Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (81 page)

The major football powers remained suspicious of the forward pass even with all of the restrictions removed. That changed in 1913, when Notre Dame coach Jesse Harper wrote a letter to the Army team asking them if they had an opening in their schedule “and if so, would they give us a game.” There was an opening on November 1, 1913, so Army invited Notre Dame to come and play at West Point.

Notre Dame’s quarterback, Charley Dorais, and left end, Knute Rockne, had spent much of their summer vacation practicing forward passes on the beaches of Lake Erie. “Perfection came to us only through daily, tedious practice,” Rockne wrote in 1930.

Notre Dame played three games before meeting Army, racking up 169 points—all from forward passing—and giving up only seven to its opponents. But not many people noticed because the school wasn’t a major football power at the time.

No one—least of all the Army team—was prepared for the events at West Point that first day of November. “We went out to play Army like crusaders, believing we represented not only our own school but the whole aspiring Middle West,” Rockne remembered. “The Cadet body and most of the other spectators seemed to regard the engagement as a quiet, friendly work-out for the Army.”

Notre Dame began the first quarter playing a fairly conventional game; its defensive line held against Army, forcing them to kick. When Notre Dame got the ball, Dorais’s first attempts at throwing short passes failed; then he told his teammates, “Let’s open things up.”

The next pass was successful; Dorais only threw it 11 yards, but it so startled Army that they held a huddle to discuss it. Following one particularly rough scrimmage, Rockne started limping as if he’d been hurt, and continued limping through the next three plays, as Notre Dame advanced steadily down to the Army 25-yard line. The normally boisterous crowd was silent as it took in the Midwesterners’ new kind of game.

“After that third play,” he remembered, “the Army halfback covering me figured I wasn’t worth watching. Even as a decoy, he figured I was harmless.” On the next play, Dorais signaled that he would throw the next pass to Rockne. Football was about to change forever:

I started limping down the field, and the Army halfback covering me almost yawned in my face, he was that bored. I put on full speed and left him standing there flat-footed. I raced across the Army goal line as Dorais whipped the ball, and the grandstands roared at the completion of a 40-yard pass. Everybody seemed astonished. There had been no hurdling, no tackling, no plunging, no crushing of fiber and sinew. At the moment when I touched the ball, life for me was complete.

Notre Dame went on to complete 14 out of 17 passes, gaining 243 yards and scoring five touchdowns in the process, beating Army 35–13. The potential of the forward pass was laid out for everyone to see: A team that few people had heard of had come roaring out of the Midwest to humble a major Eastern football power, master of the old-style game, on their own home field.

Cursed? So few Heisman Trophy winners have made it into the Pro Football Hall of Fame—only 6—that the prize has been called “the kiss of death for college players.”

“Goliath,” Tom Perrin writes in
Football: A College History,
“learned again what a missile can do in the hands of David.”

With the arrival of the forward pass, all the major elements of modern football were in place. Very little has changed in the game since then, except for the advent of pro football and the NFL...but that’s another story, perhaps for the next
Bathroom Reader.

“There was no bad blood between [Yale and Princeton], but...in the very first scrimmage it became apparent that the practice of turning one cheek when the other is smitten is not to be entertained for a moment. As the game progressed, this fact became more potent. The eye of the umpire was the only thing they feared, and when his attention was diverted the surreptitious punches, gouges, and kicks were frequent and damaging.… The favorite methods of damaging an opponent were to stamp on his feet, to kick his shins, to give him a dainty upper cut, and to gouge his face in tackling.”

—
The New York Times
, describing the national championship game between Yale and Princeton in 1888

“Among the Maya the ball game was related to fertility, the sun, warfare, and sacrifice by decapitation. A high-ranking captive might be forced to play a game in which he might lose his head. Courts were often built against staircases. In some well-documented instances, the loser in the game was taken to the top, bound up to form a ball, and rolled down the stairs to his death.”

—
The Aztecs, Maya, and Their Predecessors
, by Muriel Porter Weaver

Was it the world’s most expensive private residence…or the world’s biggest white elephant? Luckily, California’s Hearst Castle is open for public tours. Pay it a visit and see for yourself.

In 1894 William Randolph Hearst, age 31, a member of one of California’s wealthiest families and the publisher of the
San Francisco Examiner,
commissioned an architect to build a mansion on a large tract of land in Pleasanton, California.

Somehow, he never got around to telling the owner—his mother—he was building himself a house on her property. When she found out, she took it and kept it for herself. There wasn’t much William could do about it—his mother, the widow of U.S. Senator George Hearst, controlled the family’s entire $20 million fortune. William hadn’t inherited a penny of his father’s estate and had nothing in his own name, not even the
Examiner.
His mother owned that, too.

Twenty-five years later, Hearst, now 56, wanted to build a hilltop house on the 60,000-acre ranch his mother owned in San Simeon, a small coastal whaling town halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Hearst was fond of camping with his family and an entourage of as many as 50 guests and servants at the site, but wanted something “a little more comfortable.”

By now Hearst was well on his way to becoming one of the most powerful publishers in the country…but his mother still controlled the family fortune. He must have learned something from his 1894 experience, because he told his mother about the plan for San Simeon
before
he started construction, and he limited himself to a single tiny “Jappo-Swisso bungalow.” Mrs. Hearst agreed to let him build, but insisted on keeping the property in her name because, she explained, “I’m afraid he might get carried away.” She had good reason to worry.

Just a few months later, in April 1919, Hearst’s mother died of influenza. William, her only son, inherited everything… and began rethinking his simple bungalow. He told architect Julia Morgan that he wanted something a little bigger.

Every 4 seconds, somebody somewhere on Earth opens a can of Spam.

“I don’t think it was a month before we were going on a grand scale,” Morgan’s employee Walter Steilberg remembered. The bungalow quickly evolved into a large house… then a mansion… and finally one
enormous
mansion called Casa Grande, surrounded by three smaller “cottages”—Casa del Sol, Casa del Mar, and Casa del Monte—giving the hilltop retreat the appearance of an entire Mediterranean hill town.

Hearst called it
La Cuesta Encantata,
“The Enchanted Hill.” To the public, it would become known as Hearst Castle.

That was the plan, but as Julia Morgan explained to Hearst, bringing the large project to completion would not be easy or cheap. For one thing, there was no paved road and the rocky, barren spot where Hearst wanted to build was 1,600 feet up, which meant there was no easy way to get construction materials to the site. And with no topsoil, there was no way to plant the trees and gardens Hearst wanted, either. Furthermore, San Simeon was in the middle of nowhere, which meant that skilled workers would have to be brought in from hundreds of miles away and housed and fed on site.

None of this mattered to Hearst. He’d loved San Simeon since childhood, and for the first time in his life he had the money to build his dream house. Nothing was going to get in his way. The dirt trail up the hill was paved; the pier in the town of San Simeon was enlarged to allow steamships to unload construction materials; dormitories were constructed for the workers; and tons of topsoil were hauled up to the site, enough to bury 50 acres of land under four feet of dirt. Construction began in 1919… and was still underway more than 30 years later when Hearst died in August 1951.

While Morgan was working on the building plans, Hearst was hard at work indulging what his mother had once described as his “mania for antiquities”—he spent millions of dollars acquiring entire train-loads of antiques to furnish and decorate the 165 rooms—including 56 bedrooms and 19 sitting rooms—and the 61 bathrooms that made up his estate. His timing was perfect: cash-strapped European governments were instituting income and estate taxes to finance rebuilding in the aftermath of World War I. Once-wealthy families found themselves having to auction off artwork, antiques, and even entire castles, monasteries, and country estates to raise cash to pay their taxes. Hearst was their biggest customer.

Some species of ants have five noses.

Hearst was especially fond of acquiring “architectural fragments”— floors, doorways, windows, mantles, chimneys, etc.—that could be carted off to San Simeon and set into the concrete walls of his estate. For more than 20 years, he compulsively bought just about everything that caught his eye and shipped it across the Atlantic to warehouses in the Bronx; from there most of it was sent by rail to warehouses in San Simeon.

Hearst peppered Julia Morgan with suggestions on which artifacts should go where, and none of these treasures were too sacred to be “improved” if need be. If something was too small, Morgan had it enlarged; if it was too big, she had chopped it down to size. “So far we have received from Hearst, to incorporate into the new buildings, some 12 or 13 railroad cars of antiques,” Morgan wrote in 1920:

They comprise vast quantities of tables, beds, armoires, secretaries, all kinds of cabinets, church statuary, columns, door frames, carved doors in all stages of repair and disrepair, overaltars, reliquaries, lanterns, iron grille doors, window grilles, votive candlesticks, torchères, all kinds of chairs in quantity, door trims, wooden carved ceilings.…I don’t see myself where we are ever going to use half suitably, but I find that the idea is to try things out and if they are not satisfactory, discard them for the next thing that comes that promises better.

Not all of this booty ended up at Hearst Castle—Hearst owned a castle in Wales, a beachfront mansion in Santa Monica, a 50,000-acre estate near Mt. Shasta in the northern part of California, and more. But he bought more antiques, artworks, and architectural fragments than even these buildings could hold; to this day thousands of his purchases sit in their original packing crates in Hearst Corporation warehouses around the country.

If you’re an average adult, you’ll eat 2,000 pounds of food this year.

By the mid-1920s, enough of the construction had been completed at San Simeon to allow Hearst to begin entertaining guests as diverse as Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Calvin Coolidge, and George Bernard Shaw. He provided them with plenty to do: hiking, trout fishing, horseback riding, and tennis; there was also a billiard room, library, movie theater, and indoor and outdoor swimming pools. If guests wanted to play golf, there was even an airplane standing by to fly them to the nearest course. If they wanted to look at elephants, giraffes, or other exotic animals, that wasn’t a problem either: Hearst’s estate was also home to the largest privately owned zoo in the world.

When guests arrived at the estate, they quickly discovered that for all its grandeur, it wasn’t very comfortable. Some guest rooms gave up so much space to antiques and art that there wasn’t any room left for closets. The buildings could also be quite drafty, and the chimneys smoked terribly.