Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (79 page)

 

Social Security Administration.
The SSA provided financial assistance for single mothers, a free food program for children of low-income families, and unemployment insurance. But most
famously, the SSA created and managed a federal pension system for retired people. Not only did it allow aging citizens to retire from the workforce (without starving), it also opened up their jobs to new workers. Social Security payments were financed by a payroll tax, and they still are: It remains in effect today, covering 40 million people and accounting for a quarter of the federal budget.

• When Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was in the U.S. on an official visit in 1985, President Ronald Reagan held a 30-minute one-on-one talk with him. “They really hit it off,” one White House official reported. “It was a warm, cordial session.” The gaffe? At the end of the meeting Gandhi tactfully pointed out that none of the points the president had made had anything to do with India. Reagan had in fact studied and repeated notes that related to the King of Jordan.

• In 1977 President Jimmy Carter was riding in an elevator with chief of protocol Shirley Temple Black. When the elevator stopped, Black stepped aside and said, “After you, Mr. President.” That was correct protocol, but Carter felt it was ungentlemanly for him to leave the elevator before Black. After the two argued about it for a while, an aide finally pushed them both off the elevator at the same time.

• While on a 12-day trip through the western Pacific in 1992, President George H. W. Bush came down with an intestinal flu. He carried on with his schedule anyway, but he still wasn’t feeling well at a state dinner in the home of Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa…and threw up all over himself. The prime minister held Bush’s head in his lap until the president had recovered sufficiently to walk to his limo for a speedy return to the guest suite at Akasaka Palace. For the short walk, Mr. Bush wore a green overcoat given to him by a Secret Service agent to cover up the unsightly mess on his suit. The incident inspired the birth of a new Japanese verb:
bushusuru
—to do a Bush, or “to commit an instance of embarrassing public vomiting.”

For all the improvements that had been made in the Corvette over the years from 1953 to 1962, the car’s chassis and suspension hadn’t changed much from the 1953 model, which borrowed its components from ordinary Chevy sedans. A mechanical redesign was long overdue, and for the 1963 model year the Corvette got one, along with a styling makeover, both inside the car and out. So many changes were made to the 1963 model, in fact, that it is considered the beginning of the “second generation” of Corvettes, not just an improved version of the original car.

Duntov replaced the existing chassis with one that was much stiffer, to give it better handling. He also upgraded the front suspension and replaced the rear “solid-axle” suspension entirely, giving the 1963 Corvette its first independent rear suspension, which produced another huge improvement in handling.

Many purists consider the 1963 Corvette to be the best model in the car’s history of 50+ years, and much of this is due to Duntov’s work under the hood. But it’s also due to the Corvette’s change in body style, which was breathtaking. Dubbed the Sting Ray, the new Corvette had a look partially inspired by a Mako Shark that Bill Mitchell, Harley Earl’s successor as the head of GM’s styling department, had caught while deep-sea fishing off the island of Bimini.

The Sting Ray was available as a convertible or—for the first time—as a 2-door coupe. And what a coupe! The car’s most distinguishing features were its “fastback” roofline that tapered almost to a point at the rear of the car, and a split rear window (abandoned the following year) that made the 1963 coupe arguably the most collectible Corvette of all. That model was also the first to feature concealed pop-up headlights, which would remain a ’Vette trademark for the next 41 years.

The ’63 Corvette was the first one that could give European sports cars like Jaguars and even Ferraris a real run for their money, and it had a beautiful look that was all its own. Publicly, Duntov was proud of the new car. “For the first time, I now have a Corvette that I can be proud to drive in Europe,” he told reporters at the car’s debut. But privately, he was frustrated at having lost so many battles over the car’s design. The Sting Ray’s exciting new body style was the work of stylist Larry Shinoda, not Duntov.

In a sense, Duntov wasn’t too concerned about what the cars he worked on looked like. He valued performance over everything else. If a styling feature improved a car’s operation or enhanced the driver’s ability to operate the vehicle, he was for it. If it didn’t, he was indifferent at best and vehemently opposed at worst. A sports car inspired by a
shark
? What for? The coupe’s split rear window in particular drove him to distraction. Dividing the window in two with a vertical bar may have looked cool, but it obstructed the driver’s ability to see behind the car, which was what the rear window was there for in the first place.

But the designers in the Styling department had the final say on the car’s appearance, and they were in the dreamboat business—they made cars that people lusted for, cars that people had to have
right now.
If splitting the rear window in two and adding fake scoops and air vents was what it took to get the kids drooling, Bill Mitchell had the power to make it happen, no matter how loudly Duntov objected.

If Duntov had ever risen high enough at Chevrolet to dictate the design of the Corvette, it would have eventually become a mid-engined car (with the motor behind the seats), because he believed that a mid-engine configuration was the next logical step in improving the Corvette’s performance. He proposed the idea in 1963 and again in 1968, and he even managed to get a few mid-engined concept cars built. But his political skills were never the match of his engineering skills, and he never did gain enough clout at GM to realize his dream.

When work began on the third-generation Corvette in the late 1960s, Duntov became increasingly upset by the direction this
new car was taking. Mechanically it had little that was new or improved. And stylistically, thanks again to Larry Shinoda’s skill as a designer, it looked even more like a shark than before, complete with gill-shaped vents on the left and right front fenders. Duntov complained so frequently about the new car that he was “promoted” to a new role as a Corvette public relations figurehead (he was the Father of the Corvette, after all), which effectively cut him off from any further say in the design of the car.

The only thing that saved Duntov from permanent exile was the fact that the all-new 1968 Corvette was an even bigger disaster than the first Corvette had been in 1953. For one thing, the new body style interfered with the cooling system, causing the engine to overheat. And the roofline was so low that the seat backs had to be tilted back from 25° to an uncomfortable 33°, an angle akin to a living-room recliner, which caused the occupants to continually slide forward in their seats while the car was in motion.

Quality control was another big problem. When
Car & Driver
received a Corvette to test-drive, it was in such bad shape that they refused to accept it. “The car was unfit for a road test,” the magazine complained. “No amount of envious gawking by the spectators could make up for the disappointment we felt at the car’s shocking lack of quality control. With less than 2,000 miles on it, the Corvette was falling apart.” The magazine’s scathing review not only got Duntov his old job back, it got him a new title to go with it: Chief Engineer of the Corvette.

As disappointing as the 1968 Corvette was to Duntov and the automotive press, the car’s exciting new look struck a chord with the buying public. They snapped up more than 28,000 that year—a new record.
Car & Driver
may not have liked it, but the magazine’s readers voted it the “Best All-Around Car in the World.” Sales of the new Corvette remained impressive for the rest of the decade, even as quality control continued to be a problem, and the phasing in of new federal emissions regulations caused the car to lose horsepower from one year to the next.

Duntov hit GM’s mandatory retirement age of 65 in December 1974. Professionally speaking, it wasn’t a bad time for him to go. GM was so busy grappling with the energy crisis and changing federal emissions and fuel economy standards that it didn’t have money to spare for developing the next generation of Corvette. The car’s horsepower sank to 165 hp in 1975, down from 270 in 1971, and remained low for the rest of the decade. That didn’t hurt the car’s popularity, though: Sales passed the 40,000 mark for the first time in 1978 and hit an all-time high of 53,807 cars the following year. For all its problems, the Sting Ray became the longest-running, bestselling series of Corvettes ever, lasting from 1968 through the 1982 model year.

Duntov lived to see the Corvette regain much of the performance it had lost during the 1970s. Thanks to advances in automotive technology, the horsepower in the fourth-generation Corvette, introduced in 1983, began to climb again, reaching 230 hp by 1985 and 300 by 1992. And Duntov lived to see work completed on the fifth generation, 345-hp Corvettes, introduced in 1997, as well. He died in April 1996 at the age of 86, just months before the models began arriving on showroom floors. (The sixth-generation, 400-hp Corvette made its debut in 2005.)

At Duntov’s request, his ashes were interred at the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky, which is also home to the auto plant where Corvettes have been manufactured since 1981. The ashes are part of an exhibit that commemorates Duntov’s life and work. Look for them near the display that showcases a copy of his memo, “Thoughts Pertaining to Youth, Hot-Rodders and Chevrolet.”

Q:
How long does it take to completely digest a meal?

A:
About 12 hours.

Q.
What was the TV character MacGuyver’s first name?

A.
Angus.

 

W
HERE’S HEDVIGA?
Hedviga Golik of Zagreb, Croatia, was reported missing in 1966—her neighbors hadn’t seen her for a few days and assumed she had moved away. The police finally found her…in 2008. She was at home, sitting in a chair in front of the television. Now a skeleton, Golik had been dead since 1966, when she had first been reported missing. (Authorities can’t explain why she wasn’t discovered sooner.)

 

IT WORKED TOO WELL.
In 2004 the University Medical Center in Leiden, the Netherlands, made a public plea to Dutch citizens: Donate your body to the center so medical students could use it as a hands-on learning tool. Four years later, the University Medical Center asked Dutch citizens to
stop
donating their bodies—so many had been donated that there were now more bodies than students. Two out of every three bodies donated were used; the third had to be discarded.

 

THE LATEST THING.
There are only so many ways to dispose of a dead body—interment (above- or below-ground), cremation, and now, according to
Funeral Industry Insider,
dissolving it in caustic chemicals. Technically called
alkaline hydrolysis,
the process involves an undertaker placing a body in a steel drum, filling it with lye, and then heating and pressurizing it until the remains condense into a brown fluid similar in consistency to motor oil. It’s sterile, so it can simply be poured down the drain. The small amount of bone residue is returned to the family in an urn.