Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (32 page)

—Time
, February 25, 1966

“By the year 2000, people will work no more than four days a week and less than eight hours a day. With legal holidays and long vacations, this could result in an annual working period of 147 days [on] and 218 days off.”

—New York Times
, October 19, 1967

Everyone wants to be famous these days—but sometimes people forget that it’s not always a good idea. Take these guys—they hopped into the limelight...and ended up making headlines they wished they hadn’t.

H
EADLINE:
Man Wins Largest Prize in Game Show’s History...and Free Trip to Jail

The Story:
In December 1987, a man identifying himself as “Patrick Quinn” went on the TV game show
Super Password
and won $58,600, the largest one-day jackpot in the show’s history.

Caught:
The show aired on January 8,1988...and within minutes phones at the
Password
offices began to ring. “We started getting calls from people...saying, ‘That’s not Patrick Quinn, there is no Patrick Quinn,’” executive producer Bob Sherman told reporters.

The man was actually Kerry Ketcham, who was wanted by the Secret Service for faking a $100,000 life insurance claim on his wife (who had not died). When Ketcham showed up at the
Super Password
offices to pick up his check, he was arrested. He pled guilty to two counts of mail fraud...and forfeited his winnings from the show. Reason: he gave a false name when applying to be a contestant.

HEADLINE:
Man
Loses Nearly $10 million in Lottery; Wins Prison Sentence.

The Story:
On October 19, 1990, a real estate executive named Joseph A. Sutera won the “Mass Millions” prize in the Massachusetts lottery, collecting a jackpot of $9,916,540 to be paid out in annual installments over 20 years.

Caught:
Years earlier, Sutera had swindled hundreds of seniors in Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and other states out of their retirement savings in bogus real estate deals. When Sutera won the lottery, more than a thousand swindled retirees spotted his name in news stories. So many claims were filed against the winnings
that Sutera was forced into bankruptcy. A federal judge awarded Sutera’s winnings to his victims in 1994. By then, Sutera was already serving a five-year prison sentence on federal fraud charges.

HEADLINE:
Large Donor at Political Fundraiser Earns a Seat at President Bush’s Table...and a Ticket to Jail.

The Story:
On April 28, 1992, Los Angeles businessman Michael Kojima contributed $500,000 to a Republican Party Fundraiser called “The President’s Dinner” for then-President George Bush, who was pushing “Family Values” as a major theme in his campaign. That made Kojima the largest contributor at the event (which raised a record $9 million in one night, the largest political fundraiser ever) and earned him a spot at President Bush’s table. He appeared in photographs and news footage broadcast around the world.

Caught:
Los Angeles prosecutors immediately recognized Kojima as the man dubbed “America’s Most-Wanted Deadbeat Dad,” wanted on a fugitive warrant for failing to pay more than $200,000 in child support to two of his five ex-wives. According to the
Los Angeles Times
, Kojima “had eluded investigators for four months, moving frequently and living under assumed names.”

Authorities arrested him a few days later as he was preparing to leave on vacation with his sixth wife. But rather than turn the money over to Mrs. Kojima and her children, Republican fundraisers put the $500,000 in an escrow account and asked a judge to decide who should get the money, while maintaining that the party “has a valid interest in and is entitled to the political contributions.” In the end, the GOP got to hang on to about half of the money.

HEADLINE:
Hijacked Honeymooners Receive Key to City; Trip to Prison.

The Story:
In 1977, Jerry and Darlene Jenkins of Burlington, Vermont, were honeymooning in New York City when a mentally ill man hijacked their car and took them on a terrifying ride that ended when the car jumped a curb and plowed into a crowd of people, killing one pedestrian and injuring 12 others.

New Yorkers were so shocked by the senselessness of the crime that they showered the couple with dinner invitations, tickets to Broadway plays, and free hotel rooms paid for by the
New York Daily News
, the New York Telephone Company, and other big corporations. Mayor Abraham Beame even had the couple over to City Hall, where he presented them with a public apology and an engraved silver plate.

Caught:
The incident made headlines all over the country, including Burlington, Vermont—where law enforcement officials recognized Jerry Jenkins as the man who was wanted for passing more than $2,500 worth of bad checks in area stores. And, as
The Washington Post
reported a week later, “there was some question as to whether the couple was even married. His woman companion, who previously identified herself as his 21-year-old bride, Darlene, apparently left New York for parts unknown.” Jenkins was arrested.

ON THE OTHER HAND...

HEADLINE:
Viewers of “America’s Most Wanted” TV Show Nab Another Desperado.

The Story:
David Adams, a Tennessee man wanted in connection with a number of fraud and arson cases, was nabbed at a Nashville country fair after two women recognized him from an “America’s Most Wanted” episode that had aired two days earlier. The women alerted park rangers, who took Adams into custody.

Caught:
“David Adams” turned out to be actor Christopher Cotton, the man hired by “America’s Most Wanted” to portray the crook in the show’s crime reenactment sequences.

Cotton showed proof of identification to the rangers, but it didn’t win his release—at least not right away. According to news reports, “Adams had often used fake identification and disguises to elude authorities, so the authorities had to take Cotton into custody until a photo and fingerprints could be compared.”

“I guess it’s an occupational hazard,” Cotton told reporters, “but I never expected it. You never know how people are going to react to television.”

At the BRI, we enjoy finding out where things come from. Here are some items we picked at random:

T
HE SQUARE HANDKERCHIEF

Among her many eccentricities, Marie Antoinette hated the fact that handkerchiefs came in so many sizes and shapes. She decided that she liked the square ones the best, and, in 1785, she had her husband, Louis XVI, issue a law that henceforth, “the length of handkerchiefs shall equal their width, throughout my entire kingdom.” Non-square handkerchiefs have been hard to find ever since.

ERASERS

In 1770, an American friend gave renowned English scientist Joseph Priestly a ball made out of a material Priestly had never seen before. He observed that the material, which was sap from a South American tree, could rub away pencil marks from paper, so he called it “rubber.” It wasn’t until the discovery of vulcanized rubber in 1839 that rubber erasers became practical, and even then it took another 20 years before a Philadelphia inventor named Hyman Lipman patented the first pencil with an eraser.

AIRLINE STEWARDESSES

Before 1930, only men served on airplane crews. Then, Ellen Church, a nurse and student pilot, convinced United Airlines that having females on board would help ticket sales...but not for the reason you’d think: “Don’t you think it would be good psychology to have women up in the air?” she asked the directors. “How is a man going to say he is afraid to fly when a woman is working on the plane?” United agreed and told her to hire seven women. The women had to be under 5’4” and 115 pounds, age 25 or less, single, and—
registered nurses.
Their wage: $125 a month for each 100 hours in the air. On top of serving passengers, the first stewardesses also had to help the crew clean the plane, load the baggage, gas the plane, and push it from the hanger.

RED BARNS

BRI-member Douglas Ottati sends us this information: “Why are barns painted red? In the early nineteenth century, farmers learned that the color red absorbed sunlight extremely well and was useful in keeping barns warm during winter. The farmers made their red paint from skim milk mixed with the rust shavings of metal fences and nails.”

GUIDE DOGS

It probably seems as though seeing-eye dogs have been around forever. Actually, they are a 20th-century development.

Near the end of World War I, a doctor and his dog were walking the grounds of a German military hospital with a soldier who’d lost his sight in the war. The doctor stepped inside the hospital for a minute. When he returned, he found that the dog had led the soldier around the grounds on its own. That inspired him to do some experiments. When the doctor showed that he had successfully trained dogs to lead the blind, the German government lent its support. Later, an American named Dorothy Eustis visited Germany to see the trained dogs, and wrote an article about it in
The Saturday Evening Post.
In 1929, the first school for seeing-eye dogs was set up in the U.S.

BASEBALL’S “MOST
VALUABLE PLAYER” AWARD

According to
Wheels of a Nation
, by Frank Donovan, the award started out as an effort to publicize a now-forgotten car called the Chalmers: “Hugh Chalmers announced in 1910 that he would give a car to the champion batters of each league. He was delighted when Ty Cobb, a Detroiter, won the American League championship. But his elation turned to fury when Cobb promptly sold his prize.”

THE RUBBER BAND

In 1820, Thomas Hancock, an Englishman, was given a bottle made of rubber by some Central American Indians. He cut it into strips and created the first rubber bands (although he sold them as garters and waistbands).

Here are a few “facts” about the Wild West that you may have heard...which are 100% baloney. Most of the information is from Bill Bryson’s excellent book
, Made in America.

T
HE MYTH:
Cowboys talked like cowboys—they said things like “get along little dogie,” and “I’ve got an itchy trigger finger.”

THE TRUTH:
A lot of the words associated with cowboys were invented by novelists and movie scriptwriters, and not until long after the age of the cowboy had passed. Motherless calves were not called
dogies
until 1903, jails didn’t become
hoosegows
until 1920, and the expressions
bounty hunter, gunslinger
, and
I’ve got an itchy trigger finger
were all invented in Hollywood.

MYTH:
Settlers travelled west in huge Conestoga wagons pulled by horses.

THE TRUTH:
Conestoga wagons were too heavy, and horses were too weak, for the long trip west. Settlers used smaller, nimbler wagons called
prairie schooners
, and they pulled them with mules or oxen, which were stronger and hardier than horses.

MYTH:
Wagon trains travelled in straight, single-file lines across the prairies.

THE TRUTH:
The trip across much of America was so dusty, Bryson writes, that whenever possible, wagons “fanned out into an advancing line up to ten miles wide to avoid each other’s dust and the ruts of earlier travelers.”

MYTH:
If your wagon train was attacked by Indians, the way you defended yourself was by circling the wagons.

THE TRUTH:
Another invention of Hollywood filmmakers, who liked the way circled wagons looked on film. The wagons didn’t circle, Bryson writes, “for the simple reason that the process would have been so laborious and time consuming to organize that the
participants would very probably have been slaughtered long before the job was accomplished.” Some wagon trains did circle when they stopped at night, but not specifically for protection. They needed a way to corral the animals.

MYTH:
If you wanted to make it as a gunfighter in the Old West, you had to be man enough to take a bullet in the shoulder or thigh, and keep on shooting.

THE TRUTH:
Taking a bullet “like a man” is such a standard plot device in cowboy novels that, as one film critic put it, “One would think that the human shoulder was made of some self-healing material, rather like a puncture-proof tire.” Actually, most people who were shot never got up again. Bullets were slower and softer in the 19th century—which sounds nice, but can actually make them more lethal. Instead of shooting straight through the body and exiting quickly out the other end, they tend to bounce around like a pinball, then exit “with a hole like a fist punched through paper,” Bryson writes. “Even if they miraculously missed the victim’s vital organs, he would almost invariably suffer deep and incapacitating shock and bleed to death within minutes.”