Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd by Bathroom Readers’ Institute Read Free Book Online Page A

supported by six massive columns.
    England stood to make a small fortune on such a grandiose memorial. Even so, he suggested that it might be a little much, especially considering that the country was in the depths of the Great Depression and folks in Midwestern towns like Hiawatha had been hit especially hard. Davis thanked him for his opinion and then offered to give the business to another tombstone salesman. England assured Davis that that would not be necessary and committed himself wholeheartedly to the task at hand. As far as anyone knows, he never raised another objection.
    Davis approved the final design and sent his and his wife’s measurements off to Carrara, Italy, where master craftsmen carved their likenesses out of the finest Italian marble. Completed in 1931, the Davis Memorial was easily the most impressive in Hiawatha, probably in the entire state. And yet when Davis got a look at it he felt something was missing. The giant stone canopy dwarfed the pair of statues beneath it. The solution? More statues. “I thought it still looked too bare, so I got me another pair,” Davis explained. The second set of statues depicted John and Sarah as they would have looked on their tenth wedding anniversary, much earlier in life than the first pair of statues showed them.
NO STATUE OF LIMITATIONS
    By now Davis was pretty much out of loose cash, so he signed over his two farms to Horace England for $31,000—more than enough money to pay for the second set of statues. What did he do with the money that was left? He bought a third set of statues, showing Sarah and himself seated in comfy chairs as they would have looked in 1898, after 18 years of marriage. (John is depicted clean-shaven —in the late 1890s, he had burned his beard off fighting a brush fire and for a time went without his flowing beard.)
    Why stop at three pairs? Davis then decided he wanted a fourth pair of statues. Again John is shown seated, this time missing his left hand, which he lost to infection in 1908 after he injured it while trying to trim his hedges with an axe. (The axe is on display in the nearby Brown County Agricultural Museum.)
    The porcelain god? Cloacina was the Roman goddess of sewers.
    Because this fourth set of statues depict John after his wife’s death, her absence is represented by a statue of an empty chair. (Just in case anyone misses the symbolism, the words “THE VACANT CHAIR” are carved into the chair.) Unlike the other statues, this pair was done in granite instead of in marble. Davis claimed it was because he thought men looked better carved in granite.
FORMING A CROWD
    Who says four pairs of statues are enough? Davis commissioned a fifth and then a sixth. When the money from the sale of his farms ran out, he signed over his mansion to Horace England for $1, on the condition that he be allowed to live in it for the rest of his life. That solved Davis’s money problems, which may be why the fifth and sixth pairs of statues were once again done in Italian marble. The sixth—and final—statues depict John and Sarah as angels kneeling over each others’ graves.
    When the odd jumble of statues started to attract visitors, some of whom were disrespectful and climbed the statues or sat in The Vacant Chair, Davis had a three-foot-high marble wall built around the entire memorial, with marble urns at the corners inscribed “KINDLY KEEP OFF THE MEMORIAL.” The wall is just low enough for the seated figures to be seen peeking over the top.
ANYONE’S GUESS
    Why did Davis keep adding statues? Some people speculate that with no family of his own, he was determined to blow his entire fortune to keep his wife’s relatives from getting a penny of his money. Others speculate that Davis was motivated by guilt—he was apparently a very jealous man and during the more than 30 years that he and Sarah had lived on the farm, he had rarely let Sarah go into town alone or even visit the neighboring farm wives. Now, realizing too late