Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (73 page)

THE STAR:
Charlie Shaw, owner of a London, Ohio, deli shop

THE HEADLINE:
“Clinton Burger Bites Back”

WHAT HAPPENED:
When President Bill Clinton visited Shaw’s deli in February 1994, Shaw served him a “Clinton Burger”—a beef pattie with bacon, cheese, mushrooms, onions, and a secret “Clinton sauce.” Shaw and his Clinton Burger made headlines across the nation.

THE AFTERMATH:
Unfortunately for Shaw, he also caught the attention of state government officials. They discovered he was operating his business while collecting disability benefits from a previous job-injury claim, a violation of state law. Authorities also discovered that he didn’t have a food-service permit—which is also illegal. He was indicted on state fraud charges.

Survey result: Most males blame their partner after bad sex; most females blame themselves.

Here’s a look at five famous American mothers. You’ll never guess who gave Uncle John the idea for this page.

E
LIZABETH FOSTER GOOSE

Known as:
Mother Goose

Background:
In the 1750s, Boston printer Thomas Fleet heard his mother-in-law, Elizabeth Goose, singing nursery rhymes to her grandson—including “Hickory Dickory Dock,” “Humpty Dumpty,” and “Little Bo-peep.” Fleet began writing them down, and in 1765 published them in a book called Mother
Goose’s Melodies for Children.

MARY HARRIS JONES

Known as:
Mother Jones

Background:
Mary Harris was a schoolteacher in Monroe, Michigan, in the 1850s. She married George Jones in 1861, moved to Chicago, and started a dressmaking business. But the great Chicago fire of 1871 wiped her out. Soon afterward she became active in the U.S. labor movement, and for the next 50 years traveled all over the country organizing workers in steel mills, railroads, coal mines, and the garment industry. She remained an active organizer until shortly before her death in 1930 at the age of 100.

FREDERIKA MANDELBAUM

Known as:
“Marm” Mandelbaum (aka “Ma Crime”)

Background:
She’s almost forgotten now, but Frederika Mandelbaum was one of the earliest, most famous, and most successful organized crime figures in American history. She was nicknamed “Marm,” but if she were alive today, she might be known as “the Godmother.” The
Encyclopedia of American Crime
describes her as “the leading criminal in America during the latter part of the 19th century.”

Marm got her start as the wife of an honest dry goods store owner in New York City. She eventually took over the business and began fencing stolen property. Operating from warehouses scattered all over town, Mandelbaum bought and sold stolen property from heists up and down the East Coast. In little more than a decade she built her enterprise into one of the largest criminal organizations in the city’s history, an empire she kept afloat by paying tens of thousands of dollars in bribes to the police. She retained Howe and Hummel, one of New York’s most prestigious criminal law firms, to keep her and her friends out of jail.

Just a kid at heart: George Washington loved to play marbles.

She was finally caught in possession of stolen property that had been secretly marked by Pinkerton detectives (the New York D.A. thought the police were too corrupt to be trusted for the job) and was thrown in jail. A reporter later described what the detectives found when they stormed Marm’s house to put her under arrest:

It did not seem possible that so much wealth could be assembled in one spot. There seemed to be enough clothes to supply an army. There were trunks filled with precious gems and silverware. Antique furniture was stacked against a wall and bars of gold from melted jewelry settings were stacked under newspapers.

Mandelbaum and her son Julius posted $21,000 in bail the next day...and escaped to Canada with an estimated $1 million in cash. She died a free, very wealthy woman 10 years later at the age of 76.

ANNA WHISTLER

Known as:
Whistler’s Mother

Background:
In October 1871, James Whistler decided to paint a portrait of his mother. “I want you to stand for a picture,” he said. Mrs. Whistler agreed. “I stood bravely two or three days—I stood still as a statue!” she told a friend. But in the end she was too frail to stand for the long hours the portrait required. So Whistler painted her sitting down instead. Today the painting, officially called
Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother
, is the 2nd most recognizable portrait in the world...after the Mona Lisa.

KATE BARKER

Known as:
“Ma” Barker

Background:
She was the mother of Freddy, Herman, Lloyd, and “Doc”—“the Barker Brothers,” four of the most famous gangsters of the 1930s. She not only
encouraged
her boys to become criminals, she actually masterminded many of their bank heists, post-office robberies, and other crimes—including the kidnapping and $100,000 ransom of Brewery magnate William A. Hamm, Jr. in 1933. She and Freddy were killed in a shootout with the FBI at their Florida hideout in 1935.

Just like chocolate today: It was a sin to eat woodpeckers in ancient Rome.

Ever wonder how the pencil got its lead? We did too.

I
S THERE REALLY LEAD IN A PENCIL?

Not anymore. The ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians used small lead disks for drawing guidelines on papyrus before writing with brushes and ink, and artists in Europe used metallic rods of lead, silver, and zinc to make very light drawings centuries ago. But all that changed in 1564, when a graphite deposit was unearthed in Borrowdlae, England.

Using graphite for writing wasn’t new; the Aztecs did it long before the arrival of Columbus. But it was new to the Europeans. They discovered that the soft graphite—a form of carbon—made rich, dark lines. They began carving pointed “marking stones” out of it and using the stones to write with.

The problem was that the stones marked the writer’s hands as much as the paper. Eventually, people figured out that they could wrap a string around the stick to keep their hands clean, unwinding the string as the graphite wore down. That was the first version of the modern pencil.

HOW THEY GET THE “LEAD” INTO THE PENCIL

Now, of course, the graphite comes in a wood casing. But how does it get in there?

• First the graphite is ground up and mixed with fine clay. The more clay added, the harder the lead.

• Then the mixture is forced through an “extruder” to make a long, thin rod.

• The rod is fired at a temperature of 2200° F to harden it and then treated with wax for smooth writing.

• The wood is sawed into small boards that are the length of one pencil, the width of seven pencils, and the thickness of half a pencil.

• Seven tiny grooves are cut lengthwise. Then the lead is laid into each of them, and an identical board is glued on top. A machine cuts the boards into seven individual pencils.

• Last step: They’re painted with nontoxic paint.

An adult crocodile exerts a force of 1,540 lbs. between its jaws. Humans exert 40 to 80 lbs.

It seems like law enforcement agencies have been catching criminals using fingerprints for ages...but actually the practice is less than a century old. Here’s a little background on one of the most important crimefighting techniques of the 20th century.

W
HERE THERE’S A WILL...

In 1903 a convicted criminal named Will West was being processed for entry into Leavenworth penitentiary when prison officials realized that they already had a man matching his name and description at the prison. After double-checking their records (including a photograph of the inmate), they confirmed that the man being processed was the same Will West who was supposedly already behind bars. What was he doing on the outside?

Prison officials assumed he had escaped without anyone noticing ... until they checked Will West’s cell and found he was still in it. The men looked like twins.

At the time, the standard method for criminal identification was the “Bertillon System,” a system based on physical descriptions and anatomical measurements. Robert Liston describes the theory behind it in his book,
Great Detectives:

If one measurement was taken of a man, his height, for example, the chance of another man having exactly the same height was four to one. If a second measurement was added, his head circumference, say, the chances increased to 16 to 1. If eleven meausurements were taken, the odds against a duplication were 4,191,304 to 1. If fourteen measurements were kept, the odds were 286,435,456 to 1.

It seemed foolproof. But now the Wests had proved it fallible. They resembled each other so closely that the system concluded they were the
same individual.

WHAT HAPPENED

Left with no alternative, prison officials turned to a new system being developed by England’s Scotland Yard. They
fingerprinted
the men and discovered that, although the men appeared to be identical, their fingerprints had almost nothing in common.

Yum yum! Americans eat 500 million boxes of Jell-O every year.

FINGERPRINT HISTORY

In 1858 William Herschel, an English civil servant working in India, began collecting his friends’ fingerprints as a hobby. Carefully studying the prints over the years, he made two discoveries: No two fingerprints were the same, and each subject’s fingerprints remained identical throughout their life. He brought his hobby to work with him: Put in charge of paying out pensions to Indian subjects, Herschel—a bigot who thought all Indians looked alike—required each Indian to place their thumbprint on the payroll next to their signature. He figured he could more easily spot fraudulent claimants if he took their fingerprints.

In 1880 Dr. Henry Faulds, a Scottish missionary in Japan, published an article describing how the Japanese had been signing legal documents with their fingerprints for generations. He reported another important discovery: Even when their fingers were perfectly clean, people left fingerprints on every surface they touched. Faulds called on British law enforcement agencies to make fingerprint searches a standard part of police investigations; Scotland Yard finally took his advice in 1901.

FINGERPRINT FACTS

• The FBI didn’t begin fingerprinting until the 1920s; but by the late 1980s it had more than 140 million sets of prints on file, including those of every government employee and member of the military. An estimated 2,700 criminals per month are identified using the FBI’s files.

• It is possible to have your fingerprints removed, but it’s painful and pretty pointless. Even if you do burn or slice off your prints, the scars that are left behind are as unique as the prints they replaced. There is no known case of a criminal successfully concealing his identity by mutilating their fingertips.

• It’s just about impossible to get a set of fingerprints from a handgun; experts place the odds as low as 1 in 1,000. All that stuff you see in movies about cops picking up guns by inserting a pencil under a trigger guard are hooey—there simply aren’t enough smooth, flat surfaces on most handguns to get a good print.

• No one fingerprint is
necessarily
unique; scientists figure there’s a 1 in 2 quadrillion (about 1 million times the Earth’s population) chance that someone on Earth has the same fingerprint you do.

Give that man a log! Mickey Rooney’s real name is Joe Yule, Jr.

“It’s the worst form of government,” said Mark Twain, “except for every other form of government.” Or something like that. Or maybe it wasn’t Twain. In any case, it was a good point. So here’s the BRI election news.

A
BSENTEE BALLOTS

“What if they held an election and no one voted? It happened in Centerville, Miss....Denny James looked like a sure thing for the board of aldermen—he was the only candidate. But no one voted for him. State law says a candidate must get at least one vote before being declared the winner of an election.

“The moral of the story: Don’t take anything for granted. Everyone in town assumed the neighbors would be voting. When the polls closed early, even James—who worked late that day—was shut out. But another election was held, and James got 45 votes.”

—Parade
magazine, January 2, 1994

MAKING AN ASS OF VOTERS

In 1936, Kenneth Simmons, mayor of Milton, Washington, placed a candidate named Boston Curtis on the ballot for the Republican precinct committee. Curtis ran as a “dark horse”...and although he gave no speeches and made no promises, he won.

The victory made national news, because Curtis was a mule; his hoof prints were even imprinted on the filing notice. Simmons later claimed he’d sponsored the mule’s candidacy “to show how careless many voters are.”

MAN STOPS FOR BURRITO—ALTERS HISTORY

ASHFORD, CONN.—“Robert Brady was driving through town last month and decided to stop at a convenience store for a burrito. Next door, in front of Town Hall, he saw a sign that read, ‘Vote Today.’

“For a lark, the former Ashford resident—who was still registered to vote here—strolled into the Town Hall and voted ‘Yes’ in what turned out to be a referendum on the town budget. He later learned that the $5 million budget had passed by a single vote. ‘Hey, I changed the course of history, all for a burrito,’ Brady said, laughing.”

—Hartford Courant
, July 15, 1991

At its present rate of erosion, Niagara Falls will completely disappear in 22,800 years.

PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE

“In 1978, William Smith, of Waukegan, Illinois, was elected Lake County auditor. But in a referendum on the same ballot, voters abolished the position of auditor altogether. ‘I feel like I’ve gone off a diving board and suddenly found the pool was empty,’ Smith said.”