Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader (76 page)

• Potatoes produce 75% more food energy per acre than wheat and 58% more than rice.

• Potatoes can also be used to make ethyl alcohol (ethanol). “There’s enough alcohol in one year’s yield of an acre of potatoes,” said Henry Ford, “to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for one hundred years.” Potatoes are used in manufacturing medicines, paper, cloth, glue, and candy.

• It’s the only vegetable that can be grown in desert regions and in mountains above 14,000 feet.

• The average American eats about 80 pounds of potatoes a year, but that has health advocates worried. Why? Because they’re usually deep fried or buried under butter and cheese. The skin of the potato—which contains half its fiber—is usually discarded.

• In 1995 potatoes became the first vegetables grown in space. In the future, NASA plans on using spuds as the main crop to feed space travelers on long voyages.

What do the hummingbird, the loon, and the kingfisher have in common? They can’t walk.

SHAKE THE TREES AND RAKE THE LEAVES

Some of the most colorful CB expressions of the 1970s came from the cat-and-mouse game played by truckers who hated the 55 mph speed limit, and the cops, who tried to catch them speeding.

Convoy:
a group of trucks traveling together for safety (from state troopers), often exceeding the speed limit.

Front door:
the lead truck in a convoy. Its job is to “shake the trees”—spot any state troopers up ahead and warn the other trucks in the convoy to slow down.

Back door:
The last truck in a convoy “rakes the leaves”—keeps an eye out for troopers sneaking up from behind.

Rocking chair/easy chair:
a truck in the middle of the convoy. (They can relax, since they’re not shaking the trees or raking the leaves.)

Hitting the jackpot:
getting pulled over for speeding. (The flashing lights on a patrol car look like a slot machine.)

Feeding the bears:
After hitting the jackpot, a trucker has to pull over to the side of the highway to feed the bears, i.e., receive a speeding ticket.

Brush your teeth and comb your hair:
Slow down to 55 mph—a state trooper with a radar gun is “taking pictures” up ahead.

Plain brown wrapper:
an unmarked patrol car.

Tijuana taxi:
a marked police car.

Bear in the air:
state trooper in a helicopter or airplane.

Someone spilled honey on the road:
The bears are everywhere!

All clean:
No bears in sight.

Bear in the bushes:
a state trooper hidden from view.

Christmas card:
speeding ticket.

One foot on the floor, one hanging out the door, and she won’t do no more:
driving as fast as you can.

In the pokey with Smokey:
in jail.

Dumb prediction: In 1983
Billboard
magazine declared Madonna a “flash in the pan.”

BILLY MITCHELL’S BATTLE, PART III

Here’s the final installment of our story about the man who may have done more than any other individual to prepare the United States for World War II. (Parts I and II are on
pages 185
and
399
.)

P
AYING ATTENTION
Brigadier General Billy Mitchell had proven his point four different times with four different ships: Battleships that were once the unrivaled, unsinkable masters of the sea could now be defeated by aerial bombing. The lesson was not lost on the foreign observers aboard the USS
Henderson
who came to watch the experiment. One of them, a Japanese naval attaché named Captain Osami Nagano, took careful notes during the tests while two companions snapped away with cameras. “There is much to learn here,” one of his companions explained to a reporter for the
Hartford Courant
.

Nagano eventually rose to the rank of admiral…and helped plan the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

LET’S PRETEND IT NEVER HAPPENED

The foreign observers understood what they had witnessed, and so did many of the American officers who were present. So, too, would the public, when newsreel footage of the sinking ships began appearing in movie theaters across the country.

Everyone got the message except for the people who mattered most—the military brass. A joint Army-Navy board studied the tests and decided that the results were “inconclusive.” So a second test, this time using two decommissioned Navy warships as targets, took place in September 1923. Mitchell’s pilots sank them both; unbelievably, the military again dismissed the results.

The media certainly didn’t ignore them: Mitchell, or the “flying general,” as he’d become known, was a popular public figure even before the tests. Coverage of his efforts to repair a serious and obvious defect in America’s national defense turned him into a hero. As his public profile grew, however, so did the number of his enemies inside the military. And Mitchell was anything but a diplomat—he pushed his ideas so forcefully and was so contemptuous of people who disagreed with him that he alienated a lot of colleagues who might otherwise have been his allies.

Since the 1700s, the average yield of a dairy cow has increased by 4 gallons a day.

TAKE A HIKE

In late 1923, the Army sent Mitchell on an eight-month inspection tour of U.S. military installations in the Pacific to get him out of the headlines. Mitchell paid particular attention to the facilities in Hawaii, and when he returned home he wrote a 324-page report that included a prediction that the Japanese would one day attack Pearl Harbor. In his report Mitchell correctly predicted the day of the attack (Sunday), and estimated it would begin at 7:30 in the morning (the first bombs actually fell at 7:53 a.m.). He also correctly predicted where the Japanese aircraft carriers would be positioned, and warned that U.S. forces in Hawaii were unprepared to defend against such an assault.

Not many people bothered to read Mitchell’s report; those few who did ignored it. “Many of the opinions expressed are based on the author’s exaggerated ideas of the powers and importance of air power, and are therefore unsound,” an officer assigned to the Army General Staff wrote in response.

INTO THE WILDERNESS

Mitchell had been the deputy director of the Army’s Air Service since 1919, and as such he had been able to retain his “temporary” wartime rank of brigadier general. But he’d made so many enemies pushing for air power that when his term as deputy director expired in 1925, it was not renewed. He reverted back to his lower, permanent rank of colonel and in June 1925 was transferred to Fort Sam Houston in Texas to keep him out of the newspapers. He was still there three months later when two naval air disasters put him right back in the headlines.

In early September 1925, a Navy seaplane, called a flying boat, crashed into the Pacific after attempting to fly nonstop from San Francisco to Hawaii. A few days later, the dirigible USS
Shenandoah
, pride of the U.S. Navy, crashed after it flew into a thunderstorm, killing 14 crewmembers. Both trips had been ill-advised: the flying boat did not have the necessary range to fly to Hawaii without refueling and had crashed 200 miles short of its destination. The
Shenandoah
was in the middle of a 27-city publicity tour when its captain, under pressure to stick to a tight schedule and against his better judgment, flew into bad weather. (Ironically, both trips were attempts by the Navy to prevent its air program from being overshadowed by the Army Air Service.) Secretary of the Navy Curtis Wilbur summed up the tragedies by saying that they demonstrated the limits of air power: If an enemy tried to mount an air attack from across the Atlantic or the Pacific, they were sure to crash before they got to North America.

Studies show: There are 7,500,000,000,000,000,000 grains of sand on the world’s beaches.

WAR OF WORDS

Mitchell had put up with a lot over the years, but the two accidents and the Navy’s response to them were too much. “My opinion is as follows,” he said in a public statement, “These terrible accidents are the direct result of incompetency, criminal negligence, and almost treasonable administration of the national defense by the War and Navy Departments. As a patriotic American citizen, I can stand by no longer and see these disgusting performances by the Navy and War Departments.”

Mitchell’s enemies had been waiting for a chance to strike back at him, and this statement handed it to them. The military, probably at the instigation of President Calvin Coolidge, decided to court-martial Mitchell on grounds of insubordination and making public statements that were prejudicial to good order and discipline.

GOING OUT WITH A BANG

How do you defend yourself against charges of insubordination when you’ve just called your superiors incompetent, criminally negligent, and practically guilty of treason? Mitchell and his defense team decided that a guilty verdict was almost inevitable, so they turned the trial into a public forum for his belief that the United States was woefully unprepared to fight the next war.

The trial lasted seven weeks. Mitchell defended himself by arguing that the statements he’d made were true. In December 1925, just as he’d expected, he was found guilty on all charges and suspended from active duty without pay for five years. He resigned from the Army a week later.

For a time, Mitchell hoped to capitalize on the publicity generated by his court-martial, and continued to speak out and publish articles in favor of air power. But now the “flying general” was just another civilian, and his arguments had become repetitive and shrill. Then, in 1927, Americans turned their attention to a new and more exciting aviation hero when 25-year-old Charles Lindbergh became the first person to make a nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic.

At –90°F, your breath will freeze in mid-air…and drop to the ground.

THE END

Mitchell once said that if the U.S. were ever drawn into another full-scale war, he wanted to “see the color of the faces of those who opposed our military aircraft program.” But he didn’t live long enough to see his dire predictions about the nation’s vulnerability come true. In 1936, at the age of 56, he died of heart disease—five years before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Still, though he died overshadowed and largely forgotten, he hadn’t lived his life in vain. The sinking of the
Ostfriesland
had made an impact—not with senior officers, but with younger ones working their way up through the ranks. One by one, Mitchell’s skeptics retired and were replaced by officers who understood the importance of air power.

JUST IN THE NICK OF TIME

Whatever doubts remained about the role of military air power ended in 1939, when Germany used fighters and bombers to devastating effect during the invasion of Poland. As with the First World War 25 years earlier, the United States lagged behind its opponents in air power.

But, thanks in large part to Billy Mitchell’s battle, the U.S. military now understood the importance of air power, knew how to use it effectively, and was in a position to build a much larger, stronger air force. Luckily, the nation had two years between the invasion of Poland and America’s entry into World War II, and the military made good use of the time, arming rapidly and building what would ultimately become an 80,000-plane Army Air Force and a 35-carrier Navy, both of which would be decisive in winning the war.

Where would America be now if Billy Mitchell hadn’t been willing to sacrifice his career to drag the U.S. military kicking and screaming into the aviation age?

Maybe it’s better not to think about it.

Chicago has it all—America’s tallest building, and a drive-through post office window.

THE PILGRIMS, PT. IV: THE NEW WORLD

The Pilgrims’ landing in Massachusetts is without question one of the most important moments in North American history. Here’s Part IV of the story. (Part III starts on
page 396
.)

L
ANDING ON PLYMOUTH ROCK
The Pilgrims didn’t land on “Plymouth Rock.” They didn’t land on any rock at all. They didn’t even land at Plymouth. Their original destination was “Northern Virginia”—but not the same region that currently resides next to Washington, D.C. In the 1600s, many maps referred to the entire eastern seaboard as Virginia, because the Virginia Company laid claim to it. The Pilgrims’ actual destination was the Hudson River area in what is now New York, where they had been granted a land claim from the Virginia Company. But they didn’t land there, either.

As the
Mayflower
headed for the Hudson, yet another squall tossed and turned the ship, forcing it off course. When one of Master Jones’s men sighted a peninsula that they could safely reach, William Bradford begged Jones to land there. Jones agreed, so the battered ship immediately turned its rudders and headed for safety. On November 11, 1620, after more than two months at sea, the
Mayflower
dropped anchor off the sandy tip of Cape Cod, near what is now Provincetown, Massachusetts. William Bradford describes the landing in his journal:

Being thus arrived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven, who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element.