Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (55 page)

Date:
May 1922

Background:
The first known car radio was fitted to the passenger door of a Ford Model T by 18-year-old George Frost, president of the Lane High School Radio Club, Chicago.

Date:
August 17, 1896

Background:
The first automobile fatality occurred at the Crystal Palace in London, when Mrs. Bridget Driscoll was run over and her skull fractured by a wheel of the car. The driver was Arthur Edsell, an employee of the Anglo-French Motor Co. Edsell’s vision was obstructed by two other cars and Mrs. Driscoll, in a state of panic, stood still in the path of the approaching vehicle. At the inquest it was stated that Edsell was driving at 4 mph at the time of the accident. The verdict was Accidental Death.

Sun-light: The weight of the sun’s light on the Earth’s surface: 2 lbs. per square mile.

In previous
Bathroom Readers
we’ve told you the stories of Milton Hershey, Henri Nestlé, Frank Mars, and other notables in the chocolate world. Here are a few more. (Hint: Baker’s chocolate wasn’t named with bakers in mind, and German chocolate doesn’t come from Germany.)

In the early 1920s Reese worked in one of the dairies owned by Milton Hershey. Inspired by Hershey’s success, he decided “if Hershey can sell a trainload of chocolate every day, I can at least make a living making candy.” Reese struck out on his own and by the mid- 1920s had an entire line of candies, including dinner mints, dipped chocolates, caramels, and coconut candies. In 1928 he added peanut butter cups; they were so popular that when World War II rationing put a dent in his business in 1942, he dumped the rest of his product line and focused exclusively on them. Today Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are part of Hershey Foods.

In 1914 an Illinois schoolteacher named L. S. Heath mortgaged his house for $3,000 to buy his sons a soda shop. A year later he quit his teaching job to join them and expanded the business into homemade ice cream and candy. One afternoon in the mid-1920s a salesman told them about a candy called Trail-Toffee that he’d seen in another store. The Heath brothers took the basic recipe— almonds, butter, and sugar—and spent the next several months experimenting. In 1928 they finally came up with a chocolate-covered English toffee bar—the Heath Bar.

In 1765 Dr. Baker and an Irish immigrant chocolate-maker named John Hannon formed a chocolate company in Dorchester, Massachusetts. In 1772 they started advertising their chocolate under the brand name Hannon’s Best Chocolate…but when Hannon was lost at sea in 1799, Dr. Baker assumed full control of the company and renamed the product Baker’s Chocolate.

Heavy, man: In 1907 egret plumes were worth twice their weight in gold.

The guy that German chocolate is named after worked for the guy that Baker’s chocolate is named after. No kidding. Sam German was an employee of the Baker Chocolate Company in the 1850s, when he created a mild dark chocolate bar for baking. The bar was named Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate in his honor.

About a century later in 1957, a Dallas, Texas, newspaper published a recipe for German Chocolate Cake, sparking a local baking craze. When General Foods, then-owner of the Baker’s Chocolate company, noticed a spike in German’s Chocolate sales, they investigated… and when they learned that German Chocolate Cake was responsible, sent copies of the recipe and photos of the cake to food editors all over the country. Sales of German’s Chocolate jumped 73% in the first year alone, and German Chocolate Cake became an American dessert classic.

In 1822 John Cadbury opened a tea and coffee shop in Birmingham, England. He expanded into chocolate manufacturing, and in 1853 became purveyor of chocolate to Queen Victoria. In 1861 his son Richard Cadbury hit upon the idea of increasing sales of Valentine’s Day chocolate sales by packaging Cadbury chocolates in the world’s first heart-shaped candy box.

In 1883 Clark, an Irish immigrant, hired a cook and started a candy business in Pittsburgh. While the cook prepared the candy, Clark sold it out of the back of a wagon to local merchants. In 1886 he tasted chewing gum for the first time; a short while later he added it to his product line. Countless other products followed; in time Clark became known as the Pittsburgh Candy King. But his biggest claim to fame came in 1917, when he invented a nickel candy bar similar to a Butterfinger—honeycombed ground, roasted peanuts coated with milk chocolate—that America’s World War I fighting men could carry with them into battle. Clark liked his new product so much he named it after himself: the Clark Bar.

World’s most recognizable smell? Coffee.

Some more irony to put the problems of day-to-day life in proper perspective.

• In August 2000, a 44-year-old woman named Angel Destiny fled for her life dressed only in pajamas after half of her house in Cardiff, Wales, collapsed into rubble. Destiny, who makes her living as a psychic, told reporters, “I just didn’t see it coming.”

• A circus contortionist who goes by the name Berkine got his right foot stuck on his left shoulder…and did not immediately receive the medical attention he needed to get unstuck. Reason: Circus workers who heard him screaming for help “thought he was joking.”

• In May 2000 a save-the-whales activist was forced to call off his sailing voyage across the Pacific Ocean, which he had hoped would call attention to his cause. Reason: “His 60-foot boat was damaged by two passing whales.”

• In an unrelated incident, in July 2001, the 50-foot yacht
Peningo
was struck by a whale while sailing about 350 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. What was crew member John Fullerton doing when the incident occurred? Reading a copy of Moby
Dick.

• According to
Industrial Machinery News,
an (unnamed) company with a five-year perfect safety record tried to demonstrate the importance of wearing safety goggles on-the-job by showing workers a graphic film containing footage of gory industrial accidents. Twenty-five people injured themselves while fleeing the screening room, 13 others passed out during the film, and another required seven stitches “after he cut his head falling off a chair while watching the film.”

• In June 2000, an 87-year-old man dropped dead while standing in line at a government office in Bogotá, Colombia. Reason for visiting the office: To “apply for a government certificate to prove he was still alive.”

• In 1919
The New York Times
commissioned a poll asking people who they thought were the 10 most important living Americans. Herbert Hoover won first place. Franklin Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy, saw the poll and wrote a colleague, “Herbert Hoover is certainly a winner, and I wish we could make him President of the United States.”

• In January 2000 a Florida seventh-grade teacher had his 70 students write their elected representatives a letter. Purpose of the exercise: To demonstrate that “their opinions matter.” As of the end of the school year, none of the students had received a reply.

Toilet Rock, a natural rock formation shaped like a flush toilet, is in City of Rocks, NM.

•
Hellcats of the Navy,
a 1957 film starring Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis (the future Mrs. Reagan), was co-written by screenwriter Bernard Gordon. Gordon used the name Raymond T. Marcus because he’d been blacklisted during the McCarthy era, during which Reagan had served as a government informant.

• A production company won a $1.8 million judgment against a former employee accused of stealing the concept for a television game show. Name of the stolen show:
Anything for Money.”

• A 15-year-old Zimbabwe boy named Victim Kamubvumbi lived up to his name when he became stranded on an island in the middle of the Ruya River during a flood. Victim’s last name, when translated into English: “slight drizzle that does not end.”

• In 1982 Bill Curtis, an electronic technician at the Vancouver airport, became convinced that a nuclear war was imminent. So convinced, in fact, that he moved his family to the place his research told him would be the safest on Earth: The Falkland Islands, an English colony off the east coast of South America. The following April, 4,000 Argentinian troops attacked the islands and claimed them for Argentina, in the process starting a shooting war with England that lasted more than three months.

“I’ve always hated that damn James Bond. I’d like to kill him.”

—Sean Connery

Poison oak is not an oak and poison ivy is not an ivy. Both are members of the cashew family.

Here are more examples of “rebirth”: people who were thought to be dead, but were actually quite alive.

D
ECEASED:
Jayaprakash Narayan, Indian “patriot and elder statesman”

NEWS OF HIS DEATH:
On March 22, 1979, Prime Minister Morarji Desai announced to the nation that Narayan had died. Desai delivered an emotional eulogy; Parliament was adjourned. Flags were lowered to half-mast nationwide, schools and shops closed, and funeral music was broadcast over All-India Radio in honor of the fallen giant.

RESURRECTION:
Later that day, Jayaprakash Narayan heard the news of his own death while convalescing in the hospital, where he was still very much alive. Prime Minister Desai apologized for the mistake and brought the official mourning to an end, blaming the false report on the director of the Indian Intelligence Bureau, “one of whose staff had seen a body being carried out of the hospital.”

DECEASED:
Sam Kalungi, a private in the Ugandan army

NEWS OF HIS DEATH:
In the late 1990s, Private Kalungi was one of more than 10,000 Ugandan soldiers sent to the Congo to aid rebels trying to overthrow Congolese president Laurent Kabila. Several months later the Ugandan Army contacted Kalungi’s family, telling them that Kalungi had died in battle. Family members went to the morgue of the Mbuya military hospital, positively identified the body, and had it delivered to their home village of Mbukiro for burial.

RESURRECTION:
When his two-year tour was up, Kalungi returned home to Mbukiro, where shocked and relieved relatives took him to see the grave that bore his name. So who’s buried there? Private James Kalungi (no relation), delivered to the wrong family and misidentified by Sam Kalungi’s own parents. “The body had spent one and a half months in the military hospital. It had an ice coating on the face which made us believe it was our son,” Sam’s mother explained.

The flowers of Africa’s baobab tree open only in the moonlight. They are pollinated by bats.

DECEASED:
An unidentified man from Almaty, Kazakhstan

NEWS OF HIS DEATH:
According to the Reuters news agency, the man was trying to steal electrical power cables in eastern Kazakhstan, when he touched a live wire and was electrocuted. Thinking he was dead, his family wrapped him in a cloth shroud and buried him in a shallow grave.

RESURRECTION:
The grave must have been really shallow, because two days later the man “regained consciousness and rose naked from the ground,” whereupon he hitched a ride back to his village…and got there just in time to attend his own funeral feast. That was no easy task—according to local news reports, the naked, electrocuted man “had trouble flagging down a vehicle to take him home.”

DECEASED:
Cesar Aguilera, 58, of Nicaragua

NEWS OF HIS DEATH:
In May 2001, Aguilera went to tend some property he owned in the countryside. More than a week passed and he did not return. His relatives, fearing the worst, went around to local morgues looking for his body…and thought they had found it when they discovered a man about Aguilera’s height and weight who’d been run over by a car.

RESURRECTION:
Aguilera returned home from his trip just as his family was preparing to bury the deceased. You would expect they would have been happy to see him, but they didn’t exactly show it. “One kid screamed at me, ‘Are you from this life or the other?’ ” Aguilera said.