations of a traditional handgun is that the bullet stops accelerating the instant it leaves the barrel, and loses speed and power from then on. Not so with the Gyrojet—each rocket burned for 1/10th of a second. That may not sound like much, but in that short time the rocket could travel a full 60 feet, gaining speed and power all the while. It was as if the gun barrel was 60 feet long instead of just a few inches. At a distance of 70 yards, a rocket round fired from a Gyrojet gun struck the target at greater speed and more than twice as much force as an ordinary .45 caliber bullet. Bonus: The Gyrojet could be fired underwater…or in outer space.

The Gyrojet had plenty of other advantages, too. It takes a pretty big explosion of gunpowder to send an ordinary bullet on its way, so handguns have to be built out of very strong, very durable, and very heavy materials in order to contain those explosions. Since Gyrojet rocket fuel burned instead of exploding, and the burning did not need to be contained within the gun, the Gyrojet handgun could be built with almost any lightweight material, including aluminum and even plastic. And with no empty cartridges to expel from the gun after firing, Gyrojets were also mechanically simpler than most typical handguns, which further reduced their weight, complexity, and cost of manufacture.

Another drawback of ordinary handguns is that they have a powerful “kick” or
recoil
when you shoot them—a by-product of the powerful explosion. The kick causes the gun to jerk sharply after each shot, and you have to re-aim the gun before you can
fire again. With no explosion, the Gyrojet had almost no kick—you could fire one shot after another in rapid sequence, until all six of the rockets contained in the gun’s magazine were launched.

So why didn’t the Gyrojet banish the ordinary handgun into oblivion like the musket and the blunderbuss before it? Because even though the Gyrojet offered the
promise
of a science-fiction weapon of the future, what it actually delivered was something more akin to a gun in a Saturday morning cartoon.

Sure, the Gyrojet had a lot of power at a distance of 70 yards, but at point-blank range it was useless. The rocket had so little power before it got up to speed that if you shot it at someone standing right in front of you, there was a very good chance that the rocket would bounce right off their chest. And not that anyone was ever foolish enough to try it, but the Gyrojet was probably the first gun in history that really did allow you to defend yourself against it by sticking your finger in the barrel to block the rocket…just like cartoon characters do.