Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (60 page)

Last Concert:
Madison Square Garden, New York City, August 7, 2008

What Happened:
The Police broke up in 1984, but got back together briefly in 1986, played at Sting’s wedding in 1992, and at their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003. Then in May 2007, after 21 years apart, the original three—Sting, Andy Summers, and Stewart Copeland—kicked off a worldwide 30th anniversary reunion tour. A whopping 151 shows later (and after grossing roughly $358 million), they finished off at Madison Square Garden on August 7, 2008. They started the final show with Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love,” then brought up the New York City
Police
Department’s band to help them on “Message in a Bottle” (the usual show opener), played 11 more of their biggest hits, and then left the stage. The crowd watched on the big screens as backstage Sting had his beard shaved off while getting a manicure and massage. The band then returned for a five-song encore, left again, and came back for the big finish, an amped-up version of “Next to You”—the very first song on their very first album,
Outlandos d'Amour
(1978).

Coda:
As the Police left the stage for the last time, the “That’s All Folks” Looney Tunes theme was played on the house speakers. As far as the chances of a reunion go—don’t count on it. According to Sting: “There was no new energy on the tour. Who really wants to go and live with the wife you divorced? I won’t do it again.”

Gallup poll results: 49% of Americans don’t know white bread is made from wheat.

THE STRANGE FATE
OF BIG NOSE GEORGE

“Big Nose” George Parrot got his nickname from the fact that he had a very large proboscis, but his real claim to fame comes from something much stranger than a prodigious schnoz
.

T
HE (NOT SO) GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY
In the late 1870s, a band of Wyoming outlaws called the Sim Jan gang decided to try their hand at robbing Union Pacific trains. Most banking was done by cash in the 19th century, and much of the cash moved by rail. This made trains very tempting targets for criminals looking for big scores.

Some gangs, the James-Younger and Hole-in-the-Wall gangs among them, became quite adept at train robbery. Sim Jan and his gang never did: When, for example, they tried to derail a train outside of Medicine Bow, Wyoming, by loosening a length of rail, a railroad crew on a handcart came by and discovered the damage to the track. After repairing the track, the crew sped off to report the incident to the sheriff, all in plain sight of the gang, who were hiding in bushes nearby. The next day the gang shot it out with the two lawmen sent to find them, Deputy Sheriff Robert Widdowfield and railroad detective Henry Vincent, killing them both. They were the first Wyoming lawmen killed in the line of duty.

FRONTIER JUSTICE

Frank Tole was the first member of the gang to pay for his crime; he was killed a few weeks later while trying to rob a stagecoach. Then came “Dutch” Charlie Burress, who was arrested for the murders and put on a train bound for Rawlins, Wyoming, where he would have gone on trial had he lived long enough to see a trial. He didn’t: when his train made a stop in the town of Carbon, which was Deputy Widdowfield’s hometown, an angry mob pulled him from the train and hanged him from a telegraph pole.

Next up for justice: “Big Nose” George Parrot. His turn might never have come at all, had he not gotten drunk in Montana two years after the killings and been overheard boasting of his involvement
in the crimes. He, too, was arrested and put on a train bound for Rawlins; when the train pulled into Carbon, history seemed about to repeat itself, because once again a lynch mob was waiting. But Big Nose George managed to talk the mob out of the hanging by admitting guilt and promising to tell all if they let him live to face trial. Had he known what fate awaited him, he probably would have preferred being lynched.

Country with the most automobile deaths in the world: India (more than 130,000 yearly).

DOPE ON A ROPE

Big Nose George lived long enough to be sentenced to death by hanging, to be carried out in 3½ months’ time. But he
didn’t
live long enough to see the sentence carried out, because when he nearly killed a guard trying break out of jail, the lynch mob decided that a speedier, unofficial hanging would do just fine. On March 22, 1881, a crowd of about 200 people dragged Big Nose George from the jail and hanged him from the crossarm of a telegraph pole.

Twice.

The mob had to hang him twice because the first rope broke. After a sturdier rope was found, Big Nose George, still very much alive, was hanged again. By now, however, George had managed to untie his hands from behind his back without anyone noticing. Then, when he was strung up the second time, he swung himself
—by the noose around his neck
—over to the telegraph pole, wrapped his flailing arms around it, and held on for dear life.

Big Nose George had no sympathizers in the crowd. The mob was happy to wait for gravity and muscle fatigue to finish the job. Over the next several minutes, he slowly lost his grip and died what must surely have been a slow and painful death.

(According to legend, George’s namesake beak was so big that when he was finally cut down hours later and laid out in a coffin, the undertaker had trouble nailing down the lid because the dead man’s nose was pressing up against it.)

AND NOW THE GRUESOME PART

When no next of kin arrived to claim the body, two local doctors, Dr. Thomas Maghee and Dr. John Osborne, claimed it in the name of medical science. Dr. Maghee had a personal interest in the case: His wife was criminally insane, the victim, it was thought, of head injuries sustained from falling from a horse.
Maghee wanted to examine Big Nose George’s brain for any signs of abnormality that might explain his criminal behavior, then use what he learned to try and help his wife. With the assistance of Lillian Heath, his 15-year-old apprentice, he sawed off the top of the skull, removed the brain, and studied it, but found nothing unusual. Perhaps in a macabre gesture of thanks, he let Lillian keep the top of the skull as a souvenir.

Blueprints for the Eiffel Tower required a third of an acre of drafting paper.

NEXT OF (S)KIN

Dr. Maghee would probably have been better off examining Dr. Osborne’s brain for signs of abnormality. Osborne’s interest in Big Nose George was anything but scientific (he may have been motivated by revenge; according to one account, he was on one of the trains robbed by the Sim Jan gang and the delay caused him to miss a party). After making a plaster death mask of the deceased, a common practice at the time, Maghee removed the skin from Big Nose George’s chest and thighs (but not his nose), and mailed the human flesh to a tannery in Denver, Colorado, where it was made into human “leather”—definitely
not
a common practice at the time. Osborne then had the leather made into a coin purse, a doctor’s bag, and a pair of shoes.

Well, not the
entire
shoes. They were made from a combination of 1) leather taken from the shoes Big Nose George was wearing the day he died and 2) Big Nose George’s own skin. If you’re ever in the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins, where the shoes are on display to this day, you’ll see that it’s easy to tell where the ordinary cowhide ends and Big Nose George begins: Most of the shoes’ leather is an ordinary dark brown, but the leather on the front of the shoes over the toes is much paler—the color of Big Nose George’s own Caucasian hide.

Dr. Osborne loved to wear his Big Nose George shoes. He wore them while practicing as a country doctor, and when he diversified into ranching, banking, and politics in later years, he kept wearing them. When he was elected the first Democratic governor of Wyoming in 1892, in what some claimed was a stolen election, he wore the shoes to his inauguration—which must surely make him the only elected official in U.S. history to be sworn into office while wearing another man’s skin.

Let’s hope so, anyway.

Physician Amynthas of Alexandria performed the first known nose job in the 3rd century B.C.

WHERE’S THE REST OF ME?

The remainder of Big Nose George’s remains did not fare much better: Drs. Maghee and Osborne kept them in a whiskey barrel filled with saltwater for about a year; then, when Dr. Maghee decided he’d learned everything he could (or Osborne decided one pair of shoes was enough), Maghee buried the barrel, with Big Nose George still in it, in the yard outside his medical office.

The remains, long since forgotten, were still there in 1950 when Dr. Maghee’s office building was torn down and the site cleared for new construction. It was then that workmen found the whiskey barrel containing a human skeleton—a human skeleton with the top of its skull sawed off.

Luckily for the medical examiners called in to investigate, someone remembered that many years earlier a young woman named Lillian Heath had been presented the top of the skull of an outlaw named Big Nose George as a gift. She had gone on to become the first female doctor in the state; now in her eighties, she was still very much alive. She still had the top of the skull, too. Over the years she had used it as a pen holder and a doorstop; her husband had used it as an ashtray. When the skull top was brought to where the barrel had been found, it fit the rest of the skull perfectly. A DNA test later confirmed the match.

REST IN PIECES

Today, the lower portion of Big Nose George’s skull is on display in the Carbon County Museum alongside “his” shoes, his death mask, and other related artifacts. But if you want to see the top of the skull, you have to go to Iowa—Dr. Heath held on to it for another decade or so, then donated it to the Union Pacific Museum in the city of Council Bluffs.

That leaves the coin purse and the doctor’s bag, also made from Big Nose George’s hide. They haven’t been seen in ages. Who knows? Maybe they’re still out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered, perhaps on a future episode of
Antiques Roadshow
. How about you—do you have an old, pale-leather coin purse or doctor’s bag collecting dust in your attic?

They may tell a stranger tale than you realize.

Study result: People who smile in their high school yearbook photos live happier lives.

WORD ORIGINS

Ever wonder where everyday words come from? Here are some more interesting stories
.

A
DULTERY

Meaning:
The act of having sexual relations with someone other than a spouse

Origin:
“You may be surprised to hear that there’s no ‘adult’ in ‘adultery.’ That’s because the word goes back to the Latin term
adulterare,
‘to pollute, corrupt, or defile.’ (This in turn comes from
alterare,
‘to alter.’) Having extramarital relations was seen as defiling—or adulterating—the marriage vows, and the verb eventually turned into the noun ‘adultery.’ ‘Adult’ traces back to the Latin
adultus,
a form of the verb
adolescere,
‘to grow up,’ which was the source of the word ‘adolescent.’” (From
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Weird Word Origins,
by Paul McFedries)

AVATAR

Meaning:
An electronic image that represents a computer user

Origin:
“From the Sanskrit
avatra,
meaning ‘descent,’ ‘avatar’ first appeared in English in 1784 to mean an incarnation or human appearance of a deity, particularly Vishnu. It entered the computer world via Randall Farmer and Chip Morningstar, who created the 1986 video game
Habitat
. Said Farmer: ‘Chip came up with the word because back then, pre-Internet, you had to call a number on the telephone and then put the handset into the cradle of a modem. The avatar was the incarnation of a deity, the player, in the online world. We liked the idea of the puppet master controlling his puppet, but instead of using strings, he was using a telephone line.’” (From
The New York Times Magazine
“On Language,” by Aaron Britt)

EUNUCH

Meaning:
A castrated male; an ineffectual person

Origin:
“‘From the Greek
eunoukhos,
‘a castrated person employed to take charge of the women and act as chamberlain.’ The Greek
word is derived from
eune,
‘bed,’ and
ekhein,
‘to keep.’ For obvious reasons, a eunuch was ideally suited to guard the bedchamber of women.” (From
Word Mysteries
&
Histories,
by the editors of the
American Heritage
dictionaries)

Like cats, pigs also get hair balls…but they can’t cough them up.

PUPPY

Meaning:
A young dog

Origin:
“Etymologically, a puppy is a ‘toy’ dog. The word was borrowed from Old French
popee,
meaning ‘doll,’ hence ‘toy,’ which went back via Vulgar Latin to
puppa
(source of English ‘puppet’). The shift from ‘toy dog’ to ‘young dog’ happened at the end of the 16th century. (The Middle English word for ‘puppy,’ incidentally, was
whelp.)
” (From
Arcade Dictionary of Word Origins,
by John Ayto)

PLATONIC

Meaning:
The description of a close relationship between two people—usually a man and a woman—that does not involve sex

Origin:
“Named after Plato, the great Athenian philosopher (420–348 B.C.), to whom we owe almost all our knowledge of Socrates. In his
Symposium,
Plato lauds not the sexless love of a man for a woman but rather Socrates’ love of young men, which was entirely without sexual implications.” (From
Batty, Bloomers and Boycott,
by Rosie Boycott)