In 1956, several of us National Guard recruits were sitting around a campfire during encampment in Fort Bliss. As we smoked our cigarettes and drank warm beer, it feel on each one of us to “tell a story guaranteed to curl our hair.”
Two of the guardsmen almost got into a scuffle, each one claiming exclusive rights to a “true” story. As it turned out, several of us had been familiar with the just-told tale. It involved the deleterious effects of a compound called “Spanish fly,” and described the near catastrophic effects an overdose had had on a local woman.
When it was my turn, I made up a tale of a lunatic who’d escaped from jail and had literally torn off a youngster’s arm. My story seemed to suffice; at least nobody appeared to question it and nobody claimed prior knowledge of such an occurrence.
Later, the tales invariably were preceded by “I understand this really happened.” Generally, it happened to a friend of a friend — and it’s amazing how even then, almost a half century ago, the stories circulated — and how they endure.
Generations long before us had their peculiar mythology and clung to these beliefs the way we do.
One of the biggest literary feuds involves the question of whether Shakespeare wrote his own plays. Shakespeare, the author who all of us read in high school, has been the subject of centuries-long controversies.
A writer for New Yorker magazine said he’d watched as someone appeared on the Tonight Show and cited lines from other playwrights, used by Shakespeare. The guest’s conclusion was that the Bard didn’t write his own plays. The New Yorker staffer reported that on the elevator the following morning, he heard several men saying that someone had PROVED that Christopher Marlowe really wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays.
Such is the power of the media. We seldom really question the veracity or reliability of our sources, and once we see something in print, or on TV, we tend to believe it. Add to that the test of time and we have a durable tale. Whether they’re called “old wive’s tales,” “myths.” “hoaxes” or “urban legends,” they all have incredible sticking power. Some of them get their form from other media and times: last century’s horse and buggy is today’s BMW.
Back at Fort Bliss, as the hour was getting on and some of us were scheduled for early guard duty, a couple of us guardsmen discussed the possibility that some of the tales we exchanged that night might be hoaxes. The term “urban legend” had not been invented yet, but we still considered the source.
We pondered the chances of starting our own tale. Accordingly, we conjured up a quote, ostensibly spoken by Dean Martin about Sammy Davis Jr. Surprisingly, the quote caught on — one soldier even swore he’d heard it on TV — but somehow it never appeared to circulate beyond the bivouac area at TV Fort Bliss.
These are some of the more persistent urban legends:
—A man in a bar befriended a woman who agreed to accompany him to his hotel room. When he awoke, in considerable pain, he discovered one of his kidneys had been surgically removed.
—A trucker, being harassed in a bar by a group of bikers, appeared to remain a good sport, but when he left, he drove over all of the machines parked outside.
—A woman desiring a deep tan went to several tanning parlors in one day and continued to tan long after she got home, from the inside-out—a form of prolonged microwaving. That legend gave rise to a book on that subject, “Curses, broiled again!”
—An airline offered a much-discounted fare for wives of frequent flyers. The only trouble was, when airline representatives wrote letters to the wives, thanking them for flying with them, most of the wives knew nothing about the promotion.
—Dropping a few aspirin tablets into a bottle of Coke will get you high. Las Vegas school children used to participate in summer dances held each Friday at MacFarland Hall. It was fun watching people dropping a handful of tablets into the pop, always out of view of adult supervisors.
When we returned from camp, we asked our parents whether they’d heard any of these tales. Indeed they had. My parents told of a woman at a dance in Mora who had combusted spontaneously some years earlier. Dad recalled some curious stories related by his father, some tales going back to the 1850s.
The Internet is rife with examples of urban legends. One website cautions readers not to automatically discount a story simply because it has been dubbed an urban legend. A great many of them originated as fact but have undergone embellishments over the years.
One of the most intriguing urban legends deals with the world’s best-known atheist, Madalyn Murry O’Hair and the furor that involved millions of Christians determined to “put that heathen in her place.” O’Hair, purportedly, asked the Federal Communications Commission to remove all religious programming from the airwaves. A future Work of Art will address the O’Hair matter, in addition to various other urban legends spawned by her.
Meanwhile we can say two things about O’Hair: 1) She doesn’t have a prayer; and 2) It’s her God-given right to be an atheist.