Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (10 page)

In our last
Bathroom Reader,
we included lists of the annual Top 10 TV shows. That prompted requests for a similar list of the Top 10 songs of each year. So here’s the first of our series of lists, compiled from a number of sources with help from New York’s #1 oldies deejay, Bob Shannon of WCBS-FM.

1956

(1) Heartbreak Hotel —
Elvis Presley

(2) Don’t Be Cruel —
Elvis Presley

(3) My Prayer —
The Platters

(4) Lisbon Antigua —
Nelson Riddle

(5) Hound Dog —
Elvis Presley

(6) The Wayward Wind —
Gogi Grant

(7) Poor People of Paris —
Lee Baxter

(8) Que Sera, Sera —
Doris Day

(9) Memories Are Made Of This —
Dean Martin

(10) Rock And Roll Waltz —
Kay Starr

1957

(1) All Shook Up —
Elvis Presley

(2) Little Darlin’ —
The Diamonds

(3) Young Love —
Tab Hunter

(4) Love Letters In The Sand —
Pat Boone

(5) So Rare —
Jimmy Dorsey

(6) Don’t Forbid Me —
Pat Boone

(7) Singin’ The Blues —
Guy Mitchell

(8) Young Love —
Sonny James

(9) Too Much—
Elvis Presley

(10) Round And Round —
Perry Como

1958

(1) Volare (Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu) —
Domenico Modugno

(2) All I Have To Do Is Dream —
The Everly Brothers

(3) Don’t —
Elvis Presley

(4) Witch Doctor —
David Seville

(5) Patricia —
Perez Prado

(6) Tequila —
The Champs

(7) Catch A Falling Star —
Perry Como

(8) Sail Along Silvery Moon —
Billy Vaughn

(9) It’s All In The Game —
Tommy Edwards

(10) Return To Me —
Dean Martin

1959

(1) Mack The Knife —
Bobby Darin

(2) The Battle Of New Orleans —
Johnny Horton

(3) Personality—
Lloyd Price

(4) Venus —
Frankie Avalon

(5) Lonely Boy —
Paul Anka

(6) Dream Lover —
Bobby Darin

(7) The Three Bells —
The Browns

(8) Come Softly To Me —
The Fleetwoods

(9) Kansas City —
Wilbert Harrison

(10) Mr. Blue —
The Fleetwoods

Today we take aspirin so much for granted that it’s hard to believe that when it was first discovered, it was considered one of the most miraculous drugs ever invented. It turns out that the history of aspirin also makes a good story.

P
AIN KILLER

In the late 1890s, Felix Hoffman, a chemist with Germany’s Friedrich Bayer (pronounced “By-er”) & Company, started looking for a new treatment to help relieve his father’s painful rheumatism.

Drugs to treat the pain and inflammation of rheumatism had been around for 2,000 years. In 200 B.C., Hippocrates, the father of medicine, observed that chewing on the bark of the white willow tree soothed aches and pains. In 1823, chemists had finally succeeded in isolating the bark’s active ingredient. It was salicylic acid.

TOUGH STUFF

The problem was, salicylic acid wasn’t safe. In its pure form, it was so powerful that it did damage at the same time it was doing good. Unless you mixed it with water, it would burn your mouth and throat. And even
with
water, it was so hard on the stomach lining that people who took it became violently ill, complaining that their stomachs felt like they were “crawling with ants.”

Salicylic acid had given Hoffman’s father multiple ulcers. He had literally burned holes in his stomach trying to relieve his rheumatism pain, and was desperate for something milder. So Hoffman read through all the scientific literature he could find. He discovered that every scientist who had tried to neutralize the acidic properties of salicylic acid had failed...except one. In 1853, a French chemist named Charles Frederic Gerhart had improved the acid by adding sodium and acetyl chloride—creating a new compound called
acetylsalicylic acid.
However, the substance was so unstable and difficult to make that Gerhart had abandoned it.

No Pain, No Gain

Hoffman decided to make his own batch of Gerhart’s acetylsalicylic acid. Working on it in his spare time, he managed to produce a purer, more stable form than anyone had ever been able to make. He tested the powder on himself successfully. Then he gave some to his father. It eased the elder Hoffman’s pain, with virtually no side effects.

The Bayer Facts

Hoffman reported his findings to his superiors at Bayer. His immediate supervisor was Heinrich Dreser, the inventor of heroin. (At the time, it was thought to be a non-addictive substitute for morphine. Heroin was a brand name, selected to describe the drug’s
heroic
painkilling properties.) Dreser studied Hoffman’s acid, found that it worked, and in 1899 Bayer began selling their patented acetylsalicylic acid powder to physicians under the brand name
aspirin.
The name was derived from the Latin term for the “queen of the meadow” plant,
Spiraea ulmaria
, which was an important source of salicylic acid. A year later, they introduced aspirin pills.

IN THE BEGINNING

Within ten years of its introduction, aspirin became the most-commonly prescribed patent medicine in the world for two reasons: (1) it actually worked, and (2) unlike heroin, morphine, and other powerful drugs of the time, it had few side effects. There was nothing on the market like it, and when it proved effective at reducing fever during the influenza epidemics at the start of the twentieth century, its reputation as a miracle drug spread around the world.

“This was a period of time when a person only had a life expectancy of 44 years because there were no medications available,” says Bayer spokesman Dr. Steven Weisman. “Aspirin very quickly become the most important drug available.” It seemed to be able to solve any problem, large or small—gargling aspirin dissolved in water eased sore throats, and rubbing aspirin against a baby’s gums even helped sooth teething pain.

UPS AND DOWNS

Aspirin was initially a prescription-only medication, but it became available over the counter in 1915. Sales exploded, and demand for the new drug grew at a faster rate than ever. Since Bayer owned the patent on aspirin—and there were no other drugs like it—the company didn’t have to worry about competition; it had the worldwide market to itself.

But the forces of history would soon get in the way.

HEADACHE MATERIAL

In 1916, Bayer used its aspirin profits to build a massive new factory in upstate New York. They immediately started manufacturing the drug for the American market and sold $6 million worth in the first year.

Then they ran into problems. World War I made Germany America’s enemy, and in 1918 the U.S. Government seized Bayer’s American assets under the Trading With the Enemy Act. They auctioned the factory off to the Sterling Products Company of West Virginia. (The two Bayers would not reunite again until 1995, when the German Bayer bought Sterling’s over-the-counter drug business for $1 billion.) Sterling continued marketing aspirin under the Bayer brand name, which by now had been Americanized to “Bay-er.”

The original American patent for aspirin expired in 1917, and the “Aspirin” trademark was lost in 1921. Anyone who wanted to make and sell aspirin was now legally free to do so. By the 1930s there were more than a thousand brands of pure aspirin on the market; there were also hundreds of products (Anacin, for example) that combined aspirin with caffeine or other drugs. A bottle of aspirin in the medicine cabinet was as common in American households as salt and pepper were on the kitchen table.

Ready for more? “Aspirin: the Miracle Drug” is on
page 254
.

Historical note:
In 1763, an English clergyman named Edward Stone administered tea, water, and beer laced with powdered willow bark to more than fifty people suffering from fever. They all got better, proving that willow bark reduced fever, too.

Mick Jagger is like the Energizer Bunny—still going...and going... and going. He’s had over 30 years to come up with enough comments to make at least one interesting page of quotes.

“People have this obsession: They want you to be like you were in 1969. They want you to, because otherwise their youth goes with you.”

“I’d rather be dead than singing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m forty-five.”

“You get to the point where you have to change everything—change your looks, change your money, change your sex, change your women—because of the business.”

“Of course we’re doing this for the money....We’ve always done it for the money.”

“Sometimes an orgasm is better than being onstage. Sometimes being onstage is better than an orgasm.”

“People ask me, ‘Why do you wear makeup? Why don’t you just come off the street?’ The whole idea is you don’t come off the street. You put on different clothes, you do your hair and you acquire this personality that has to go out and perform. When you get off the stage, that mask is dropped.”

“Fame is like ice cream. It’s only bad if you eat too much.”

“The best rock ‘n’ roll music encapsulates a certain high energy—an angriness—whether on record or onstage. That is, rock ‘n’ roll is only rock ‘n’ roll if it’s not safe.”

“When I’m 33, I’ll quit. That’s the time when a man has to do something else. I can’t say what it will definitely be. It’s still in the back of my head—but it won’t be in show business. I don’t want to be a rock star all my life. I couldn’t bear to end up as an Elvis Presley and sing in Las Vegas with all those housewives and old ladies coming in with their handbags. It’s really sick.” (1972)

More points to ponder while poised upon the pot.

“The two biggest sellers in any bookstore are the cookbooks and the diet books. The cookbooks tell you how to prepare the food, and the diet books tell you how not to eat any of it.”

—Andy Rooney

“I never believed in Santa Claus because I knew no white dude would come into my neighborhood after dark.”

—Dick Gregory

“If you have a job without aggravations, you don’t have a job.”

—Malcolm Forbes

“The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets.”

—John D. Rockefeller

“Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.”

—Napoleon

“The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.”

—Alfred Hitchcock

“My grandmother is over eighty and she still doesn’t need glasses. Drinks right out of the bottle.”

—Henny Youngman

“Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.”

—George Burns

“Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.”

—Socrates (470–399 B.C.)

“Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.”

—Edward R. Murrow

“Few things are harder to put up with than a good example.”

—Mark Twain

“Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools talk because they have to say something.”

—Plato

These days, it seems that people will sue each other over practically anything. Here are a few real-life examples of unusual legal battles.