Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader (46 page)

THE EYE HAS IT

For his company motto, Pinkerton chose “We Never Sleep.” For his logo, he chose a large, unblinking eye. His agency wasn’t the world’s first private detective agency—a Frenchman named Eugène François Vidocq beat him by 17 years when he founded the Bureau des Renseignements (Office of Intelligence) in 1833. But it was Pinkerton who gave private detectives their famous nickname. Thanks to his choice of logo, they’ve been known as “private eyes” ever since.

Q: When do cannibals leave the dinner table? A: When everyone’s eaten.

TRAIN OF THOUGHT

Pinkerton’s timing was perfect. Railroads were beginning to transform the American way of life—in both good ways and bad. As rails began to link major American cities, people could travel greater distances in less time and at less cost than ever before. But criminals could, too: a bank robber could knock over a bank in one state, then hop a train and by the next morning be hundreds of miles away in another state.

Have you ever seen a movie where the sheriff chases a bad guy and has to stop at the county line? That really was the way things worked back then—law-enforcement agencies were organized locally, and a police officer’s or sheriff’s powers ended as soon as he crossed the city or the county line. There were few if any state police in those days, and no national police to speak of, either. The Bureau of Investigation, predecessor to the FBI, wouldn’t come into existence until 1908. Pinkerton’s
private
detectives had no formal police powers, but they were free to chase criminals across county and state lines and then work with local law enforcers to arrest criminals and bring them to justice.

With no one else to turn to protect their interests, the railroads went to Pinkerton. By 1854 the agency was earning $10,000 a year (about $200,000 today) on railroad company retainers alone.

UNDERCOVER

Pinkerton’s agency achieved its greatest successes by sticking to the principle that Pinkerton himself had used to catch the counterfeiter John Craig back in 1846: The best way to catch a thief was by pretending to
be
a thief—a detective had to win the bad guy’s confidence, then get him to spill the beans. The agents infiltrated organized gangs of all types: Confederate spy rings, unions, even the Mafia.

The Pinkerton agency was ahead of their time in many areas. They pioneered the use of the mug shot and by the 1870s had the largest collection in the world. Their centralized criminal filing system has since been emulated by the FBI and other law enforcement organizations worldwide. The agency hired a female detective, a 23-year-old widow named Kate Warne, in 1856; by comparison, the New York City Police Department did not hire its first female investigator until 1903.

Australia is home to more than 750 different kinds of reptiles.

After the Civil War, the Pinkerton Detective Agency helped bring the Wild West era to a close by sending manhunters into the field to hunt down infamous train and bank robbers: Jesse James, the Missouri Kid, the Reno brothers, and the Cole Younger gang. Why did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid abandon their life of crime and flee to Argentina in 1901? Because Pinkerton detectives were hot on their trail. With the agency’s “wanted” posters and mug shots circulating throughout the United States, there was no place in the country left for them to hide.

END OF AN ERA

After suffering a stroke in 1869, Pinkerton began turning more and more of his responsibilities over to his sons, Robert and William. But he never retired, and he was still working at the agency in June 1884 when he tripped and bit his tongue while taking a walk. In the days before antibiotics, such injuries were very serious—a few days later gangrene set in, followed by blood poisoning, and on July 1, Pinkerton died.

The world of law enforcement has changed a great deal since the Pinkerton National Detective Agency opened its doors in 1850, and if anything, the pace accelerated following Allan Pinkerton’s death. The biggest change of all: in 1908 the Bureau of Investigation opened for business. The Pinkerton agency’s detective services became increasingly redundant—why pay good money to hire private detectives when the FBI, backed by the resources of the federal government, would investigate crimes for free? As the crime detection side of the business dried up, the agency’s security guard division, founded in 1858, came to assume a larger share. By the late 1930s, only a fraction of the company’s revenue came from its original detective services. In 1965 Allan Pinkerton’s great-grandson, Robert Allan Pinkerton II, acknowledged the inevitable by dropping the word “Detective” altogether and renamed the company Pinkerton’s, Inc. He was the last Pinkerton to head the Pinkerton Agency.

So can you still hire a Pinkerton agent today, at least as a security guard? No—in 1999 an international security company headquartered in Sweden, Securitas A.B., bought the firm and stopped doing business under the Pinkerton name.

For some of Pinkerton’s famous cases see
page 499
.

The ancient Greeks ate cheesecake.

With her husband George Burns, Gracie Allen was a star of vaudeville, radio, movies, and television...and one of the funniest women of the 20th century. Here are some of her one-liners and comedy bits
.

George:
Gracie, let me ask you something. Did the nurse ever happen to drop you on your head when you were a baby?

Gracie:
Oh, no, we couldn’t afford a nurse, my mother had to do it.

George:
Gracie, what day is it today?

Gracie:
Well, I don’t know.

George:
You can find out if you look at that paper on your desk.

Gracie:
Oh, George, that doesn’t help. It’s yesterday’s paper.

“They laughed at Joan of Arc, but she went right ahead and built it.”

George:
This letter feels kind of heavy, I’d better put another three-cent stamp on it.

Gracie:
What for? That’ll only make it heavier.

Gracie:
The baby my father brought home was a little French baby. So my mother took up French.

George:
Why?

Gracie:
So she would be able to understand the baby.

Gracie:
On my way in here, a man stopped me at the stage door and said, “Hiya, cutie, how about a bite tonight after the show?”

George:
And you said...?

Gracie:
I said, “I’ll be busy after the show but I’m not doing anything now,” so I bit him.

Harry Von Zell:
Gracie, isn’t that boiling water you’re putting in the refrigerator?

Gracie:
Yes, I’m freezing it.

Harry:
You’re freezing it?

Gracie:
Mmm-hmm, and then whenever I want boiling water, all I have to do is defrost it.

“This recipe is certainly silly. It says to separate two eggs, but it doesn’t say how far to separate them.”

Gracie:
Don’t give up, Blanche. Women don’t do that. Look at Betsy Ross, Martha Washington—they didn’t give up. Look at Nina Jones.

Blanche Morton:
Nina Jones?

Gracie:
I’ve never heard of her either, because she gave up.

All of Japan’s highways are toll roads; it costs more than $300 to go cross-country.

Limericks have been around since the 1700s. Here are a few of the more “respectable” ones that our readers have sent in
.

An accident really uncanny
Occurred to my elderly granny;
She sat down in a chair
While her false teeth lay there,
And bit herself right in the fanny.

“There’s a train at 4:04,” said Miss Jenny.

“Four tickets I’ll take. Have you any?”

Said the man at the door,

“Not four for 4:04,

For four at 4:04 is too many.”

A painter who came from Great Britain

Accosted two girls who were knittin’.

He said with a sigh,

“That park bench—well,

I Just painted it, right where you’re sittin’.”

A funny old bird is the pelican,

His beak holds more than his belican.

He can take in his beak

Enough food for a week.

I’m damned if I know how the helican!

There was a young lady who tried

A diet of apples, and died.

The unfortunate miss

Really perished of this:

Too much cider inside her inside.

There was an old skinflint named Green,

Who grew so abnormally lean

And flat and compressed,

That his back squeezed his chest,

And sideways he couldn’t be seen.

There was an old man from Nantucket

Who kept all his cash in a bucket.

His daughter, named Nan,

Ran away with a man

And as for the bucket, Nantucket.

A daring young lady of Guam

Observed, “The Pacific’s so calm

I’ll swim out for a lark.”

She met a large shark...

Let us now sing the 90th Psalm.

A man with the surname of Beebee

Wished to marry a lady named Phoebe,

But he said, “I must see

What the minister’s fee be

Before Phoebe be Phoebe Beebee.”

A bather whose clothing was strewed

By winds that had left her quite nude,

Saw a man come along...

And unless we are wrong,

You thought the next line would be lewd.

Among army ants, the “general” is always female.

In February 2004, Mel Gibson’s much-anticipated and controversial film
The Passion of the Christ
opened around the world. Within weeks it had changed people’s lives
.

J
OHNNY OLSEN, OSLO, NORWAY:
Olsen was known as a neo-Nazi and one of Norway’s most notorious criminals; he had served 12 years for the murder of two youths in 1980. In March he walked into the offices of the Norwegian newspaper
Dagbladet
and made a confession: he was the person who had twice bombed the Blitz House, an anti-racism center in Oslo, in 1994. “It was the film that made him realize that he had to show his hand,” said his lawyer, Fridtjof Feydt. “It has been a long process, but the Jesus film made the difference.”

MELISSA AND SEAN DAVIDSON, GEORGIA:
The Davidsons, who had been married for 10 years, left a theater in Bulloch County, Georgia, after seeing the movie. As they walked home, they discussed whether “the Father” referred to in the film was symbolic or human. By the time they got home, the discussion had turned into an argument...and then into a fistfight. When police arrived, Mrs. Davidson had bruises on her face and her husband had a stab wound on his hand from scissors. Both were arrested. “It was the dumbest thing we’ve ever done,” Mr. Davidson said. “We called the law on each other. It was one of those stupid things.”

DAN R. LEACH, RICHMOND, TEXAS:
Leach, 21, saw the film, talked it over with a family friend, and then paid a visit to the Fort Bend County Sheriff. The recent death of a 19-year-old woman that had been ruled a suicide was actually a murder, he told police, and he had done it. The young woman was carrying his child, but he didn’t want to raise the baby, he told officers. So he killed her and carefully made the death look like a self-strangulation. Then he saw the movie. “(It was) something the friend said. Between that and the movie, he felt in order for him to have redemption he would have to confess his sin and do his time,” Detective Mike Kubricht told reporters. Leach was arrested the next day.

Heavy drinkers: Elephants love to drink alcohol.

JAMES ANDERSON, PALM BEACH, FLORIDA:
The 53-year-old Anderson walked into a sheriff’s office in Palm Beach and confessed to having robbed a bank in the city two years earlier. He had gotten away with $25,000, and police had no leads on the case at all. Anderson said he decided to come clean after seeing the movie (although police suspect he may have also wanted the free health care of prison—he had recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer).

A WOMAN IN NEW BRITAIN, CONNECTICUT:
Someone called police to say they had seen a car drive into a creek in New Britain. When police arrived, the woman driver, whose name was not released, told them she had driven her Chevy Lumina into the water on purpose—to reenact a scene from
The Passion
. The woman wasn’t hurt and no property was damaged, so no charges were filed. Police said they didn’t know which scene it was that she was trying to reenact.

RONALD ANTHONY, WASHINGTON, D.C.:
Anthony, a teacher at Malcolm X Elementary School, showed excerpts from Gibson’s R-rated (and extremely violent) movie to his sixth-grade class. “I saw Jesus getting beaten,” said upset 11-year-old Cutairra Ransom. “Needles were going in his arms.” Children must have parental permission to see an R-rated film, yet no parents—or the principal—had been notified. Principal Vaughn Kimbrough suspended Anthony, saying, “You don’t show the rated R, you don’t show the religious.” And if Anthony showed the film as a lesson in morality, he chose an ironic way to do it: it was a pirated copy.