Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (43 page)

BIRTH OF THE BURGER

It began around 1879, in a restaurant near the docks of the HamburgAmerika Line in Germany. Owner Otto Kuase began serving a sandwich American sailors loved: two slices of buttered bread, pickle strips, and a fried beef patty with a butter-fried egg on top. Add a mug of good German beer, and this sandwich made an excellent, inexpensive dinner.

So many Yankee seamen came to his restaurant for the sandwich that Kuase listed it on his menu as “American Steak.” When the sailors returned home, they taught restaurants along the Eastern Seaboard how to make it. Soon, all a customer had to say was “bring me a hamburger.” The name stuck, even when the recipe changed.

THE BURGER STARTS SIZZLING

In 1904, to celebrate the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, St.
Louis staged a huge World’s Fair. There were hundreds of vendors selling foods—including German immigrants peddling their native fare. This included a new version of the old hamburger. The slices of bread were replaced with dinner rolls, which fit the round meat patty. Butter was expensive, so the rolls were smeared with the cheaper Heinz ketchup. The butter-fried egg was replaced by slices of onion, tomato, and pickles.

The new hamburger was inexpensive because cheaper cuts of beef could be used...and it was an instant success. People from all over the country attended the fair, and returned home ready to eat more.

THE BUN

There was one flaw—the dinner rolls made burgers harder to eat. So for another dozen years or so, people kept using the traditional slices of bread. Then an enterprising cook in Wichita, Kansas invented the last component of the modern hamburger: he created a round, soft bun that absorbed the juices of the meat patty.

His name was J. Walter Anderson. He was working as a short order cook when he made his discovery. Soon after, he bought an old trolley and converted it into a five stool diner, specializing in burgers at 5¢ each. This was in 1916, but it was a real bargain even then. In 1920, Anderson added two more diners, stressing their cleanliness with the name White Castle Hamburgers. Others followed and White Castle became the first national hamburger chain.

THE NAME’S THE SAME?

At the beginning of World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm had a treaty with Belgium guaranteeing its neutrality. When he sent his armies through Belgium to attack France, the U.S. protested—and the Kaiser replied that the treaty was just “a scrap of paper.” It was a public relations disaster—anti-German hysteria swept the world. In Britain, the Royal Family changed its name from the House of Saxe-Coburg to the English-sounding House of Windsor. On American menus,
sauerkraut
became “victory cabbage” and
hamburger steak
became Salisbury Steak. But against pressure to call burgers “ground meat patty sandwiches,” burger-lovers held their ground. Today, a hamburger is still a hamburger.

Next July 4th, you’ll have something new to talk about.

A
FLASH IN THE PAN

The first fireworks were hollowed out bamboo stalks stuffed with black powder. The Chinese called them “arrows of flying fire,” and shot them into the air during religious occasions and holidays to ward off imaginary dragons.

According to legend, the essential ingredient—black powder—was first discovered in a Chinese kitchen in the 10th century A.D. A cook was preparing potassium nitrate (a pickling agent and preservative) over a charcoal fire laced with sulfur. Somehow the three chemicals—potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur—combined, causing an explosion. The meal was destroyed, but the powder, later known as gunpowder, was born.

SAFETY FIRST

According to the fireworks industry’s own estimates, as many people have been killed by 4th of July fireworks as were killed in the Revolutionary War. Nearly all of the victims were killed setting off their own fireworks, not watching public displays. And most fatalities occurred before World War II, when fireworks were almost completely unregulated. The carnage became so widespread that the 4th of July actually came to be known as the “Bloody Fourth” and even the “Carnival of Lockjaw,” due to the large number of people who died from infected burns.

Then in the 1930s, several organizations began a campaign to outlaw fireworks. Pressured by the
Ladies’ Home Journal
(which printed photographs of dozens of maimed victims), the federal government and individual states outlawed just about every kind of firework imaginable...to the point where many states now ban them entirely. Since then, the number of firework-related injuries plummeted. Today, the Consumer Safety Commission ranks them as only the 132nd most-dangerous consumer item, behind such things as beds, grocery carts, key rings, and plumbing fixtures.

COLORS

• Because black powder burns at a relatively low temperature, for more than 800 years fireworks burned only with dull yellow and orange flames. It wasn’t until the 19th century that pyrotechnicians discovered that mixing potassium chlorate into the powder made it burn much hotter, enabling it to burn red when strontium was added, green when barium was added, and bright yellow when sodium was added.

• White was impossible to produce until the mid-1800s, when scientists developed ways to add aluminum, magnesium, and titanium to black powder.

• Blues and violets (caused when copper and chlorine are added) are the hardest colors to create; even today, fireworks manufacturers judge their skills according to how well their blues and violets turn out.

FIREWORKS LINGO

Here are some names the fireworks industry gives to its creations:

•
Willows:
Fireworks with long colorful “branches” that stream down towards the ground.

•
Palm Trees:
Willows that leave a brightly-colored trail from the ground as they’re shot into the air.

•
Chrysanthemums:
Fireworks that explode into perfect circles.

•
Split comets:
Fireworks that explode into starlets, which explode again into even more starlets.

•
Salutes
: A bright, white flash, followed by a boom.

•
Triple-break Salutes:
Salutes that explode three times in rapid succession.

•
Cookie-Cutters:
Created by filling the inside of a cardboard container with black powder and gluing individual starlets to the outside. When the black powder charge explodes, the starlets explode in the same shape as the cookie-cutter. Shapes include stars, hearts, ovals, etc.

Ever heard of flagpole-sitting? At the height of his fame in 1930, the greatest flagpole-sitter of all, “Shipwreck Kelly,” claimed he had spent a total of 20,613 hours “in cloudland.” Perched atop flagpoles on tall buildings he endured 14,000 hours of rain and sleet, 210 hours in temperatures below freezing, 47 hours in snowstorms. He climbed poles for more than 20 years, and what he started never stopped. Ever since Kelly’s time, others have sat on flagpoles in search of the publicity that once surrounded the self-described “luckiest fool alive.” Here’s the story from Bill Severn’s
A Carnival of Sports.

L
’IL ORPHAN ALVIN

Alvin Anthony Kelly, born in New York’s tough “Hell’s Kitchen” district in 1893, ran off to sea at the age of thirteen. He was supposedly called “Shipwreck” because of his boast that he had survived several ship sinkings during his years as a sailor. But friends admitted his nickname came from his career as a professional boxer, when opponents dropped him to the canvas so often that fans began chanting, “Sailor Kelly’s been shipwrecked again!”

In the early 1920s, the five-foot seven-inch Irishman got a job with a skyscraper construction crew walking steel girders. Discovering that he had no fear of high places, he decided to become a professional stunt man. He balanced on rooftops, climbed walls as a human fly, put on exhibitions as a high diver, and finally drifted to Hollywood.

In 1924, a Los Angeles theater owner hired him to sit on a flagpole atop the theater as a publicity stunt. Kelly stayed on the pole most of a day, drew a big crowd, pocketed a good fee, and at the age of thirty-one began a new career.

A STAR IS BORN

Americans in the Roaring Twenties turned out by gawking thousands to stare up at what was then something completely new. “Shipwreck Kelly” on his flagpole, like a man pronged on the point of a giant toothpick, was a headline-making curiosity. Pictures
of him captured such newspaper space for his sponsors that Kelly soon was earning a hefty $100 a day. He was a one-man sporting spectacle.

But not for long. Dozens of others got into the act, swarming up flagpoles from coast to coast. Some of his many imitators borrowed not only the game but also his name, calling themselves “Shipwreck Kelly.” He once counted seventeen other “Shipwrecks” in operation at the same time.

POLE POSITION

Kelly took flagpoling seriously. When he sat atop a pole for days, his perch was a small 13” wooden disc. He slept in five-minute catnaps with his thumbs locked into holes bored in the pole. Any wavering while he dozed would bring a sharp twinge of pain and alert him instantly so he wouldn’t fall off.

When he stood, which was harder and more dangerous, it usually was only for hours instead of days, on an even smaller perch, a tiny six- to eight-inch platform. There were stirrups or rope slings to hold his legs, but no other support to keep him standing.

His food and other necessities were hauled up in a basket on a rope pulley, and the same rope was used to haul down a washbasin and pot that were also needed by a man stranded on a flagpole without bathroom facilities. A covering blanket, discreetly used, afforded privacy.

ABOVE THE LAW

By 1927, the craze he started had so many rivals up on poles that police in Boston, Los Angeles, and several other cities moved to arrest them as public nuisances. Kelly himself later had some brushes with the law. New York police, for example, ordered him down from one pole over a midtown hotel because he was attracting crowds that choked Times Square traffic. But his prestige as the nation’s number one flagpoler usually won him tolerance. Mayors and other public officials were happy to pose for pictures with him and bask in his publicity.

CHILD’S PLAY

In 1929, he set a then “world’s record” for flagpole-sitting by staying aloft twenty-three days at a Baltimore amusement park. When he came down, the crowd-roaring acclaim made him such a hero to the
young that the whole city blossomed with juvenile pole-sitters. Boys and girls from the age eight upward took to the tops of trees and backyard poles at such a rate that in a single week reporters counted twenty-five young disciples of “Shipwreck Kelly” at roost.

As the epidemic spread, newspapers and national magazines sounded editorial alarms, and public moralists demanded a mobilization of parents to apply hairbrushes and straps to the posterior of pole-sitting young America. But for the most part, the young pole-perchers were encouraged by adults eager to share their notoriety.

RECORD BREAKER

Kelly accomplished the greatest feat of his own pole-sitting career the next summer at Atlantic City. On June 21, 1930, he climbed atop a 125-foot mast above the New Jersey shore resort’s Steel Pier, hoping to stay on his 13-inch perch long enough to beat his previous record of twenty-three days aloft. When he had smashed the record on July 14, he decided to stay up a little longer.

He kept busy answering hundreds of fan mail letters basketed up to him, making nightly pole-top radio broadcasts, and sending messages down to the boardwalk crowds below to tell them how much he was enjoying the cool ocean breeze. There was more than a breeze at times; storm winds whipped and swayed his flagpole, and he endured thunderstorms and hail.