Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (8 page)

Jill, age
6:
“I’m in favor of love as long as it doesn’t happen when
Dinosaurs
is on television.”

Floyd, age
9:
“Love is foolish…but I still might try it sometime.”

Dave, age
8:
“Love will find you, even if you are trying to hide from it. I been trying to hide from it since I was five, but the girls keep finding me.”

Regina, age
10:
“I’m not rushing into being in love. I’m finding the fourth grade hard enough.”

WHAT’S A SUREFIRE WAY TO MAKE A PERSON FALL IN LOVE WITH YOU?

Del, age
6:
“Tell them that you own a whole bunch of candy stores.”

Camille, age
9:
“Shake your hips and hope for the best.”

Carey, age
7:
“Yesterday I kissed a girl in a private place….We were behind a tree.”

REFLECTIONS ON THE NATURE OF LOVE

Greg, age
8:
“Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good, too.”

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*
      
*

“To love a thing means wanting it to live.”

—Confucius

Don’t let all that happy Ronald McDonald stuff fool you—from the beginning, McDonald’s has played hardball in the burger business. Not even the company’s namesakes, the McDonald brothers, were exempt. Here’s a classic revenge story on a sesame seed bun.

S
ETTING THE STAGE

In 1949, Dick and Mac McDonald opened a drive-in restaurant in San Bernardino, California. By 1954, it was so popular that a salesman named Ray Kroc made a deal to turn it into a national chain and pay the brothers a part of every dollar earned.

That’s how McDonald’s got started.

Six years later, Kroc offered to buy the brothers out for $1 million apiece. They said yes, but there was a misunderstanding: Kroc thought he was getting the original San Bernardino restaurant as part of the agreement; the McDonalds insisted it wasn’t part of the deal.

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

Kroc was furious. He had counted on the cash flow the restaurant would bring. “I closed the door to my office and paced up and down the floor calling the [McDonald brothers] every kind of son of a bitch there was,” Kroc recalled. “I hated their guts.” Privately, he told co-workers: “I’m not a vindictive man, but this time I’m going to get those sons of bitches.” According to John Love in
McDonald’s Behind the Arches
, that’s exactly what he did.

      
The moment the deal was completed, Kroc…hopped on a plane to Los Angeles, bought a piece of property [in San Bernardino] one block away from the brothers’ original fast-food drive-in—and ordered the construction of a brand-new McDonald’s store. It had only one purpose: to put the McDonald brothers’ drive-in out of business.

THE BIG M SINKS

The brothers had already been forced to take down their “McDonald’s” sign, because Kroc’s company now owned their trade name. They renamed it “The Big M,” but in every other way it was the
same as it always had been. The problem was, Kroc’s restaurant also looked like the Big M…but
his
had the McDonald’s name. Customers were a little confused, but figured that the original restaurant had been moved; they took their business to the new McDonald’s. Sales at the Big M plummeted. In 1968, the McDonald brothers finally gave up. They sold their drive-in to a local restauranteur. But he couldn’t make it work either. In 1970, Kroc had his final revenge: the birthplace of the fast food industry closed for good.

ANIMAL REVENGE

“An ice fisherman in Edwardsburg, Michigan, hauled a 4-pound beauty out of the lake, cleanly removed the hook from the fish’s mouth and placed it on the ice to re-bait his line. The thrashing fish flung itself in the air, locked its teeth on the fisherman’s leg and had to be pried loose by two men. The bite required a doctor’s attention.”

—Oops,

by Richard Smith

“In Missouri, Larry Lands was showing off a turkey he had shot and put in his trunk when the not-yet-dead bird started thrashing around and pulled the trigger of Lands’s gun, also in the trunk. Lands was shot in the leg. The turkeys are fighting back,’ said county sheriff Ron Skiles.”

—News from the Fringe,

by John Kohut & Roland Sweet

CONTINENTAL DRIFT

“In revenge for England’s closing of the Libyan embassy in London, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi ordered that England be deleted from all Libyan maps in the mid-1980s. In its place was put a new arm of the North Sea, bordered by Scotland and Wales.”

—More News of the Weird

“The Tonight Show” is a television institution that’s been around longer than a lot of you Bathroom readers. It’s also the forerunner of most of today’s TV talk shows—and it’s got a fascinating history. So we’ve decided to include parts of it throughout the book. Tune it in one day at a time, the way you might watch the show.

G
OODNIGHT, AMERICA

If you flip through the TV channels between 11:30 p.m. and 1:00 a.m., you’ll see a lot of talk shows.

But it wasn’t always that way. Before 1950, there weren’t many TV shows of
any
kind on that late. Networks ended their programming at 11:00 p.m., and many affiliate stations went off the air, too. If they didn’t, chances are they played old movies—
bad
ones. Hollywood, threatened by the inroads TV was making into their business, refused to give them anything good.

Bad movies and test patterns—no wonder hardly anyone was watching.

LEAVE IT TO WEAVER

In 1950, an NBC executive named Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, who’d successfully launched the “The Today Show” and “Your Show of Shows” (a 90-minute variety show starring comic Sid Caesar) turned his attention to late-evening programming.

Weaver (whose daughter, by the way, is actress Sigourney Weaver) figured that a program like “Your Show of Shows,” with vaudeville or Broadway review acts, would be successful between 11:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m.—especially since there was so little competition. He passed around a memo outlining his idea to other NBC executives. It would be called “Broadway Open House,” he wrote, and would be “zany, light-hearted…for people in the mood for staying up.…It would have the glitter and excitement of Broadway, but the backstage ambience of a party.” Through the medium of television, viewers could hobnob with the rich and famous.

Some NBC executives thought it was the dumbest idea they’d ever heard.

“Late night?” one of them supposedly asked at a meeting. “Eleven thirty? At that hour, people are either sleeping or f——.”

“Most people aren’t that lucky,” another NBC exec said, to which Weaver replied: “Let’s do something for ‘most people.’”

HOST OF PROBLEMS

Finding the right host has always been a problem for talk shows—even from the beginning. “Your Show of Shows” had done well with a comedian for a host, and Weaver thought it would work again with “Broadway Open House.” His first choice was a night-club comic named Jan Murray…but Murray decided to emcee a TV game show instead.

Second choice was Don “Creesh” Hornsby, a cross between Robin Williams and PeeWee Herman. On his own L.A. show, he performed magic tricks, played the piano, ran around the stage shouting “Creesh! Creesh!,” and pulled brassieres out of women’s blouses. “His stuff was really wild,” Weaver remembered years later. “We reasoned, ‘What the hell, it’ll be late at night and who cares?’”

Creesh took the job, moved his family to New York…and then died suddenly the weekend before “Broadway Open House” was to premiere. NBC executives were shocked by his death, but weren’t completely unprepared: his act was so weird that they’d already thought about replacements in case he bombed.

“Broadway Open House” went on the air May 22,1950, hosted by Tex and Jinx, a husband-and-wife team with their own radio interview show. They were terrible. So Weaver quickly replaced them with comic actor Wally Cox (Mr.
Peepers
)…who lasted only a few days. Then he tried Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. They were better, but were so overbooked that they couldn’t work as regular hosts.

Weaver’s next choice was a comedian named Jerry Lester. He took the job…but would only agree to work three nights a week—Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays. So NBC hired Morey Amsterdam (who later became famous on “The Dick Van Dyke Show”) to fill in on Tuesdays and Thursdays. A young Neil Simon was hired as a writer.

KEEPING ABREAST

Today, the “sidekick” is a standard part of late-night talk shows. But in 1950, it was a new idea. Few people recall that the first side-kick was Dagmar, a beautiful blonde woman with huge breasts.