Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (33 page)

In 1935 Humpty Dumpty Drive-In owner Louis Ballast trademarked the word “cheeseburger.”

BODIES IN MOTION

It’s hard to stay disinterested about disinterment. Throw in (or dig up) some celebrities, and you’ve unearthed some great bathroom reading
.

E
LVIS PRESLEY (1935–77)
Claim to Fame:
The King of Rock ’n’ Roll
Interred:
When Presley passed away at age 42 in August 1977, he was initially entombed in a special “family room” crypt inside the mausoleum at the Forest Hill Cemetery in Memphis, Tennessee. The crypt had slots for eight people, and Presley’s mother Gladys, buried nearby, was moved to a space near her son.

Disinterred:
In the month following Presley’s death, it’s estimated that more than a million fans crowded into the cemetery, disrupting other mourners and forcing the Presley estate to pay for extra security. Then, two weeks after the funeral, three men broke into the cemetery in the middle of the night and were charged with attempting to steal the King’s body to hold it for ransom. The charges were later dropped; the men carried no tools and may simply have been trespassing. But the incident put a scare into Elvis’s father, Vernon Presley. He felt his wife and son would be safer at Graceland, so he obtained a zoning variance to convert the estate’s “Meditation Garden” into a six-plot private cemetery. Both Elvis and his mother were disinterred and buried at Graceland the following October. Vernon Presley died in 1979 and is buried there, as is his mother, Minnie Mae, who died in 1980.

JACKIE WILSON (1934–84)

Claim to Fame:
A legendary R&B and pop singer of the 1950s and ’60s, Wilson had numerous top-10 singles, including “Higher and Higher” and “Lonely Teardrops.”

Buried:
In 1975 Wilson collapsed from a heart attack while singing “Lonely Teardrops” onstage. He never fully recovered, and after lingering in nursing homes for eight years, he died in 1984. Wilson’s finances weren’t great even before the heart attack, and after almost nine years of round-the-clock care, his estate was broke. There was no money for a headstone; his grave in the Westlawn Cemetery in Wayne, Michigan, was marked only by a board with his name on it.

Don’t tell your kids! In Brazil the school day starts at 7:00 a.m. and ends at noon.

Exhumed:
Three years later, Wilson’s grave still had no marker. That’s when Florida disc jockey Jack “The Rapper” Gibson launched a fundraising drive to buy one. He raised enough money for a small marble crypt, and in June 1987 the remains of Wilson and his mother, who died a few weeks after his heart attack, were exhumed and interred together. Inscribed at the bottom of their marble marker: “No More Lonely Teardrops.”

LEE HARVEY OSWALD (1939–63)

Claim to Fame:
On November 22, 1963, Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Two days later he was gunned down by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby.

Buried:
After Oswald’s body was autopsied, it was returned to his family and buried at the Rose Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth, Texas.

Exhumed:
In 1981 Oswald’s grave was reopened at the behest of Michael Eddowes, a British conspiracy theorist who believed that the man buried in Oswald’s grave was a Soviet KGB assassin. Oswald had lived in the U.S.S.R. from 1959 to 1962, and Eddowes was convinced that a KGB double agent had returned to the United States in Oswald’s place on a mission to kill JFK. Exhuming the corpse and comparing the skull with Oswald’s dental records, he argued, would prove the man in the grave was not Oswald.

Oswald’s widow, Marina, thought Eddowes’s theory was nuts, but she had her own theory, namely that Oswald’s body had been secretly removed from the grave and cremated “to prevent vandalism.” She supported Eddowes’s request to have the body exhumed because it would enable her to find out if the grave was empty.

It wasn’t. When the grave was dug up in October 1981, it did indeed contain a body. After the head was removed and the teeth cleaned and X-rayed, the new X-rays matched Oswald’s dental records perfectly. “Beyond any doubt, and I mean absolutely any doubt,” the lead pathologist told reporters, “the person buried under the name Lee Harvey Oswald is Lee Harvey Oswald.”

Worldwide, only 6% of airplane pilots are women.

BLOOD & BOOTY

American history might have been written in French or Spanish. Here’s part of the reason it wasn’t
.

P
LUNDERERS FOR HIRE

In 1562 some French Protestants known as
Huguenots
landed on what is now Parris Island, near Beaufort, South Carolina. Like the English Pilgrims who would arrive a half century later, the Huguenots wanted religious freedom. This group, led by Captain Jean Ribault, also wanted riches: They were privateers. In an era when navies were smaller than they are today, countries hired armed private ships and crews to do much of their pillaging and plundering for them. Privateers were an accepted part of naval warfare: Under admiralty law, if captured they were supposed to be treated as prisoners of war, even if what they were doing looked a lot like piracy.

The Huguenots were going to do their pillaging under the French Crown. After raising a stone marker on Parris Island and claiming all the surrounding land in the name of King Charles IX, Ribault sailed back to France for supplies. He left behind 28 men to establish a fort, with enough food for six months and sufficient arms and munitions for defense. The men immediately set to work building a shelter made of wood and earth, with a straw roof. They dug a moat around it and added four bastions—bulwarks from which they could defend the new settlement. Then they waited...and waited... and waited. But Ribault did not return. The problem: By the time Ribault reached home, France was embroiled in a full-blown religious war between Protestants and Catholics and had no money to spare for his resupply mission. So Ribault sailed on to England, hoping to find a sponsor there. Instead, he ended up imprisoned in the Tower of London by a suspicious Queen Elizabeth I.

WE’LL NEVER HAVE PARRIS

When their supplies ran out, the abandoned men panicked. They cobbled together a ship using pine resin to seal the wood and moss to caulk the seams. Then they sewed their shirts and sheets together to make sails and begged the natives for rope to rig them. The 15-year-old cabin boy took one look at the ship that they planned to sail across 3,000 miles of ocean (with no navigator) and decided to stay with the Indians.

In 1810 the average American drank 5 gallons of liquor per year. In 2010: 1 gallon.

The would-be colonists spent more than a year at sea, much of the time drifting for lack of wind. The food they’d brought dwindled to 12 corn kernels per man a day. When that was gone, they ate their shoes and leather jackets. Then they turned to cannibalism, choosing one of their own to eat so the rest might live. Fourteen months into their voyage, adrift and within sight of France but unable to steer what was left of their poorly built vessel, a British ship spotted them. They were rescued and taken to England.

HERE THERE BE SILVER

Two years later, Ribault’s lieutenant, René Laudonnière, sailed a second band of colonists to the New World. He landed at the mouth of the St. John’s River (near present-day Jacksonville, Florida), a perfect spot for attacking the galleons returning to Spain via the Gulf Stream. But while his men built a new fort—called Fort Caroline—Laudonnière discovered spoils closer at hand: gold and silver bangles jingling around the natives’ ankles. He decided to befriend them and discover the source of their wealth. First, he promised to aid a local chief in his war with an inland rival. Then, to curry favor with the rival chief, he rescued the prisoners being held by the first chief and returned them home. Pretty soon neither leader trusted the French commander.

The same went for his own men. Tired of waiting for treasure—and food—they plotted to get rid of him. Thirteen mutineers stole some small ships, and set to sea to attack Spanish ships. Bad idea. Spain had already targeted the colonists at Fort Caroline as “a nest of pirates” and sent one of its most brutal commanders—Pedro Menendez de Aviles—to wipe them out.

GOD VS. PIRATES

By the time Menendez arrived, Ribault had been released from the Tower and returned to France. From there he went to the New World with seven ships and 500 soldiers, where he reinforced and resupplied Fort Caroline, left a small company of men to help Laudonnière guard the fort, and set sail with the rest of his crew. If all went well, he would wipe out the Spanish before Menendez could establish a stronghold. As for Menendez, he built fortifications on ground protected by water on three sides and named the new fort
San Augustin
(St. Augustine). Being a devout Catholic, he also prayed. He was certain that God would be on his side against the Protestant pirates.

The world’s first nuclear reactor was built under the University of Chicago football stadium.

SURRENDER OR STARVE

Ribault’s ships made their way down the coast toward St. Augustine, not knowing that a hurricane thundered toward shore. While the French were battered by the hurricane, Menendez took his forces overland to Fort Caroline. He destroyed the fort and killed nearly everyone there, including the sick, the elderly, the women, and the children. Laudonnière survived by abandoning his post and fleeing with a few followers. Meanwhile, the storm blew Ribault’s ships past the inlet that led to St. Augustine and smashed them against the barrier islands. Ribault and his men survived, but had to make the 180-mile trek back to Fort Caroline on foot, only to be stymied when they reached an inlet south of St. Augustine. How would they cross?

Back from destroying the fort, Menendez and his troops were only too happy to help. They offered to ferry the French across, if they agreed to lay down their weapons and surrender. Famished and exhausted, the shipwrecked privateers let themselves be taken captive, expecting to be treated as prisoners of war. Menendez promised to do “whatever God directed him to do.” The Spanish ferried the French across the inlet a few at a time, led them into the dunes, and put them to the sword. Locals named the place
Matanzas
—the Spanish word for “slaughter.”

THE PIRATES’ REVENGE

Menendez’s treachery did not go unmarked, though he justified the massacre as being done “not as to Frenchmen but as to heretics.” Unfortunately for him, Laudonnière made it home. Soon tales of the slaughter spread across France. Dominique de Gourgues, a French nobleman, had his own score to settle with Spain. In his youth, he had been taken captive and consigned to the brutal Spanish galleys. Enraged by the massacre, he disguised himself as a slaver, equipped three ships with 200 men-at-arms, and headed across the Atlantic.

Volleyball was originally called Mintonette.

WHO GOT THE LOOT

Spanish soldiers at the fort on the St. John’s River—renamed San Mateo—were completely fooled by the fake slavers, and saluted as de Gourgues’s ships sailed into the river. That night, de Gourgues and his men came ashore, slew the guards at their posts, and over-ran the garrison. They hanged Menendez’s men on the same trees Menendez had used as gallows for the French at Fort Caroline. De Gourgues posted a sign that read, “I do this not as to Spaniards nor as unto Mariners, but as to Traitors, Robbers, and Murderers.”

Historians have speculated that had the French and Spanish not been busy fighting each other for control of Florida,
either
country might have secured an unbreakable hold over the New World. Their squabbles most benefited another colonial power: England.

TWO McDONALDS (B)AD CAMPAIGNS

• Members of the company’s marketing department knew they had their work cut out for them when they were faced with the task of pitching the dark, PG-13-rated
Batman Returns
to McDonald’s young customers in 1992. The company rolled out a line of Happy Meals that downplayed connections to the film: A free toy featuring the Penguin looked like the character in the comic book instead of the grisly, deformed villain in the film, played by Danny DeVito. Even so, the company was slammed with complaints from angry parents who took their young children to the movie after seeing the toys. To avoid further controversy, the company yanked the campaign.

• McDonald’s has helped promote dozens of animated Disney films over the years, from
The Little Mermaid
to
Bambi
rereleases. They missed the mark on a promotion for
Mulan
, the 1998 movie based on an ancient Chinese legend. Commercials featured Ronald McDonald in a headband comically karate-chopping the company’s logo, and encouraged customers to sit on the floor when they ate their Happy Meals. Jeff Yang, founding editor of
A
, an Asian-American magazine, called the racial stereotyping in the ads “the equivalent of a drive-by mooning.”