Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (28 page)

Dispatcher:
No ma’am, I’m not sending the deputies down there over a cheeseburger. You need to go in there and act like an adult and either get your money back or go home.

Woman:
She is not acting like an adult herself! I’m sitting here in my car; I just want them to make my kids a Western Burger.

Dispatcher:
Ma’am, this is what I suggest: I suggest you get your money back from the manager, and you go on your way home.

Woman:
Okay.

Dispatcher:
Okay? Bye-bye.

Croaker curfew: A Memphis, Tennessee, ordinance bans frogs from croaking after 11 p.m.

FOOD OF THE GODS

As Mrs. Uncle John always says, be sure to look at your food before you eat it. (You might want to put it on eBay.)

H
OLY CHAPATI
Shella Anthony of Bangalore, India, baked a chapati bread (an Indian staple) with what looked like an image of Jesus on it. She brought it to a local church, where more than 20,000 people from all over India flocked to see the “miracle” bread. Said Father Jacob George, “People are feeling blessed on witnessing it.”

HOLY GRILLED CHEESE

Diana Duyser of Miami kept half a grilled cheese sandwich with a bite out of it on her nightstand for ten years because she thought it bore an image of the Virgin Mary. In 2005 she sold it on eBay for $28,000, issuing a statement saying: “I would like all people to know that I do believe that this is the Virgin Mary Mother of God.”

HOLY PRETZEL

Machell Naylor’s 12-year-old daughter, Crysta, of St. Paul, Nebraska, found a Rold Gold honey-mustard pretzel that looked like the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus. “We had a feeling of spirituality and warmth when holding it,” Naylor said. She sold it on eBay for $10,600; the money went to charity (Crysta got a pony).

HOLY CHICKEN BREAST

Edward Rouzin-Moy, a freshman at Eastern Illinois University, ordered a chicken breast in the school cafeteria. “I was about to dig in, and I looked at it,” he said. “I turned to my buddy and said, ‘It looks like the pope.’” Pope John Paul II had died just two weeks earlier. He put the breast on eBay, where it sold for $232.50.

HOLY POTATO CHIPS

Rosalie Lawson of St. Petersburg, Florida, found a Lays potato chip that looks like Jesus. When her husband saw it he said, “Well, we can’t eat that!” But take it with a grain of salt, warned Ms. Lawson, because “you only know what you think he looks like from pictures.” She added that she might be selling the chip on eBay.

According to zoologists, a tiger’s scent markings smell like buttered popcorn.

LOCAL HERO: LEROY GORHAM

Here’s the story of a man who suffered a family tragedy and then went on a mission to save other families from the same fate
.

T
ERRIBLE LOSS
In the summer of 1946 a fire broke out in LeRoy and Lillian Gorham’s house in The Bottom neighborhood of Chapel Oaks, Maryland. It took firefighters a very long time to arrive. Too long. By the time they put out the fire, all three of the Gorhams’ children—Ruth, 4, Jean, 3, and LeRoy Earl, 2—had perished in the blaze.

There’s no way to know if the Gorham children could have been saved had the fire department arrived sooner, and for that matter, no one knows exactly why it took the fire department so long to get there. But The Bottom is a black community, and residents there claim that the all-white fire departments of surrounding communities were always slow to respond to emergencies in black neighborhoods…if they came at all.

“It’s just the way it was,” says resident Luther Crutchfield. “If they got a call for a fire in a black neighborhood, they either came or they didn’t. Sometimes they came, but they took their time.” Further complicating matters, The Bottom didn’t have running water in the 1940s, so even when firefighters did respond, there was no place to hook up their hoses. Fires were fought with bucket brigades, using water drawn from nearby wells and streams.

A NEW BEGINNING

Gorham was devastated by the loss of his children. He wanted to do anything he could to see to it that no other families in his neighborhood or the surrounding communities ever had to suffer the same fate. So he and a group of his friends decided to found the Chapel Oaks Volunteer Fire Department, the first all-black volunteer fire company in the state of Maryland.

Less than a year after the fire, the department opened its doors.

Milk cartons were invented in Sweden.

It wasn’t easy—the organizers didn’t receive any funding from Prince George’s County, so they took up a collection in the surrounding black community and used these funds to buy an old pumper, which they kept in an old garage that served as the fire station. There wasn’t enough money for proper firefighting gear, so the Chapel Oaks firefighters made do with surplus helmets, coats, and boots they got from the U.S. military. They had no breathing equipment, either—if the men had to enter burning buildings, they simply held their breath or tied wet handkerchiefs over their mouths. Since they didn’t have access to professional training, the volunteers trained themselves by setting fires in abandoned buildings and putting them out.

“We weren’t in the county fire association, because they had a white male-only clause,” remembers Crutchfield, who joined the department in 1949. And the discrimination continued even when firefighters battled a blaze. “The white firefighters would take our lines out and put theirs in,” Crutchfield says. “They wouldn’t recognize the authority of our chief on the scene. But we wouldn’t play those games. We were professional men who were there to save lives, and that’s what we did.”

HEALING

Change came slowly in the decades that followed. When a fire destroyed the garage that served as Chapel Oak’s first fire station, the volunteers raised enough money from the community to build their first proper fire station nearby and laid the bricks themselves. The county fire association eventually dropped its whites-only clause and Chapel Oaks joined in 1960; then in 1979, the county built them a new fire station.

Gorham and his wife had three more children. He was a volunteer with the department for 54 years, serving as chief for 17 of those. And when he wasn’t at the station, he was listening to his radio scanner. “The only time his scanner wasn’t on was when he was at church,” his daughter Tanya says.

Even when he became too old to fight fires, Gorham continued to visit the fire station every day, and did so until the day before he died in July 2000. “LeRoy wanted to be sure,” his friend and fellow firefighter Roy Lee Jordan remembers, “that no other children died like his did.”

In 1999, residents of Melbourne, Australia, erected a 40-foot statue of Barbie.

WHEN REAL LIFE BECOMES
REEL
LIFE

Movies that are “based on a true story” often stray from the truth. Hollywood has a tendency to embellish some facts, while omitting others. Here are some inconsistencies we found in major motion pictures
.

S
EABISCUIT
(2003)
Reel Life:
Red Pollard (Tobey Maguire) was neither a great jockey nor a great prizefighter, but he tried hard at both. When he’s paired up with a racehorse who, like him, has never amounted to much, Pollard overcomes his weakness and starts winning races using little more than pure heart and guile.

Real Life:
The film doesn’t touch on Pollard’s life-long battle with drinking, which started as a way to ease the pain suffered from his many injuries, but then became a habit he was unable to kick until much later in life.

Reel Life:
Pollard is painted as a true American hero whose courage gives hope to a nation mired in the Great Depression.
Real Life:
The movie left out the fact that he was Canadian.

APOLLO 13
(1995)

Reel Life:
On the second day of the ill-fated 1970 mission to the Moon, the three-man crew hears a loud bang. Warning lights begin flashing on the instrument panel. Commander Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) says into his microphone, “Houston, we have a problem.”
Real Life:
It wasn’t quite that dramatic. After checking the instrument panel, Swigert—not Lovell—said, “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” Mission Control responded, “This is Houston. Say again please.” And
then
Lovell said, “Houston, we’ve had a problem. We’ve had a main B bus undervolt.”

Reel Life:
After the accident, tensions run high between crew members, especially after Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) accuses John Swigert (Kevin Bacon) of causing the explosion.

Real Life:
“The crew conflict was something that Hollywood added to make us seem more human,” admits the real Haise.

A 1946 FBI memo denounced the movie
It’s a Wonderful Life
as communist propaganda.

RAY
(2004)

Reel Life:
Ray Charles (Jamie Foxx) and his loyal wife, Bea (Kerry Washington), go to Georgia in 1979 to celebrate the end of his 17-year ban from performing there.

Real Life:
He did go to the Georgia State Legislature in 1979, but it was so lawmakers could proclaim “Georgia on My Mind” the state song. That’s it. There was never a ban against Charles performing in Georgia. And Bea didn’t go with him. In fact, they’d been divorced for two years by that time.

A BEAUTIFUL MIND
(2001)

Reel Life:
Mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. (Russell Crowe) is a brilliant man, but he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia that gives him frightening hallucinations. Through sheer determination—along with the love of his faithful wife, Alicia (Jennifer Connelly)—Nash overcomes his illness, makes a groundbreaking mathematical discovery, and is awarded the Nobel Prize.

Real Life:
In their book
Based on a True Story
, Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen rip into this film for its rampant lack of historical accuracy. Here are a few of the more glaring inconsistencies:

• Alicia did not stay by Nash’s side; she divorced him three years into his illness. She got back together with Nash after he recovered.

• Completely removed from the film was the fact that Nash fathered a child with another woman and abandoned it.

• Another fact of his life left out of the movie: Nash was bisexual.

So why the changes? “The real events of Nash’s life,” write Vankin and Whalen, “were unacceptably unpleasant. The movie wouldn’t sell.”

FINDING NEVERLAND
(2004)

Reel Life:
J. M. Barrie (Johnny Depp) befriends a widow named Sylvia Davies (Kate Winslet). His relationship with her four sons, especially 10-year-old Peter, inspires the 1904 play
Peter Pan
.

Real Life:
Sylvia’s husband, Arthur, was alive when Barrie met them, and the two men were friends for ten years before Arthur died. (Although the timeline of the movie is about a year, the events that it’s based on happened over the course of 13 years.) And there were five kids, not four.

One beehive can have as many as 80,000 bees.

THE FOGGIEST PLACE ON EARTH

To “Newfies,” the Canadian island province of Newfoundland is home sweet home. It’s also the site of many firsts, feats, and claims to fame
.

•
Oldest City in North America
. St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland, was founded in 1497. It’s also the home of the continent’s oldest street, Water Street.

•
First Smallpox Vaccine
. In 1800 Dr. John Clinch of Trinity, Newfoundland, was the first doctor in North America to administer the smallpox vaccine.

•
World’s Longest Squid
. The longest giant squid ever caught was netted in Glover’s Harbour, Newfoundland, on November 2, 1878. It was 55 feet long.

• Oldest Sporting Event
. The Royal St. John’s Regatta has been held every year since 1825, making it the longest-running sporting event in North America.

•
First Transatlantic Wireless Radio Transmission
. In 1901 Guglielmo Marconi sent the first successful wireless radio transmission from Cornwall, England, to St. John’s, Newfoundland.

•
First to Respond to the
Titanic
. Wireless operators Walter Gray, Jack Goodwin, and Robert Hunston of Cape Race, Newfoundland, were the first to hear and respond to the
Titanic’s
distress signal on April 14, 1912.

•
First Transatlantic Flight
. British pilots John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown flew from Newfoundland to Ireland in June 1919. It took them 16 hours to cross the Atlantic.

•
Longest Running Daily Radio Show in North America
.
The Fisheries Broadcast
(nicknamed “The Broadcast”) has aired from St. John’s since March 5, 1951.

•
Foggiest Spot
. The Grand Banks, off the southeast coast of Newfoundland, was named “the foggiest place on Earth” by the
Guinness Book of World Records
. In winter it’s shrouded in fog 40 percent of the time; in summer, 84 percent.