Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (59 page)

ROLL TO VICTORY

In the early morning hours of September 12, a Viennese baker was preparing his dough for the next day’s bread. He noticed that a tray of delicate breakfast rolls was vibrating. Why? They were acting as a seismograph, transmitting vibrations made by Turkish pickaxes. The Turks, it turned out, had decided to tunnel up to Vienna’s walls, then launch a final assault. The baker sent his son to warn the city fathers, and the Austrians rushed to the ramparts just in time to repel the Grand Vizier’s forces.

Kulczyski and the Bavarian army arrived a few hours later, sealing the Moslem defeat. After a bloody, 15-hour battle, the Turkish army fled, abandoning their tents and stores of food. The latter included thousands of sacks of hard, black beans, which the Austrians began to burn, because they believed the beans had no value.

A NEW TWIST

When the heroic baker was told to name his own reward, he asked to become chief baker in the royal palace. The request was granted. To impress his new masters, and to commemorate their narrow escape from the Moslems, he created a new breakfast roll. The star and crescent had long been a symbol of the Islamic faith, so instead of making ordinary round or oblong rolls, he rolled the dough out, then cut it into six inch triangles. He rolled these from the top corner, creating a humpbacked center with tapering horns. Just before baking, he twisted these horns down, forming a crescent.

Eighty-five years later, in 1770, a tactless Austrian princess named Marie Antoinette married Louis XVI of France. To ensure her supply of crescent rolls, she brought her own bakers from Vienna. The Royal French bakers were furious at this insult, but didn’t dare protest. Instead, they fought back by creating a new and better breakfast roll. They retained the crescent shape to appease Her Majesty, but used pastry dough. Thus, the noble
croissant
was born.

BACK TO 1683

Meanwhile, back in 1683, Kulczyski was asked what reward
he
wanted for saving Vienna. His request was surprisingly modest: all he asked for was the sacks of black beans that the Austrians were destroying...and permission to open a business in Vienna.

Both were immediately granted.

It turns out that while making his way through the surrounding Moslem army, Kulczyski had been served a sweet, black beverage, which seemed to restore his energy. It was coffee—virtually unknown in Europe at that time, but a staple for the Turks.

Kulczyski collected all the Turks’ unburned sacks of coffee beans and opened the first coffee house in Eastern Europe. Soon, all of Europe was drinking Viennese coffee, and Kulczyski became a wealthy and respected citizen of his adopted homeland.

The origin of baseball cards, on
page 104
, is tied in with the history of cigarettes in America. The rest of the story is about kids...and money.

K
IDS’ STUFF

In the years following tobacco’s exit from the baseball card business, cards were marketed directly to kids. They were used as promotions for candy, chewing gum, and cookies—but none were especially successful until 1928, when the Fleer Corporation invented bubblegum. As one sports historian writes, “Baseball cards had found a marketing partner to replace tobacco.”

The Goudey Company was the first to combine bubblegum and cards, and they became the most popular distributor of cards in the 1930s. Other companies joined in, adding gimmicks to make cards appealing to kids. They issued sets with players’ heads superimposed on cartoon bodies, included coupons for fan clubs, offered chances to win baseball gear, and so on. By the end of the 1930s, card collecting was beginning to take off as a hobby. Then World War II broke out, and resources were diverted to the war effort. Baseball cards all but disappeared.

CUTTHROAT COMPETITION

The business of baseball cards began in earnest after the war. The Bowman Company came out with the first annual sets of cards in 1948, and secured their investment by signing baseball players to contracts that gave Bowman exclusive rights to sell cards with bubblegum.

But with the introduction of color cards in 1950, baseball card collecting became the fastest growing hobby among boys in America—and competitors began lining up. The most important one was Sy Berger, an executive at Topps (the company that made Bazooka bubblegum), who genuinely liked baseball.

Berger convinced his bosses that they should start manufacturing and selling cards. He started hanging around the clubhouses of the three New York teams, signing players to Topps contracts. To avoid infringing on Bowman’s right to package cards with gum, Topps offered its cards with a piece of taffy. Bowman filed suit—but the court ruled that Bowman couldn’t stop Topps from signing players to card contracts.

By 1955, Topps had outhustled its rival for player contracts. In 1956, Bowman conceded defeat and sold out to Topps. From the ’50s through the ‘70s, Topps had a virtual stranglehold on the business. When the Fleer Corporation tried issuing cards with a cookie, Topps took them to court and won.

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY

Topps was selling 250 million cards a year, raking in millions of dollars in profits. But what did the players get? A whopping $125 for a
five-year contract—
plus a $5 “steak money” bonus. The amazing thing is, they were glad to get it; the average player salary in the 1960s was only $19,000.

Two things changed that: 1) a baseball players’ union was formed and got involved in contract negotiations with Topps, and 2) in 1980, Fleer won an anti-trust suit against Topps. The judge ruled that any company was free to negotiate a card deal.

A year later, there were three companies willing to sign players to card contracts. And by 1988, there were at least a half-dozen more. Cards got fancier and more expensive...and baseball cards turned into big business.

• By 1985, baseball cards had passed stamps and coins as the most popular collecting hobby in the country.

• By 1988, card companies were selling
five billion
cards a year.

• By 1992, sports cards were nearly a $1 billion a year business. The industry leader, Upper Deck, was selling $250 million worth of cards and sports memorabilia annually. They paid former superstar Mickey Mantle—who made $100,000 a year at the peak of his career—$2.5 million to make 26 promotional appearances at memorabilia conventions.

PARADISE LOST

A baseball card glut, combined with the bad press that the 1995 baseball strike generated, slowed down the card business—and it may never hit its peak again. But there’s no going back to the innocence of earlier decades. An adult attitude has settled over the hobby. As one critic puts it, “Once kids stuck the cards of their favorite players to the spokes of their bicycles. Now adults store their collections in safe-deposit boxes and fret over how much to insure their 1952 Mickey Mantles for.”

MISCELLANY

• The first cards to list player stats on the back were put out by Mecca Cigarettes in 1918.

• In 1969, Topps goofed on Angel’s 3rd-baseman Aurelio Rodriguez’s card. They photographed the Angels’ batboy, thinking he was Rodriguez, and put the
batboy’
s picture on the card.

• In 1989, a card of Baltimore Oriole Billy Ripken (brother of Cal) made headlines when it slipped past Fleer proofreaders. The card shows Ripken holding a bat over his right shoulder in a posed stance. At the bottom of the bat knob, written in black felt pen, is a “profanity.” “Sometimes players play practical jokes on the photographers,” said a Fleer spokesman. “We try to catch them before they go to press, but this one must have made it through.”

How Baseball Cards Got Their Modern Look

Bill Hemrich owned the Upper Deck sports card and memorabilia shop, located just a short walk from the stadium where the California Angels played their home games. Around 1987, he shelled out $4000 for a stack of Don Mattingly rookie cards—which turned out to be fakes. Paul Sumner, a printing company executive, heard the story and contacted Hemrich. He sketched out an idea for a baseball card using hologram technology. The hologram design would be impossible to counterfeit, Sumner explained. Plus, it would set the cards apart from all the rest with a hip, high-tech look.

Together they formed Upper Deck Cards, got rich, and changed sports cards forever.

“I believe everyone should carry some type of religious artifact on his or her person at all times.”
—Bob Costas, explaining why he carried a Mickey Mantle card in his wallet.

We’re guaranteed free speech by the Constitution. But, historically, there are lots of subtle ways the “free press” has kept that under control. Here are some amusing(?) examples from one of Uncle John’s favorite books
, If No News Send Rumors,
by Stephen Bates. (We highly recommend it for bathroom reading.)

D
irty secret:
“The
Los Angeles Times
bars the word ‘smog’ from its real-estate section. Ads may say ‘cleaner skies,’ but such phrases as ‘no smog here’ are forbidden.”

Get them somewhere else:
“The
Christian Science Monitor
refuses advertisements for, among other things, medicines and tombstones.”

Speak no evil:
“A 1985 regulatory ruling got almost no press coverage. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) had concluded that the oils in newspaper inks cause cancer and that ink barrels should include printed warnings.”

What sweat?:
“In the 50s and 60s, business considerations sometimes influenced newspapers’ weather reports. Weather predictions in the
Sacramento Bee
never included the word ‘hot,’ which newspaper officials feared might dissuade businesses from relocating to Sacramento. Instead, even blistering weather was described as ‘unseasonably warm.’”

No boycotts:
“Some newspapers, at the urging of florists’ trade associations, refuse to include the sentiment “Please omit flowers” in obituaries. A spokesman for one such paper, the
Pittsburgh Press
, explained that the phrase ‘urges a boycott just like “Don’t buy grapes,” and we don’t permit that.’”

Keeping people informed:
“In 1966, CBS chose not to cover the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s hearings on Vietnam. Instead, it aired its regular reruns of I
Love Lucy
and
The Real McCoys
, among others....A few months later, CBS did interrupt its daytime programming for live coverage of the Pillsbury Bakeoff prize ceremony. The bake-off, unlike the Vietnam hearings, had a sponsor—Pillsbury.”

Marlon Brando has long been regarded as one of America’s great actors. Here are some surprising thoughts he had about his craft.

“Acting is fundamentally a childish thing to pursue. Quitting acting—that is the mark of maturity.”

“I was down the tubes not long ago...you could see it when you rented a car; you could see it when you walked into a restaurant.”

“If you’ve made a hit movie, then you get the full 32-teeth display in some places; and if you’ve sort of faded, they say ‘Are you still making movies? I remember that picture, blah, blah, blah.’ The point is, people are interested in people who are successful.”

“An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer.”

“Acting is like sustaining a twenty-five-year love affair. There are no new tricks. You just have to keep finding new ways to do it, to keep it fresh.”

“If you play a pig, they think you’re a pig.”

“If you’re successful, acting is about as soft a job as anybody could ever wish for. But if you’re unsuccessful, it’s worse than having a skin disease.”

“If you want something from an audience, you give blood to their fantasies. It’s the ultimate hustle.”

“Acting is as old as mankind.... Politicians are actors of the first order.”

“An actor’s a guy who, if you ain’t talking about him, ain’t listening.”

“I’m convinced that the larger the gross, the worse the picture.”

“Why should anybody care about what any movie star has to say? A movie star is nothing important. Freud, Gandhi, Marx—these people are important. But movie acting is just dull, boring, childish work. Movie stars are nothing as actors. I guess Garbo was the last one who had it.”

Still driving? Wouldn’t you rather be doing loop-de-loops in a skycar like the Jetsons? If Paul Moiler has his way, you will be, soon. Here’s a piece from our book
Uncle John’s Indispensable Guide to the Year 2000.