Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (58 page)

•
Most Super Bowl appearances without a win:
The Minnesota Vikings and the Buffalo Bills have each been to, and lost, four Super Bowls. The Bills are the only team to lose four in a row (1991–1994).

•
Closest final score:
In 1991 the New York Giants beat the Buffalo Bills by one point, 20–19, thanks to a last-minute field goal.

•
Most Super Bowl wins:
The San Francisco 49ers, Dallas Cowboys, and Pittsburgh Steelers have won five each.

•
Lowest scoring Super Bowl:
Super Bowl VII (1973); Miami beat Washington 14–7. Highest scoring Super Bowl: Super Bowl XXIX (1995). The 49ers beat the San Diego Chargers 49–26, for a combined total of 75 points.

•
Most points scored by one team:
The San Francisco 49ers scored 55 in 1990 to beat the Denver Broncos 55–10. It was the biggest blowout in Super Bowl history.

•
Most-watched Super Bowl:
The 2008 game between the NY Giants and New England Patriots was seen by 97.5 million American TV viewers. With the population at 300 million, that means that about one out of every three U.S. residents watched the game.

•
TV shows that premiered immediately after Super Bowl broadcasts:
The A-Team, The Wonder Years, Family Guy
, and
Homicide: Life on the Street
.

More tales of dishonest people getting their comeuppance
.

C
ULPRIT
: Nigel Hardman, a.k.a. “Prince Razaq,” of Warton, England
GRAND SCHEME
: After a number of civil servant jobs—mail sorter, meter reader, and accident insurance advisor—Hardman was ready for something different. His chance came after a 2002 car accident, when he applied for disability payments and housing assistance, claiming he was “too ill to work.” Now, with a supplemental income, Hardman started training to be a magician. After he recovered, he stuck with his act…but kept on receiving government payments. Donning a turban, long robes, curly-toed sandals, and the name “Prince Razaq,” he appeared on the British TV show
The Big Breakfast
(he escaped from a straight jacket while standing on a bed of nails), and his career took off. With newfound fame, Hardman started living in lavish style, even purchasing a 31-foot-long stretch limousine so he could, according to the
Guardian
, “drive stag and hen party guests around Blackpool.”

EXPOSED!
British fraud investigators, it turned out, had also seen the talent show and soon learned that the man who was “too ill to work” was moonlighting as a death-defying daredevil who swallowed swords and tamed lions. In 2008 Hardman, 40, pleaded guilty to 11 counts of fraud—in all, he bilked £18,000 ($35,000) from the British benefits system. (He was also nearly bankrupt.)

OUTCOME
: Hardman was tagged for six months, which means he can’t leave his home from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. If he does, the magistrate warned him, the court will come down on him “like a ton of bricks.”

GRAND SCHEME
: Garibaldi’s wife (first name not released) thought her marriage was fine…until one day in 2007, when she discovered that all of her money—37,000 euros ($73,000)—was missing from her bank account. And Martino was missing, too. Did he run off? Was he kidnapped? Mrs. Garibaldi hired a private
investigator to track down her husband, but the search yielded nothing. Her husband and her money were both gone.

EXPOSED!
A few months later, in early 2008, Mrs. Garibaldi received a call from one of her friends: watch the new movie,
Natale in Crociera
(
Christmas on a Cruise
), said the friend, and pay close attention to the background people. Mrs. Garibaldi watched it, and sure enough, there was Martino—along with his mistress—sitting at a table enjoying themselves in the background of a scene that was filmed in the Dominican Republic.

OUTCOME
: Thanks to the new evidence, Mrs. Garibaldi was able to track Martino down and has since served him with divorce papers…and is suing him to get all of her money back.

GRAND SCHEME
: From December 2005 to February 2006, Cosmi would routinely wander around New York City’s JFK Airport while speaking loudly into his cell phone: “Yes, yes, I’ve been robbed! And my patient doesn’t have much time!” When a concerned citizen showed interest, Cosmi introduced himself as “Dr. Michael Harris” or “Dr. Michael Stanley” and explained that he desperately needed cab fare to get to Brigantine Hospital in New Jersey to perform emergency surgery. “I promise I’ll pay you back,” he’d say. “It’s a matter of life and death!” In all, Cosmi conned ten people out of more than $800, including a flight attendant; a rabbi; a cop’s widow; and an off-duty NYPD captain named Bill Tobin, who gave the scam artist $100.

EXPOSED!
A week after he’d been unknowingly conned at the airport, Tobin was riding on the LIRR (Long Island Railroad) and heard Cosmi giving the same spiel to an elderly woman. “I wasn’t carrying my gun, which was probably good, because I wanted to stick it in his ear,” said Tobin, who arrested Cosmi for fraud.

OUTCOME
: Authorities were able to track down Cosmi’s other victims (he still had all of their names and addresses in his notebook because he’d promised to pay them back). It was later revealed that Cosmi is the son of a New Jersey prosecutor…and that there is no “Brigantine Hospital” in New Jersey or anywhere else. Cosmi was ordered to pay $2,165 in restitution and undergo drug counseling to avoid a jail term.

Here’s the third installment of our story of one of the biggest mining bonanzas in American history. (Part II of the story is on page 222.)

S
ELLERS’ REMORSE
It didn’t take long for the discoverers of the Comstock Lode to realize how wrong they’d been to sell out so early. Having thousands of dollars in their pockets, perhaps for the first time in their lives, must have felt wonderful in an age in which the highest paid miners made $4 a day. In the 1850s, $1,000 had more purchasing power than $100,000 does today.

But as the new owners of the Comstock claims dug deeper into the earth, not only did the ore deposit not peter out as the discoverers had expected it would—it grew larger than the most experienced mining engineers had ever seen before. Who knows how many sleepless night were spent by the early sellouts, anguishing over what might have been had they held onto their claims for just a little longer.

Normally, such rich deposits of gold and silver are found in narrow cracks in the Earth known as
veins
or
lodes
. They’re deposited there by geothermally heated water, which dissolves trace amounts of gold, silver, or other minerals at deeper levels in the Earth’s crust. Then, as the water rises through cracks in the crust and gets near the earth’s surface, the hot water cools and the minerals come out of suspension and are deposited in high concentrations in the cracks.

Such cracks are
usually
quite narrow—no more than a few feet wide. But not this time: by the time the miners had dug 50 feet down, the vein had grown to 10 to 12 feet wide, and as the miners dug deeper, it grew wider still. When they reached a depth of 180 feet in December 1860, the vein was more than 45 feet across—so wide, in fact, that traditional methods of reinforcing the mine
against cave-ins weren’t good enough to do the job. A better technique of timbering had to be found, and in late 1860 a mining engineer named Philipp Deidesheimer found one. Instead of just putting posts against each wall and running a horizontal beam across the top to reinforce the ceiling, Deidesheimer used six-foot lengths of heavy timber to build giant cubes that could be stacked like building blocks to any height, width, or depth.

Once this and a few other engineering challenges were solved, the Comstock Lode began to produce valuable ore faster than the mining companies could process it. Traditional horse-powered ore processing machines called
arrastras
soon gave way to giant steam-powered mills that by the end of 1861 could process more than 1,200
tons
of ore per day. More than $2.5 million worth of gold and silver bullion was pulled out of the mines that year; the number more than doubled to $6 million in 1862 and doubled again to more than $12.4 million in 1863.

The miners and the mine owners were making plenty of money, but in these early years nobody made out better than the lawyers. When it became evident that the Comstock Lode was one gigantic ore deposit instead of many small ones, the owners of the original mining claims wanted it all. They filed suit against newer operators to drive them out of business. By the time they succeeded in 1865, more than $10 million—the equivalent of $14
billion
today and nearly 20% of the entire production of the mines up to that point—had been spent on lawsuits.

As the mine roared to life, so did the city being built on top of it. In the winter of 1859, miners who’d lacked the foresight to bring their own tents with them to Virginia City had had to tunnel into the hillsides for shelter or squat in hovels made of stone, mud, and sagebrush. By the following spring, however, more than a dozen prominent stone buildings had already been built, as had dozens more of wood. Hundreds more went up before the year was out.

The presence of so many miners with money to burn and no place to burn it attracted scores of merchants and aspiring businessmen who hoped to profit by providing them with goods and
services. Soon the wagon trains hauling goods and supplies into the city stretched for miles on end. By the end of 1860, the settlement that had looked like a refugee camp just a year earlier boasted hotels, boarding houses, restaurants, butcher shops, bakeries, tailor shops, candy and cigar stores, and doctors’ offices. On the seamier side, there were saloons, gambling halls, opium dens, several brothels, and at least one brewery.

That was just in the first year of growth; in the years to come, Virginia City would add paved streets, gas streetlights, schoolhouses, an opera house, an orphanage, five newspapers (26-year-old Samuel Clemens began using the pen name “Mark Twain” while editor of the
Virginia City Enterprise
), half a dozen churches, telegraph and railroad links to the outside world, and the only elevator between Chicago and California. When a lack of drinking water became a barrier to further growth in the early 1870s, the city ran a seven-mile-long iron pipe up into the Sierra Nevada mountains and began siphoning two million gallons of fresh water into the city every day.

By the mid-1870s, Virginia City boasted nearly 30,000 residents and in many respects was the most important community between Denver and San Francisco. The wealth of the Comstock Lode remade the map of the American West and provided the impetus in 1861 to create the Nevada Territory, which became the state of Nevada just three years later. It also helped to spur interest in building America’s first transcontinental railroad, which broke ground in 1863. The city of Reno, Nevada, 17 miles outside of Virginia City, was just a stop on the railroad when it was founded in 1868.

Most of the goods and supplies that went to Virginia City passed through San Francisco, giving that city a major economic boost. San Francisco’s first stock exchange, founded in 1862, was set up to trade Comstock Lode shares. More prominent brick buildings were built in the city in 1861 alone than had been built in all previous years combined, and the pace of development remained high for many years to come.

Feeling unlucky that you missed out on the Comstock
Lode? You might be luckier than you think
.
Part IV of the story is on page 446
.

One of the best parts about a road trip: visiting wacky tourist attractions and weird local landmarks. Here are a few towns and cities that have made their mark by having the “world’s largest” something or other
.

Location:
Providence, Rhode Island

Details:
Sitting on the roof of New England Pest Control, on the southbound side of I-95, is this 58-foot-long blue bug. “Nibbles Woodaway” (named in a local radio contest) was built in 1980 at a cost of $30,000. Nibbles is 928 times the size of an actual termite, which makes it clearly visible from I-95. The company dresses it up like a witch on Halloween and a reindeer on Christmas. Bonus fact: Nibbles is hurricane-proof, and it’s made out of fiberglass, so it’s termite-proof.

Location:
Winlock, Washington

Details:
A 12-foot-long, 1,200 lb. fiberglass egg sits atop a steel pole right in the center of this small town just south of Seattle. In the early 20th century, Winlock was the second-largest egg producer in the United States, and the town built a giant egg to celebrate its claim to fame. The first egg was built out of canvas in 1923. That egg was replaced with a plastic version in 1944, then with a fiberglass one in the 1960s. The local egg industry clucked its last cluck years ago, but the giant egg remains the centerpiece of Winlock’s annual Egg Day celebration in June. Since 9/11, the egg has been painted like an American flag.