By Joel Thurtell
I still have not found the story I wrote about a Farmington museum’s quest for the site of its outhouse.
This is driving me nuts.
You’d think it would be easy to search.
The lead of the story called the concept of seeking a lost privy “a crappy idea.”
Well, I’ve searched and searched the database containing — so I thought — every article I wrote over 23 years for the Detroit Free Press.
Zilch.
No “crappy idea.”
Too bad.
Because in that story, I theorized that the search might turn up the DNA of a POTUS.
You know, a President of the United States.
The President was Theodore Roosevelt, who visited the Governor Warner Mansion in Farmington in the early 1900s and may even have spent a night there.
I figure if Roosevelt spent any time there, and for sure if he spent the night, he would have used the loo.
Far from being “a crappy idea,” then, the quest for Gov. Warner’s outhouse is fraught with historical significance.
Finding the governor’s biffy could morph into discovering the President’s poop!
While the bad news is that I simply can’t locate that “crappy idea” in my DFP database, I have nonetheless some good news.
I got such a kick out of writing that crappy lead and seeing it in the Free Press that sometime later I tried it again.
Different set of facts, but the subject was the same: outhouses.
This one not only made the paper, but it stuck to the paper’s electronic library.
The story is about a guy named — I kid you not! — John Loose.
Here, published with permission of the Detroit Free Press, is that crappy old outhouse story:
Headline: FLUSH WITH LOVE FOR OUTHOUSES
Sub-Head: WHAT STARTED AS A GAG FOR A TROY MAN HAS BECOME AN AWARD-WINNING DEVOTION TO THE PRIVY
Byline: BY JOEL THURTELL
Pub-Date: 9/27/2005
For nine years, says John Loose, it’s been a pretty crappy hobby.
The backsliding for Loose, 51, an information technology expert from Troy, began in 1996, when – purely as a lark, he says – he created a Web site celebrating a once staple though now declining piece of American architecture.
The outhouse.
Back then, a Web surfer who stumbled onto www.jldr.com would have seen a collection of photos of a subject Loose, at the time, knew very little about: priviology.
Loose soon found there are many people fascinated by the lore of the loo.
His Web site and snail mailbox soon filled with unsolicited pictures of privies, yarns about johns, jokes about jakes, books about backhouses and models (nonworking) of Mrs. Murphys.
Now, the outhouse Web site offers huge tracts of correspondence from self-styled privy experts around the world. And there’s Loose’s photographic “Outhouses of America Tour,” showing backhouses from the boondocks of Michigan to the yard of a Pennsylvania mansion. He also peddles privy books, videotapes and other pit-stop paraphernalia.
Loose’s unremitting devotion to knickknacks of the necessary earned him this year’s Crescent Moon Award.
He was notified last week by the owners of a country store in Gravel Switch, Ky., that he was the lucky winner. According to Penn’s Store, the award has been given 14 times and is coveted.
“There’s a whole world of outhouse people,” Jeanne Penn Lane, a co-owner of the store, said Thursday.
Crescent Moon refers to the symbol often cut into the doors of outhouses to provide moonlight at night. Given its purpose, it wasn’t wise to light a lamp in an outhouse.
The award is for “contributions and efforts in promoting the outhouse with dignity,” according to the store’s Web site, www.pennsstore.com.
Loose was invited to visit Gravel Switch to receive the award Saturday. That’s when Penn’s Store, which claims to be the nation’s oldest country store under one family’s ownership, will hold its annual Great Outhouse Blowout, complete with races.
“I said, ëI don’t think I will be able to make it down there,’ ” Loose said Sunday. “That’s a long drive to pick up a piece of paper, or a trophy – I have no idea what.”
And if the award turned out to be toilet paper, wellÖ
Not that Loose is down on outhouse races. He travels each winter to Trenary to photograph, videotape and help promote the Upper Peninsula town’s annual outhouse races. Anyone can enter who has one, call it what you will – a nessy, Roosevelt, Sears seat, outback, Dooley, whatever.
A couple of years ago, Loose received a beat-up package from England. It was from the Thomas Crapper Co. and contained soaps and bath gels with the company’s antique logo.
This latter-day interest in outdoor toilets might have amused the firm’s 19th-Century founder, Thomas Crapper. It was he who contributed to the demise of the pit toilet. Not that Crapper invented the flush toilet. That development may have happened in England as early as the 16th Century.
But it was Crapper who gave his name, albeit unwittingly and posthumously, to the water-powered contraption that made biffies seem crude, stinky places that were either too hot or too cold for the business transacted in them.
Thomas Crapper died in 1910, four years before the world war that sent thousands of U.S. soldiers to England, where they saw Crapper’s name on flush toilets in private homes, hotels and even royal palaces.
There’s a now-impolite word for human waste that sounds much like his surname. This word may have its origins in a Low German word that means and sounds the same.
Thus, the confluence of “crap” and “Crapper” led the World War I doughboys – so Loose theorizes – to fuse the words. “Water closet” became synonymous with “crapper.”
Linguists have a fitting word for it: Back-formation.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com
