Word: closeting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...18th century, when residents of Edinburgh threw slops from fifth-floor bedchambers with the cry "Gardy-loo!" (from the French gardez I'eau, or watch out for the water), Europe's sanitary arrangements consisted of ordure without decorum. The first British patent for a water closet was not taken out until 1775, although da Vinci had designed one nearly three centuries earlier...
Foam & Tears. John Wilkes Booth had turned up in the studio that night carrying a press card, Paar informed the audience. As for the disputed joke, "I only talked to you about a water closet; Walter Winchell would have peeked through the hole and told you who was there." Later he called Winchell lecherous and "a silly old man who could not admit under oath that he writes his own columns," added a few more phrases so barbarous that NBC cut them from the tape-with Paar's assent. (Winchell counterattacked toward week's end, wrote: "St. Paarnard...
...ever know who really started it. It may well have been an obscure vaudeville comedian, after Appomattox or after Yorktown, who first used the joke during a desperate split week in Manchester or Dublin. The joke involved someone's trying to rent a cottage with a W.C. (water closet) and being misunderstood by someone else who thought that by some tortured leap of the jokemaker's imagination the letters stood for Wayside Chapel. Thus, the W.C. was nine miles from the house, could be visited only twice a week, etc. - endless possibilities. Little could the unsung, unremembered hero...
...Paar tape and decided stanchly that the 4.J,-min. se quence must come out. After a quick check with still-unnamed NBC superiors, but without a word to Jack Paar, the tape cutters started snipping. When the show went on the air, the Wayside Chapel, the water closet and Narrator Paar were replaced by a news broadcast. But what followed made all other news - even wine, women, and cash for disk jockeys, even the French atomic blast in the Sahara -seem insignificant on Page...
Arthur L. Kopit '59, author of the play Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Momma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Felling So Sad, flies by jet from Paris to the United States today and will arrive in Cambridge by Thursday, in time to see the reopening of his play...