Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader (5 page)

B
& S HYBRID (1980)

Ignition:
Milwaukee-based engine maker Briggs & Stratton is best known for its lawn mower engines. But in 1980 B & S introduced a unique vehicle: a “hybrid” car—one that improves fuel economy and reduces air pollution by having both an electric and a standard gasoline-powered engine. Today hybrids made by Toyota, Honda, and Ford are common, but at the time this was a strange and exotic concept. The company did not plan on selling the cars itself. Instead, it hoped that by building and demonstrating a prototype, it could interest major automakers in using Briggs & Stratton engines to power their own hybrid cars.

Car Trouble:
The idea looked good on paper, but it was more than 20 years ahead of its time—the battery technology that was necessary to make hybrid cars practical didn’t exist. The 12 rechargeable batteries the B & S hybrid carried in its trunk added so much weight to the car (about half a ton) that it needed a second set of rear wheels just to hold them up. The car had only a 60-mile range, after which the batteries needed a full eight hours to recharge. Even when both the gasoline and the electric engine were firing at the same time, it took 22 seconds for the car to accelerate to 40 mph. Top speed: a paltry 68 mph.

Out of Gas:
GM, Ford, and Chrysler weren’t interested. Briggs & Stratton went back to making engines for lawn mowers. The first practical hybrid sold in the United States, the Honda Insight, didn’t arrive in American showrooms until 1999.

FORD CAROUSEL (1970s)

Ignition:
In the early 1970s, a group of Ford Motor Company executives had an innovative idea: create a van large enough to hold seven passengers, yet small enough to handle like a car and park in an ordinary garage. They were convinced that it would be a big seller and might even replace the station wagon as
the
suburban family car. In 1972 the company created a full-size clay model of the concept, which it called the Carousel, and the following year commissioned a consumer survey to gauge public interest. Their findings: Demand was so high that Ford commissioned a second survey out of fear that the results of the first study were too good to be true. The results of the second survey were identical—so Ford set to work designing a prototype and made plans to introduce the car during the 1975 model year.

Bad car-ma? 40% of car theft victims admit they left their keys in the ignition.

Out of Gas:
Ford president Lee Iacocca liked the Carousel, but his boss, Henry Ford II, hated it and didn’t care how well the car tested. “I’m not a big survey man,” he explained years later. “I think that if you’re in the business you ought to know what the hell you want to do and you can’t rely on a survey to pull your bacon out of the frying pan.” On his orders, the Carousel was shelved.

Aftermath:
Henry II fired Iacocca in 1978, and when Iacocca went to work for Chrysler, a lot of Ford execs went with him, including several who had worked on the Carousel. Chrysler commissioned its own consumer survey to see if a Carousel-type van would still be popular. It was, and in 1983 the first Dodge Caravan—which looked virtually identical to the clay model Ford created in 1972—rolled off the assembly line. By 1988 Chrysler was selling more than 450,000 minivans a year, making it one of the most successful automobile launches in history.

LINCOLN FUTURA (1955)

Ignition:
If ever there was a concept car that was appropriately named, it was the Lincoln Futura. The car looked like something out of
The Jetsons:
it was a two-seater like the classic Ford Thunderbird, except that it had sharklike headlights, long tail fins and a “double-bubble” windshield—the driver and the passenger each sat inside their own glass bubble, just like a spaceship from a 1950s science fiction movie.

Out of Gas:
As with most concept cars, Lincoln never planned to put the Futura into production; they just built it to test some design ideas and then put it on tour in the car show circuit. The Futura also made a prominent appearance in the 1959 movie
It Started with a Kiss
, starring Debbie Reynolds and Glenn Ford. Then, when Lincoln was done with it, they sold it to a custom car designer in Los Angeles named George Barris.

Q: What do California, Delaware, Florida, Oregon, Idaho, Kansas, Nevada, New Hampshire and Wyoming all have in common? A: They are all cities in Ohio.

Aftermath:
The Futura might never again have seen the light of day, had 20th Century Fox not hired Barris to design a car for their new
Batman
TV series—and given him only three weeks to do it. It wasn’t enough time to build a Batmobile from scratch, so Barris gave the Futura a Bat-makeover instead, putting a bat-like snout in the front, installing a rocket “afterburner” in the back, and adding lots of other bat features in between. Reborn as the Batmobile, the Futura has gone on to become one of the most recognizable cars in the world.

THE CHRYSLER D’ELEGANCE (1952)

Ignition:
In 1952 Virgil Exner, the head of Chrysler’s styling department, came up with a design for a two-seater fastback coupe with beautiful, curvy lines. To save costs Exner sent his sketches and a plaster scale-model to Carrozzeria Ghia, an auto design firm headquartered in Turin, Italy. They built a full-sized prototype and sent it back to Chrysler.

Out of Gas:
At the time Chrysler was in a financial crunch. Exner thought a two-seater sports car like the D’Elegance would be a popular seller...but Chrysler didn’t want to spend the money to put the car into production. Big mistake—in 1953 Chevrolet introduced the Corvette, and the following year Ford rolled out the Thunderbird. Both cars were huge sellers; Chrysler had nothing like them.

Aftermath:
What happened to the D’Elegance? Although it never made it into production, if you saw a picture of it, the lines might look familiar. While Carrozzeria Ghia was building the full-scale model of the D’Elegance, they were also working on a sports car for Volkswagen. Ghia claims the new design was totally original, but the car’s resemblance to the Chrysler D’Elegance is remarkable. Did they “borrow” the design? Car buffs still argue over exactly what happened—all anybody knows for sure is that Ghia raced out the design for VW’s prototype sports car in a record five months and VW arranged for Karmann Coachwerks, a specialty German body maker, to assemble the car. Introduced in 1955, the VW
Karmann-Ghia
sold more than 485,000 units before it was discontinued in 1974...and Chrysler didn’t make another two-seater sports car until it introduced the Dodge Viper in 1992.

Someone once called marriage a “souvenir of love.” Here are some other observations about this blissful institution
.

“I love being married. I was single for a long time, and I just got so sick of finishing my own sentences.”

—Brian Kiley

“They say marriage is a contract. No, it’s not. Contracts come with warranties.”

—Wanda Sykes

“My husband and I celebrated our 38th wedding anniversary. You know, I finally realized that if I had killed that man the first time I thought about it, I’d have been out of jail by now.”

—Anita Milner

“The only thing that keeps me from being happily married ...is my husband.”

—Andra Douglas

“Getting married is a lot like getting into a tub of hot water. After you get used to it, it ain’t so hot.”

—Minnie Pearl

“We were happily married for eight months. Unfortunately, we were married for four and a half years.”

—Nick Faldo

“Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.”

—Leonardo da Vinci

“Before we got engaged, he never farted. Now it’s like a second language.”

—Caroline Rhea

“There is so little difference between husbands, you might as well keep the first.”

—Adela Rogers St. Johns

“Marriage is like a phone call in the night: first the ring, and then you wake up.”

—Evelyn Hendrickson

“Why can’t someone invent something for us to marry besides women?”

—Fred Flintstone

“The Wedding March always reminds me of the music played when soldiers go into battle.”

—Heinrich Heine

“Never get married in the morning—you never know who you might meet that night.”

—Paul Hornung

Now you know: Room temperature is 68° F.

Sometimes crooks get a dose of instant karma—and sometimes that’s just funny
.

C
RIME:
In September 2003, two men attempted to break into a bank in Kansas City.

INSTANT JUSTICE:
Cops in a police cruiser saw the two thieves running down a street with crowbars in their hands and chased them into a grassy field. When they lost sight of the fleeing suspects, the officers stopped and got out of the car—and then heard moans. It turned out that one of the robbers was hiding in the tall grass and the cops drove over him. The lucky thief suffered only a scrape on his forehead.

CRIME:
Wanton Beckwith, 27, stole a car in Monrovia, California, in May 2003. After a high-speed chase by police, he exited the car and ran into a house to hide.

INSTANT JUSTICE:
Somebody was home—and that somebody had a samurai sword. He pointed it at the intruder’s face, led him back outside and held him—at swords length—until police arrived.

CRIME:
In September 2003, 18-year-old Michael Watt walked into a health food store in Uttoxeter, England, pulled out a knife, and demanded money.

INSTANT JUSTICE:
The sole employee, 48-year-old Lorraine Avery, refused. “I thought, ‘He’s not having our money, I’ve worked hard for it.’” She looked for something to hit the thief with but couldn’t find anything. So she grabbed an industrial-sized bottle of salad dressing, pointed it at him, and told him to get out of the store. Watt wouldn’t go—so she started squirting him with the dressing. “He kept coming at me with the knife,” Avery told reporters, “and I kept squirting him.” It worked! The would-be robber left the store, and police were able to track him down...by following the trail of salad dressing.

CRIME:
In January 2004, an unknown man grabbed a bag out of a car stopped at a stoplight in Sydney, Australia.

INSTANT JUSTICE:
The car belonged to Bradley McDonald, a local snake catcher. In the bag was the snake he had just caught—a four-foot-long, venomous, red-bellied black snake. “It might teach him a lesson,” McDonald said.

The highest point in Pennsylvania is lower than the lowest point in Colorado.

CRIME:
Roy A. Gendron, 45, broke into a home in rural Alabama.

INSTANT JUSTICE:
The homeowner’s son, Richard Bussey, caught Gendron loading furniture and other items onto his truck. Bussey had a gun in his car, so he pulled it on Gendron. But he didn’t have a telephone and didn’t know what to do next, so he made the burglar mow the lawn—with a push mower—while he thought about it. He eventually took Gendron’s driver’s license, which the police used to track down and arrest the thief a short time later. Assistant D.A. Brian McVeigh told reporters that if he ever found himself in a similar situation, “I’ll try to get some yard work out of the guy.”

CRIME:
An inmate at the county jail in St. Charles, Missouri, attempted to escape.

INSTANT JUSTICE:
The escapee ran into the prison’s darkened parking garage and headed for an open door marked “Fire Exit.” Sensing that freedom was about to be his, he turned around, gave the approaching deputies a salute, and dashed through the door...running smack into the brick wall behind it. Deputies took the unconscious man to a nearby hospital.

CRIME:
In July 1996, 37-year-old Willie King snatched a wallet from the coat of an old woman on a street in Greenwich Village, New York City.

INSTANT JUSTICE:
The woman was 94-year-old Yolanda Gigante. Who’s that? The mother of Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, reputed head of the Genovese crime family, one of the country’s most powerful criminal organizations. King was caught a short time later, and as soon as he realized who he’d mugged he agreed to plead guilty to grand larceny. Sentence: 1-1/2 to 3 years in prison. “My client admitted his guilt at the earliest opportunity, because he wants to put this incident behind him,” King’s lawyer told the judge. “He hopes the Gigante family will, too.”

Elvis Presley shared a bed with his mom until he reached puberty.

Before this page became a
Bathroom Reader
page, it was a tree. While we can’t bring back the poor tree that sacrificed its life for your reading pleasure, we can honor these other special trees
.

F
REDERICK
D
OUGLASS
’ W
HITE
O
AK

In 1877 Frederick Douglass, former slave, author, public speaker, presidential advisor, minister, and antislavery activist, purchased one of the most beautiful and desirable homes in the Washington D.C. area. He called it Cedar Hill. In front of the house stood a towering white oak tree. On February 20, 1895, Douglass left a women’s rights conference and walked home, feeling ill. Once home, Douglass sat beneath his white oak, suffered a heart attack, and passed away. Cedar Hill is now a National Historic Site and on a clear day, the immense oak can still be seen from downtown Washington.