Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (44 page)

Unfortunately, Owney’s heartwarming story has a tragic end. In 1897 he was deemed too old to travel, and the clerks in Albany “retired” him—except that Owney didn’t take to the idea. Without the Albany postal employees knowing it, Owney hopped a train and ended up in Toledo, Ohio, where the clerks chained him to a wall in the basement of the postal station. According to the National Postal Museum, “Owney was mistreated while being shown off to a newspaper reporter in Ohio and became so mad that he bit a postal worker.” The Toledo postmaster felt he had to do something, so he summoned a police officer, and on July 11, 1897, Owney was shot and killed.

Today, his legend lives on at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C., where you can see his stuffed body in a display case. With him are many of the more than 1,100 tags, tokens, hotel room keys, and medals that Owney received in his estimated 143,000 miles of travel as the unofficial mascot of the U.S. Railway Mail Service. In 2008 the
Washington City
paper voted Owney’s display the “Best Animal Monument” in all the District. It remains one of the museum’s most popular exhibits, especially with children…and postal clerks.

How much would you spend for something you
really
wanted? You never know until you get caught up in the bidding frenzy at an auction and end up paying, say, $32,000 for a PEZ dispenser. Here are some record auction prices
.

AN ACTION FIGURE
: A 12-inch-tall prototype for the original G.I. Joe line from 1963 was purchased by Baltimore’s Geppi Museum in 2003. Price: $200,000.

A YO-YO
: Richard Nixon autographed a yo-yo for country star Roy Acuff when the president visited the Grand Ole Opry in 1974. When Acuff died in 1992, the yo-yo sold at auction for $16,000.

A KIDNEY STONE
: In 2006 online casino
Golden-Palace.com
paid actor William Shatner $25,000 for a kidney stone he’d recently passed. (Shatner donated the money to Habitat for Humanity.)

A PEZ DISPENSER
: In 1982 PEZ made two prototypes of a dispenser featuring a white-helmeted astronaut. They were shown to the merchandise department of the 1982 World’s Fair, but never went into production. That’s probably why one of them brought in $32,000 at a collectibles auction in 2006.

A BOTTLE OF WINE
: A bottle of Chateau Lafite from 1787, thought to have been owned by Thomas Jefferson (the bottle was engraved with “TH.J”), sold for $160,000 in 1985. It’s too old to drink—it was purchased by a Jefferson enthusiast, not a wine collector.

A BOOK
: In 1188 King Henry of Brunswick (now part of Germany) commissioned an order of monks to write his political biography, entitled
The Gospels of Henry the Lion
. In 1983 a copy sold at auction for $12 million.

A STAMP
: An error at a Swedish printing plant in 1855 resulted in a run of stamps being printed on yellow paper instead of the standard green. Only one of the stamps still exists; it was sold in 1996 for $2.3 million.

A DONUT
: To raise money for Hurricane Katrina victims, the “Roula and Ryan” morning radio show in Houston auctioned off a donut on eBay. It pulled in $5,100.

A BASEBALL CARD
: There are only six 1909 Honus Wagner “T-206” cards in mint condition known to exist. In 2000 a T-206 once owned by hockey great Wayne Gretzky fetched $1.27 million on eBay.

AN M&M
: In 2007 a brown M&M sold for $1,500. What was so special about it? In 2004 the candy had flown on board SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded space flight.

A CAR
: Only six Bugatti Type 41 Royale sports cars were ever made, all between 1927 and 1933. Original price: $42,000. One sold at a Japanese auction in 1990. Price: $15 million.

A LETTER
: In 1991 a letter written in 1863 by President Abraham Lincoln to Major General John A. McClernand explaining the Emancipation Proclamation sold at auction. Price: $748,000.

A PIANO
: A handmade Alma-Tadema model Steinway and Sons piano built in the 1880s was sold to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts in 1997 for $1.2 million.

A VIOLIN
: In February 2008, Russian businessman Maxim Viktorov paid $7 million for a rare 18th-century Stradivarius violin.

A PHOTOGRAPH
: Photographer Edward Steichen took a photo of a heavily forested pond in Mamaroneck, New York, in 1904. He titled it “The Pond-Moonlight.” In 2008 one of three existing original prints sold for $2.9 million to a private party. (The other two are owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.)

A MUSHROOM
: An English restaurateur purchased a two-pound Italian white truffle at a charity auction in Tuscany. Price: $28,000.

A PAINTING
: Mark Rothko’s painting
White Center
sold in 2007 for $72.8 million, an art-auction record.

A PIG
: In 1985 Bud Olson and Phil Bonzio bought “Bud the Pig” at a Texas livestock auction for the price of $56,000. Bud was a rare cross-breed barrow. (A “barrow” is a neutered male pig.)

Harley Earl was a man of many gifts, the most important of which may simply have been good timing. He happened to join GM at a time of profound change in the auto industry when his talents could be put to the most use. (Part I begins on page 139.)

M
IDEAST MEETS WEST
When Harley Earl arrived in Detroit in the late 1920s, there was no guarantee that his ideas regarding automobile design would prevail. He had the support of Alfred Sloan, the head of General Motors, but the auto industry was still dominated by engineers who were openly hostile to the idea that how a car looked was as important as how well it was built. These engineers were no-nonsense guys and
very
conservative; one designer said they “dressed like detectives and rarely even took their hats off.” When Harley Earl from Hollywood rolled into town wearing suede shoes with bronze-colored suits and purple shirts, spinning yarns about the car he’d designed with a saddle on the roof, the engineers dismissed him as a “pretty boy” and a “pantywaist” and probably figured he wasn’t going to last very long.

Besides, what was wrong with the way cars looked? They had a certain austere, utilitarian beauty to them, the automotive equivalent of a hammer or an electric drill. Making cars
prettier
made about as much sense to these engineers as putting makeup on a shotgun.

But the auto industry was changing, and changing quickly. For most of the previous two decades, automakers had sold most of their cars to people who had never owned one before. Henry Ford had won the battle to sell Americans their very first autos; his giant factories could produce them faster, cheaper, and in greater quantities than any of his competitors could. By 1923 the Model T had a 57 percent share of the U.S. automobile market. Half of all the cars in the world were Fords.

By that time, however, just about everyone in the United States who wanted a car had one. Now the trick for automakers was getting customers to replace the cars they already owned—and had already
paid for
—with new ones that cost more money. And the auto companies had to get them to do it long before the old car wore out, because if a company had to wait for the old car to die before they sold the owner a new one, it wouldn’t sell enough cars to stay in business.

In the contest to sell Americans their
second
car, Henry Ford was his own worst enemy. Ford was fixated on the Model T and rightly considered it his greatest creation. Yet over the 19 years that it was sold by the company—the
only
automobile sold by the company during that time—he refused to upgrade or improve upon the original design. He dismissed as frivolous “knickknacks” such innovations as speedometers, gas gauges, shock absorbers, hydraulic brakes, accelerators on the floorboard instead of on the steering column, and electric starters in place of hand cranks. Ford fought these improvements year after year, often firing the very capable executives who dared to suggest them. (Many of these executives were snapped up by GM.) On those few occasions when Ford finally did incorporate something new into the Model T design, it was usually long after it had become standard equipment on competing cars.

While Henry Ford kept his foot on the brake, Alfred Sloan of GM kept his mashed down on the accelerator. In addition to continually updating his automobile designs, Sloan invented new ways for people to pay for their cars. Where Ford had always insisted on being paid in cash and in full (banks did not yet offer car loans), Sloan created the General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) to finance the purchase of GM cars. Even though it was impossible for GM to match Ford on the actual price of the car, GMAC financing actually made GM cars more affordable for many buyers. By 1924, the same year that GM became the first company to accept trade-ins, a third of all GM car purchases were financed by GMAC.

For all the emphasis Sloan put into improving the quality of GM automobiles, he also understood that new technology was
very costly to develop, took years to bring to market, and often didn’t pan out. But he wanted to maintain the illusion of continual improvement, so in the mid-1920s he introduced the auto industry’s first “annual model change.” From then on, even when the mechanical components of a car remained the same from one year to the next, the car’s appearance would change every year, if only in subtle ways, to keep the public interested in it.

The annual model change would have another effect on consumers: It would cause them to become increasingly dissatisfied with their existing cars from one year to the next, a concept that became known as “planned obsolescence.” (Earl preferred to call it “dynamic obsolescence.”) With any luck, the planned obsolescence would drive car owners into a car dealership a few years early to trade in older cars that had become shabby and dowdy before their time.

Making annual style changes in all the cars sold by GM’s five divisions—Chevrolet, Oakland (later renamed Pontiac), Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac—required a lot of designers, which was why Sloan decided to set up GM’s own in-house Art and Color Division. Those conservatively dressed engineers from the Old School may not have wanted to hear it, but guys like Harley Earl, with their suede shoes, loud suits, and purple shirts, were here to stay…and soon they’d be calling the shots.

Putt-putt over to page 415 for Part III of the story
.

•
I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen

•
Cheese Problems Solved

•
High Performance Stiffened Structures

•
Living with Crazy Buttocks

•
The Joy of Chickens

•
Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers

Public servants often say the strangest things
.

“I talk to those who’ve lost their lives, and they have that sense of duty and mission.”

—
Sen. Jeff Sessions

“I’m the consul for information, but I don’t have any information.”

—
Ofra Ben Yaacov, Israeli Consul

“Thanks for the question, you little jerk.”

—
John McCain, when asked by a high school student if he was too old to be president

“Nearly everyone will lie to you given the right circumstances.”

—
Bill Clinton

“When Newfoundland finally joined with us in Confederation in 1867, it was like a family reunion.”

—
Stephen Harper, Canadian
Prime Minister (Newfoundland joined the Canadian
Confederation in 1949)

“You can’t just let nature run wild.”