JORGE RODRIGUES SIMAO

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Craig Ferguson 2012 08 06 Stephen King, Dave Barry

Never turn down a job because you think it’s too small; you don’t know where it can lead.

Julia Morgan

I had never heard of Julia Morgan, so I decided to do a little digging. What I found was fascinating. In 1894, she graduated with a degree in civil engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, the only female in her class. At the urging of a professor, she immediately headed off to Paris to study architecture at the famed École des Beaux-Arts. It took two frustrating years to gain admittance, though, as the school had never before admitted a woman. But Morgan persisted, and in 1902 she became the school’s first female graduate. After moving back to California, where she became the state’s first female architect, she almost immediately began to make a name for herself. A bell tower she designed in 1904 for Mills College in Oakland was the first reinforced-concrete structure to be built on the West Coast.

When the tower remained standing after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Morgan’s reputation skyrocketed. The back-story on the quotation is even more interesting. Morgan made her never turn down a job remark in 1918. A year later, in 1919, she was approached by newspaper magnate William Randolph

Hearst about designing a small bungalow on a rustic property he owned midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. He said to her:

I would like to build something up on the hill at San Simeon. I get tired of going up there and camping in tents. I’m getting a little too old for that. I’d like to get something that would be a little more comfortable.

After a month of discussion, the architect and the magnate began to think more grandly about the project - which ultimately went on to occupy the next eighteen years of Morgan’s life! Today, Julia Morgan is best remembered as the designer of Hearst Castle, a luxurious 60,000-square-foot mansion with 56 bedrooms, 61 bathrooms, and 19 sitting rooms. Formally named La Cuesta Encantada (“The Enchanted Hill”), it is now a U.S. National Historic Landmark and one of California’s most popular tourist attractions. And it all happened because this pioneering female architect followed her own admonition about never turning down a job because it was too small.

During my research, background stories like this were repeated time and time again. I found them so interesting that I felt I would be shortchanging readers if I did not share at least some of them.

Never Go to a Doctor Whose Office Plants Have Died

Wit & Wordplay

In 1965, Dave Barry graduated from Pleasantville High School in New York, proud of having been voted “Class Clown” by his schoolmates. Later that year, he entered Haverford College-a small, prestigious liberal arts college near Philadelphia-where he majored in English, played lead guitar in a local rock band, and wrote a regular humor column for the college newspaper.

Barry avoided service in Vietnam after he was declared a conscientious objector. He did two years of alternative service before beginning his journalism career in 1971, when he became a general assignment reporter for the Daily Local News in West Chester, Pennsylvania. After three years writing about town hall meetings, sewage plants, and zoning regulations, he gave up his dreams of a journalism career to work for a firm that taught writing skills to business executives. If anything, this new job was even more mind-numbing than his newspaper gig, but it paid better, and Barry worked at it for nearly eight years before declaring his efforts to improve executive prose “hopeless.”

In 1981, Barry wrote a guest humor column on natural childbirth for the Philadelphia Inquirer. The article somehow landed on the desk of Gene Weingarten, an editor at the Miami Herald. Years later, Weingarten recalled, “I read it and realized it was the first time in my life I had laughed out loud while reading the printed word.” Weingarten convinced his bosses to hire Barry to write a regular humor column for the Herald. Within a year, Barry had one of the fastest-growing syndicated columns in America. In 1988, five years after coming to the Herald, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, the only humorist to ever win journalism’s top award. Barry halted his weekly column-writing efforts in 2004, and has recently coauthored a number of fictional efforts with Ridley Pearson. Of his thirty books, though, Barry’s books of humor are my favorites, in large part because of his talent for finding humor in the most unexpected of places.

Never make eye contact.

This appeared in Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need (1991). In providing tips for getting maximum enjoyment out of a trip to New York City, Barry added: “This is asking to be mugged. In the New York court system, a mugger is automatically declared not guilty if the defense can prove that the victim has a history of making eye contact.” The passage is a perfect illustration of why the Pulitzer Prize committee lauded Barry for “his consistently effective use of humor as a device for presenting fresh insights into serious concerns.” In the book, Barry also offered two “cardinal rules” for tourists: Never go outside the hotel. Never board a commercial aircraft if the pilot is wearing a tank top. And “the number one rule” for people traveling to Europe: Never pee in the bidet.

One of Barry’s most distinctive tricks is adopting a serious tone when first offering a piece of advice and then giving it a humorous twist in the explanation. In Dave Barry’s Money Secrets (2006), he begins a thought on teaching children the value of money this way: Never allow a child to spend all of his allowance.

And then he explains: “Insist that he set aside a certain amount of money every week and put it in a safe place, where you can get it if you need to buy beer.” A bit later in the book, he does the same thing when offering rules for effective negotiating. He starts off by writing: “Never pay list price. I mean never. For anything, including intimate carnal relations with your spouse.” And then, in a footnote, he adds, “Just so you know: Your spouse usually charges $50.”

In Dave Barry Turns 50 (1998), there is a piece on pervasive drug use in the sixties and seventies by Jimi Hendrix and other rock stars. In citing what can be learned from the experiences of drugged-out celebrities, Barry cites “an old maxim,” but it seems pretty clear that he is the original author of the saying:

Never try to put all the chemicals in the entire world in your body at the same time.

My favorite Barry neverism, though, appeared in his 2004 book Boogers Are My Beat. I had originally shied away from the book because of the title, but I’m glad I picked it up. As a proud North Dakota native, I was drawn to one column in particular. It began with these words: My advice to aspiring columnists is: Never make fun of North Dakota.

Barry explained: “Because the North Dakotans will invite you, nicely but relentlessly, to visit, and eventually you’ll have to accept. When you get there, they’ll be incredibly nice to you, treating you with such warmth and hospitality that before long you feel almost like family. Then they will try to asphyxiate you with sewer gas.” The column was inspired by a mid-winter trip Barry had made to Grand Forks, North Dakota, to participate in a dedication ceremony for a municipal sewage pumping station that had been named for him. I won’t go into the rest of the story here, but in several hundred words Barry may have written the all-time best description of life in North Dakota in the dead of winter.

Many websites and quotation anthologies have also attributed the following quotations to Dave Barry: Never lick a steak knife. Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night. Never tell a woman that you didn’t realize she was pregnant unless you’re certain that she is. Despite their popularity, I now regard these as orphan quotations, a term for anonymously authored observations that are attached to famous people to give them stature. The last one appears to be a paraphrase of something Barry wrote in a 1997 piece called “25 Things I Have Learned in 50 Years”: “You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests you think she’s pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.”

If Dave Barry was America’s most popular male humorist in the final decades of the twentieth century, then Erma Bombeck was his female counterpart. After graduating as an English major from the University of Dayton in 1949, she married her college sweetheart, Bill Bombeck, and took a job as a full-time reporter at the local Dayton Journal Herald. She had worked as a part-time copy girl at the paper since the age of fifteen, and at sixteen achieved her first great journalistic success when the paper printed an interview she did with Shirley Temple. For the next several years, she wrote primarily for the women’s section of the paper, occasionally landing interviews with visiting celebrities, like Eleanor Roosevelt and Mamie Eisenhower. She also made her first stab at a humorous housekeeping column, which she titled “Operation Dishrag.”

In the early years of the marriage, Bombeck and husband Bill tried to have children, but without success. In 1953, after a family physician told them that a pregnancy was highly unlikely, the couple adopted a baby girl. Bombeck did what most women of the era were doing: she quit her job and embarked on a new career as a full-time mom. Two years later, the woman who was not supposed to be able to conceive gave birth to a son, and three years after that, another son was born. From 1953 to 1964, she never worked outside of her home. But she never lost her desire to write. Almost every night, after the children were put to bed, she could be found in her bedroom, hunched over a makeshift writing desk crafted out of a wooden plank placed on top of cinder blocks.

In 1964, Bombeck began writing a weekly humor column titled “At Wit’s End” for a suburban newspaper just outside of Dayton. She was paid only three dollars per column, but it was a way to dip her toe back into the journalistic waters. When her old bosses at the Dayton Journal Herald learned of her new writing efforts, they offered her $50 a week for two columns. Bombeck, who would have written the columns without remuneration, was elated. But she wasn’t prepared for what was about to happen. Three weeks after her first Journal Herald column, the paper arranged a syndication deal that placed the column in thirty-six major U.S. newspapers. Almost overnight, the little-known Dayton woman became a national celebrity, as millions of American women savored her wry and witty reflections on being a wife, mother, and homemaker. By 1966, she was receiving an honorarium of $15,000 for a single lecture.

Over the next three decades, until her premature death in 1996 at age sixty-nine (from complications after a kidney transplant), Bombeck became the most popular female humorist in America. She wrote over 4,000 columns that, at the height of her popularity, were syndicated in over 900 newspapers worldwide, capturing an estimated readership of over thirty million people. Beginning with At Wit’s End in 1967, collections of her columns were published in numerous bestselling books.

Bombeck had a gift for hilarious one-liners—especially ones that presented life lessons or rules to live by. Sometimes, like Dave Barry, she offered what appeared to be a serious warning, and then gave it a twist: Never be in a hurry to terminate a marriage. Remember, you may need this man/woman to finish a sentence. Never go to a class reunion pregnant. They will think that’s all you have been doing since you graduated. At other times, she offered straight-out witty neverisms: Never accept a drink from an urologist. Never order food in excess of your body weight. Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died. Never have more children than you have car windows. Never loan your car to someone to whom you have given birth.

02.05.2013