Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (5 page)

JUAN VALDEZ.
“This is the tale of Juan Valdez / Stubborn man, as the story says / Lives way up on a mountaintop / Growing the finest coffee crop.” In the early 1960s, about 25% of all coffee sold in America came from Colombia, but consumers didn’t know it. So Colombian coffee-growers hired an ad agency to make Americans aware of their product. The agency hired New York singer José Duval and sent him to Colombia with a film crew. Clothed in traditional garb—a “mulera” (shawl), a straw sombrero, white pants and shirt—José was filmed picking coffee beans and leading a bean-laden burro down mountain trails. It was a huge success—people in New York greeted Duval with “Hi, Juan” wherever he went. Today, a stylized picture of Juan Valdez is part of the Colombian coffee logo.

JACK, (the Cracker Jack boy) and BINGO (his dog).
The sailor boy was added to Cracker Jack packages during World War I as a salute to “our fighting boys.” But he was modeled after the company founder’s young grandson, Robert, who often wore a sailor suit. The dog was named Bingo after the children’s song (“B-I-N-G-O, and Bingo was his name-O”). Sad footnote: As the first “sailor boy” packages rolled off the presses, Robert got pneumonia and died. So the logo can also be seen on his tombstone in Chicago.

Here it is again—our feature based on Andy Warhol’s prophetic comment that “in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” Here’s how a few people have been using up their allotted quarter hour.

T
HE STAR:
Alan Hale, a backyard astronomer in New Mexico.

THE HEADLINE:
Hale, Hearty Fellow, Finds Comet but No Job.

WHAT HAPPENED:
Late in the evening of July 22, 1995, Hale set up his telescope and was observing star clusters when he noticed a fuzzy blur that didn’t appear in any astronomical charts. It turned out to be a comet, the brightest one to pass near the earth in more than 20 years. The same night another amateur astronomer, Thomas Bopp, made a sighting in Arizona. The comet was named Hale-Bopp in their honor.

AFTERMATH:
Hale and Bopp appeared on TV talk shows, and made personal appearances all over the country. For a time they were the most famous astronomers in America. But Hale, who had a Ph.D. in astronomy when he discovered the comet, was unemployed—the only job he could find in his field was a temporary one in a space museum two hours away. Even after the discovery, he remained unemployed. He made news again when he posted a letter on the Internet in 1998, saying that because of lack of jobs, he couldn’t encourage kids to be scientists when they grew up.

THE STAR:
Jessie Lee Foveaux, a 98-year-old great-great grandmother living in Manhattan, Kansas.

THE HEADLINE:
Great-Great-Granny Lays Golden Egg.

WHAT HAPPENED:
In 1979, Foveaux signed up for a senior-citizen writing class and began compiling her memoirs as a Christmas present for her family. In 1997, the
Wall St. Journal
ran a front-page story on the class...and featured Jessie’s work. The article ignited a bonfire of interest in her life story. The next day her phone rang off the hook as publishers fought to buy the manuscript. Foveaux chose Warner Books, which paid her $1 million for the rights.

AFTERMATH:
Any Given Day: The Life and Times of Jessie Lee Brown Foveaux
, hit bookstore shelves a few months later, spurring articles in
People
and other magazines and an appearance on the
Rosie O’Donnell
show. “I never thought anyone would read it but my own,” Foveaux says. “If I had, I probably wouldn’t have told as much.” Book sales were disappointing, but Foveaux became rich off the book. She was able to leave more than just a manuscript to her family.

THE STAR:
Kato Kaelin, moocher ordinaire—O.J.’s house guest on the night Simpson’s wife and her companion were murdered.

THE HEADLINE:
Trial of the Century Makes O.J.’s Sidekick House Guest of the Century.

WHAT HAPPENED:
His eyewitness account was central to the O.J. murder trial—he was the last person to see Simpson before the murders, and he heard a thump outside his guest-house wall near where the bloody glove was found. His testimony helped exonerate Simpson at the criminal trial, but helped convict him in the civil trial. Kato later admitted that he, too, thought Simpson was guilty.

AFTERMATH:
Kaelin’s aging surfer-boy persona helped make him one of the most recognizable celebrities to come out of the trials. He appeared in photo spreads for GQ and
Playgirl
magazine, endorsed hair products and cigarettes, and even wrote an article for
P.O.V.
magazine on “How to Score a Free Pad.”

An aspiring actor before the trials, he was now a
famous
aspiring actor. He got bit parts in a handful of movies, but not much more. For a while he was also a talk show host at KLSX radio in Los Angeles. Topics included “Don’t you hate waiting,” and other equally stimulating fare. That fizzled too, and not just because listeners were bored. “He quit,” a spokesperson for the station reports. “He found out it was hard work.”

THE STAR:
Divine Brown, a Hollywood, California hooker.

THE HEADLINE:
Hugh’s Hooker a Huge Hit.

WHAT HAPPENED:
In June 1995, a police officer observed a white BMW parked off a side street on LA’s seedy Sunset Strip, a boulevard notorious for streetwalkers. He checked it out...and observed a prostitute performing a sex act on actor Hugh Grant. Both
suspects were arrested. Grant was fined $1,800 for the incident; Brown was fined $1,350 and spent 180 days in jail. Overnight she went from down-and-out streetwalker to celebrity.

AFTERMATH:
In the months that followed she made more than $500,000 from interviews, appearances, and TV commercials in England, Brazil, and the U.S. She spent the money on designer clothes, an expensive apartment, two Rolls-Royces, a Mercedes, a stretch limo, and other goodies. “I’m blessed by God,” Brown told a reporter in 1996. “I ruined his life, but he made mine.”

Grant rebuilt his career and even his relationship with girlfriend Elizabeth Hurley. Brown burned through her money in about a year. She was evicted from her home, her cars were repossessed, her kids were sent back to public schools. By June 1996, she was working in a strip joint for $75 a night. In 1997, she attempted suicide. “She tasted the good life and knows she can’t have it anymore,” her publicist told reporters. “No wonder she’s depressed.”

THE STAR:
William “Refrigerator” Perry, defensive lineman for the Chicago Bears.

THE HEADLINE:
Rotund Refrigerator Romps in End Zone.

WHAT HAPPENED:
Perry was a 1st-round draft pick for the Bears in 1985. When he reported to training camp at 330 pounds—too fat even by football standards—the Bears benched him.

He might have stayed there if the Bears hadn’t lost the 1984 NFC title game to the SF 49ers. With the score 23-0, the 49ers used a 271-pound guard in the backfield. Bears coach Mike Ditka took it as a personal insult....So the next time he faced the 49ers, he had Perry, the team’s fattest player, carry the ball on two plays.

People loved it. A week later, Ditka did it again...and Perry scored a touchdown. For some reason, it became national news.

AFTERMATH:
By midseason, Perry was making appearances on
David Letterman
and the
Tonight Show.
By the time the Bears won the Superbowl he was a media superstar, making a tidy sum on product endorsements. Perry’s fame lasted until the next season, when Ditka realized Perry had a life-threatening weight problem, and put him on a diet. He retired from pro football in 1994, then signed on with the World League of American Football, a league that plays American football in Europe.

Here are still more origins of everyday phrases.

G
ET SOMEONE’S GOAT

Meaning:
Annoy someone; make them lose their temper.

Origin:
“This very American phrase came from the practice of putting a goat inside a skittish racehorse’s stall because it supposedly had a calming influence. A gambler might persuade a stableboy to remove the goat shortly before the race, thereby upsetting the horse and reducing its chance of winning (and improving the gambler’s odds).” (From
It’s Raining Cats and Dogs
, by Christine Ammer)

THE HIGH MUCKY MUCK or HIGH MUCK-A-MUCK

Meaning:
A person in charge who acts like a big shot.

Origin:
“The dictionaries usually give the spelling high-muck-amuck, and that’s a bit closer to the original Chinook version
hiu muckamuck
, which means ‘plenty of food.’ In the Alaska of a century or more ago, a person with plenty to eat was a pretty important fellow—and that’s what the expression means. A high-muck-a-muck is usually not only a person of authority but one who likes to be sure that everyone knows how important he is.” (From the
Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins
, by William and Mary Morris)

HERE’S MUD IN YOUR EYE

Meaning:
A toast wishing good luck.

Origin:
“The expression is not a toast to another; it is a toast to yourself—because it means, ‘I hope I beat you.’ The allusion is to a horse race. If the track is at all muddy, the rider of the losing horse is very likely to get mud in his eye from the horse that is winning.” (From
Why Do We Say...?
, by Nigel Rees)

Some of history’s most famous bets may never have happened at all. Here are a few you may have heard
of.
Did they really happen?

P
EARL JAM

The Wager:
According to Roman historian Pliny the Elder, Cleopatra once bet her lover Marc Antony that she could spend the equivalent of over $3 million in “one evening’s entertainment.” He didn’t believe it.

The Winner:
Cleopatra.
Here’s how she supposedly did it:

There were dancers garbed in specially-made costumes of gold and rare feathers; there were jugglers and performing elephants; there were a thousand maid-servants attending to the couple’s every need; and there was a seemingly endless banquet of indescribable splendor. At the end of the evening, Cleopatra proposed to toast her lover with a vessel of vinegar. But first she dropped her exquisite pearl earrings, each worth a small kingdom, into the cup and watched them dissolve. Then she raised the sour cocktail of untold value to her lips and drank it down.

Truth or Legend?
It’s possible, but not likely. Pearls are “largely carbonate, and will dissolve in a mild acidic solution such as vinegar.” But it would take at least a few hours, and the vinegar would have to be so strong you could hardly drink it. However, if Cleo crushed the pearls first, they would have dissolved immediately.

THE SECRET WORD IS...

The Wager:
In 1780, James Daly, manager of a theater in Dublin, Ireland, bet that he could coin a word that would become the talk of the town overnight—even though it had no meaning. Daly’s boast seemed so preposterous that everyone within earshot took him up on it.

Daly immediately paid an army of children to run around town and write a single word in chalk on walls, streets, billboards, etc.

The Winner:
Daly.
The next morning, Dubliners were asking what this strange word meant...and why it was written everywhere they looked. People speculated that it was “indecent,” but no one knew
for sure. The word was
quiz.
According to the
Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins:

At first it became synonymous with ‘practical joke’—for that was what Daly had played on the citizenry. Gradually it came to mean making fun of a person by verbal bantering. In time, it came to mean what ‘quiz’ means today—a question asked of a person in order to learn the extent of his knowledge.

Truth or Legend?
No one knows. The tale has never been authenticated, and as far as most lexicographers are concerned, the definitive origin of the word
quiz
is still unknown.

THE FIRST MOVIE?

The Wager:
In 1872, Leland Stanford, former governor of California, railroad tycoon, and dabbler in horses, bet newspaperman Frederick MacCrellish’that for a fraction of a second, a trotter has all four feet off the ground simultaneously. The bet was for anywhere from nothing to $50,000 (depending on who tells the story). To settle the question, Stanford hired English photographer Eadward J. Muy-bridge to photograph one of his prime racers, Occidental, in motion. There was one problem: photographic technology in 1872 was still too primitive to capture the desired image. The bet was left unsettled and all parties moved on.