Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader Read Free Page B

with oats). And true to his word, more than 250 horses and their riders paraded into the theater, “parked” in the stalls, and watched the movie.
    IT WORKED! The odd story ran in every newspaper and newscast in town, which attracted huge crowds to the film Weiser was promoting, Mel Brooks’s Western comedy spoof, Blazing Saddles .
    STUNTMAN: Press agent Milton Crandall
STUNT: In 1923 Denver newspapers were tipped off that a whale had been sighted on top of Pikes Peak, a 14,000-foot-high mountain in Colorado. The reporters raced up to the site to see the whale. Sure enough, just beyond the peak, occasional sprays of water shot into the air, while hundreds of spectators gathered below, shouting, “Thar she blows!”
    IT WORKED! The “whale” was actually Crandall hiding just behind the peak shooting sprays of seltzer in the air. And the shouting people were all paid to stand there in the cold for an hour. But it was worth it—for Crandall, anyway. He got just the publicity he was looking for to promote the 1922 movie, Down to the Sea in Ships .
    STUNTMAN: A “researcher” calling himself Stuart Little
STUNT: In the 1940s, Mr. Little started a massive letter-writing campaign to the editors of newspapers across the nation. His beef: He refused to believe government statistics that claimed the average life span of a crow was only 12 years. Little was certain that crows lived longer than that. So in the letters he asked people from all over to send him authenticated reports of old crows. Little just wanted to set the record straight.
    IT WORKED! Thousands responded. Soon everyone was talking about old crows. And the makers of Old Crow bourbon whiskey—and the press agent responsible for Stuart Little’s letters—were smiling all the way to the bank.
    STUNTMAN: Publicist Harry Reichenbach
STUNT: A group of teenage boys walked up to a store window in 1913 and saw a lithograph of a naked young woman standing in a lake. They ogled it for hours. Reichenbach complained to the head of the anti-vice society about the picture’s effect on the young, demanding they come see the outrage. They did, and began a moral crusade against it.
    IT WORKED! The picture was titled September Morn . The artist, Paul Chabas, had hired Reichenbach to drum up interest in it. Pretty soon the artist was unable to meet demand. The image showed up in magazines, on calendars, and on cigarette packs. Sailors had the woman tattooed on their forearms. The lithograph sold seven million copies, and the original painting is on display today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
    STUNTMAN: Publicist Jim Moran
STUNT: “Don’t change horses in midstream,” says the old adage. Moran set out to prove it wrong. Wearing an Uncle Sam top hat and tails, he was photographed in the middle of the Truckee River, where he successfully leapt from a black horse to a white one. He’d had been hired by the Republican Party to inspire voters in the 1944 presidential campaign to change parties after three consecutive terms of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Tallest monument in the U.S.: The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, at 630 feet.
    IT WORKED! Actually, no, it didn’t. FDR easily defeated Republican Thomas Dewey in the election.
    STUNTMAN: Surrealist Salvador Dalí
STUNT: In 1939 Dalí was commissioned to create a window display for New York City’s prestigious department store Bonwit Teller. The artist’s design incorporated a female mannequin with a head of roses, ermine fingernails, a green feathered negligee, and a lobster telephone. A male mannequin wore a dinner jacket with 81 glasses of crème de menthe attached to it. Each glass was topped off with a dead fly and a straw. The only furniture in the window was a fur-lined claw-foot tub filled with water and floating narcissi (flowers).
    IT WORKED! When the window was unveiled, the Bonwit Teller staff was outraged; they took it upon themselves to alter the scene without asking the artist. A furious Dalí