406: True Urban Legends 

Ira Glass

If you grew up in a big city, you may have heard the urban legend alligators in the sewers. They got there when people brought back baby alligators from vacations in Florida and flushed them down the toilets. That's the kind of thing that, once you turn 12, you don't believe in anymore.

Well, New York Times, February 10, 1935, reports three teenagers were shoveling snow into a manhole on East 123rd Street. They look down and see an alligator, which they pull out. It's not very healthy. And they carry it to the Lehigh Stove and Repair Shop at 441 East 123rd. Lots of neighbors witness it. People are quoted by name. Best guess? The gator came off a boat in the Harlem River.

Or, take this urban legend. I'd heard this one, but I'd never believed it. Turns out to be true. Ian Meyer in Portland, Oregon, three years ago, walks home one night with his girlfriend from a party, where he'd had a couple of beers, three beers. Gets to his house, goes in the bathroom

Ira Glass

Right? Maybe you heard stories like this that don't seem they could possibly be true about somebody. They go in their bathroom late at night. They sit down. They get bit by a rat that came up through the pipes into the toilet. Here it is.

Ira Glass

OK. Horrifying. Ian, of course, quickly closes the lid, stands there dumbstruck. What's his next move? It's obvious.

Ira Glass

Ian picks up the magazine rack by the toilet, which is heavy with three-years-old National Geographics. He puts this on top of the toilet lid, leaves the bathroom to figure out his next play. His girlfriend, Chelsea, is outside.

Ira Glass

Ian puts a leather garden glove on one hand and puts a rubber kitchen glove on top of that figuring, the rat's wet, that's going to be better.

Ira Glass

Not good. Ian drops the lid, leans his weight on it, which catches the rat half-in half-out of the toilet. Its head and front arms are sticking out, waving around. Now he just feels sorry for the little thing. But this is his chance to set it free.

Ira Glass

I'll spare you the gory details that follow. Let's just say that after another couple grabs, Ian comes to realize that he cannot capture the rat. He's going to have to kill him while he's trapped there halfway out of the toilet bowl. Which Ian does with his not-bare hands.

Ira Glass

Ian says half the people he tells this story to don't believe it. He thinks they just don't want to believe it. But it turns out that the pipes that lead from your house to the sewer are not full of water. They're mostly empty unless you're doing your wash or something else that's sending a lot of water down.

So rats can climb up through the pipes, and the only time that they actually need to hold their breath is when they get into the little reservoir in the toilet trap. In a way, it's surprising it doesn't happen more often. Ian says he's found another rat in his toilet since then. He now flushes when he walks into the bathroom just to send water down the pipes as a precaution against vermin. As for Chelsea?

Ira Glass

Chelsea was left with the urban legend that rats could come up into the toilet. I mean, now she knew it was true. So when she went into the bathroom, her imagination could just go wild.

Well, today on our radio show, we tried to wave away the smoky vapor of illusion and myth. We dive into a few stories, a few urban myths to see what is real and what is not so our imaginations don't have to run wild anymore. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. We bring you today three stories of real urban legends.

Act One, What's That Smell, in which a retired millionaire tries to understand the reality of a tough, seedy inner city neighborhood. Act Two, Fleeing Is Believing. Foreigners come to the US who believe all kinds of misinformation about us that turns out to be true. Act Three, Sleeper Cells. Is it an urban myth that your cell phone gives you brain tumors? Stay with us.

Ira Glass

What's that smell? The way Steve Poizner sees it, he did something admirable, something daring, something unusual. And when I read his account of what he did, he seemed sincere about it too. He's a bit of a corny writer. Though even that, you can kind of forgive him. He's not a professional author.

At the age of 45, after starting one Silicon Valley company that he sold for $30 million and a second one that sold for $1 billion, Poizner didn't need to work anymore. He says, he wanted to do some good for people. And so he called a dozen public high schools and volunteered to be a guest teacher of some sort. One called him back, a high school called Mount Pleasant. And Poizner got into his car, drove the 15 miles from his neighborhood in Los Gatos in Silicon Valley to East San Jose.

Ira Glass

This is Steve Poizner reading from the book he wrote about this.

Ira Glass

When he sees the sound walls that separate California homes from the highway, he asks, were they keeping out the city's grit and noise or hiding profoundly sad lives? He's allowed in the school to teach one US government class for one semester under another teacher's supervision.

What he finds in the school are leaky roofs, hardened, unresponsive students, gangs and violence, a drop-out rate twice the national average. He worries that one student is going to punch him. And later, that this student and his thug friends are going to push him up against a wall. He wonders if the students are "too busy ducking bullets to consider their careers." At the end of his first visit to school, he's relieved to find his Lexus still in the parking lot where he left it.

Ira Glass

And the only problem with this is a lot of it might not be true.

Ira Glass

Steve Poizner's book got more attention than most do because in the seven years since he spent one semester at Mount Pleasant High School, Steve Poizner ran for assemblyman and lost, ran for a statewide office, California Insurance Commissioner, and won. He's in his fourth year in that job now. And today, he's one of two front-runners to become the Republican candidate for the governor of California. And right after publication, his book, which is titled Mount Pleasant, jumped to number 5 on The New York Times Best Seller list.

Ira Glass

I heard about Steve Poizner and the controversy over whether his book got things wrong when a publicist for the book contacted our radio program. She wrote an email describing the incident at the bookstore this way, "Liberal activist took offense at how he describes the school, accurately, as plagued by gangs, teen pregnancy, and disrepair. They are trying to shut him up and discredit his argument about charter schools." Poizner makes a case for charter schools late in the book. "This is a classic case of liberals refusing to listen to simple facts and rational solutions."

So I read the excerpt of his book online. There's a full chapter, and Poizner links to it from his campaign website. You can read it yourself. And it raised more questions than it answered. It's a very odd chapter, all about Poizner's first days teaching a class at Mount Pleasant. There's scene after scene where he's floundering, standing in front of the class asking big, abstract questions. "Would you want to live in a country where the leader didn't want to lead, if the money issued by the government wasn't any good, or people were treated unfairly?" None of the students respond.

He's a rookie teacher. He doesn't know how to engage them yet. Nothing unusual there. But here's the strange thing. The conclusion Poizner comes to, again and again, during these scenes isn't that he's doing anything wrong, or he has anything to learn as a teacher. Instead, he blames the kids. They're tough. They're unmotivated. They lack ambition. They're wired differently.

The students, meanwhile, in every scene in the book-- I've read the whole book-- seem utterly lovely. Polite, they don't interrupt, they don't talk back. They just seem a little bored. His very worst student is a graduating senior, who's hoping to go into the Marines. Checking school records, I learn that Poizner's unmotivated, unambitious class included one of the school valedictorians, Charles Rudy, who graduated and went to college.

Could he be getting this so completely wrong, I wondered? Could he have written an entire book misperceiving so thoroughly what was happening in front of his own eyes and was now trying to use that book to run for governor? It seemed too incredible. And that's what brought me to San Jose last week to visit the school and its neighborhood.

Ira Glass

This is Joe Lovato. He teaches English at Mount Pleasant. His Dad taught English at Mount Pleasant before him.

Ira Glass

Mark Holston is one of Joe's colleagues in the English department. In his book, Poizner talks a few times about wishing that he could have a Stand and Deliver moment with his students. And Mark says, that's a problem right there.

Ira Glass

Driving around the neighborhood, it is hard to disagree with the teachers who say that it is a perfectly nice middle class and working class area. Occasionally you'll see a house in bad shape, but overwhelmingly it's nicely tended yards, garages, decent cars and SUVs in the driveways. It's suburban. I was surprised to learn that when Poizner taught here in 2003, there was a golf course just a couple blocks from the school. There's still a lake and the Raging Waters water park. He doesn't mention those in the book.

We called a half dozen local real estate agents who confirmed what the teachers told us. That the neighborhood looks the same today as it did back in 2003. If anything, they said, with the recession, it's gotten a little worse. Average house price in 2003 near the school was $457,000. Today, it's $317,000.

Well, it's 4:45, and I'm standing in the staff parking lot where Steve Poizner used to park his car, I suppose. And I am hearing the raspy sound of a dog's bark. I can't see any beat-up, old cars over the fence. Mainly, it's incredibly lush and green and beautiful. There are little purple flowers. There are palm trees. And it's just-- it's lovely. And it smells nice. Though there is the dumpster for the school right by the parking lot. Conceivably, on some day that he was out here, that's what was making the trash smell was the school's own trash.

So I ran all this by Steve Poizner, the tidy houses, the golf course, what I did not smell in the parking lot.

Ira Glass

So we went to the police. And they informed us that no, the neighborhood around Mount Pleasant High School is not especially dangerous or crime ridden. It's average for San Jose. And while San Jose might have a reputation in the richer suburbs around it for being sketchy and definitely was more dangerous in the '70s and '80s, a police spokesman told us that that view is out of date, an urban myth.

According to FBI statistics, San Jose is one of the safest cities in the country. There are 371 violent crimes per 100,000 people in San Jose in 2003, the year Poizner was there. You'd be more likely to be a victim of violent crime in Austin, Texas or Seattle or Phoenix or Columbus, Ohio or San Francisco. When it came to property crime that year, you were more than twice as likely to have something stolen from you in Honolulu, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco or nearly any big city you can name.

In his book, Poizner plays up the violence at the school itself. He mentions a shooting at the school that happened all the way back in 1990 where a Vietnamese student from another school shot a Mount Pleasant freshman. And Poizner tells a story of a student of his who let him know that she wouldn't be at class for a couple of days because her boyfriend was on trial for being the driver in a bank robbery. There's another student in Poizner's class that Poizner assumes must be in a gang. Though confusingly in the book, Poizner never actually goes to the trouble to find out if the student is in a gang. That's the student who Poizner worries will hit him or get his thug friends and push him against a wall.

So is the school dangerous? Well, I checked with the man who knows, Christopher Schroeder, the associate principal at Mount Pleasant in charge of discipline.

Ira Glass

That's about the number of fights that you would get at any high school even in a fancy neighborhood. There are no metal detectors in the school's entrances. Mr. Schroeder says, the total number of gang members among the 1,900 students here? 50 at most.

Ira Glass

When it comes to the drop out rate, Steve Poizner also seems to be choosing his statistics very selectively. Mount Pleasant's dropout rate, including the year he was there, is consistently better, sometimes far better than the state and national dropout rates, which is a huge achievement for a school like Mount Pleasant that is 2/3 Latino. Nationally, Latino dropout rates are much higher than those of other students. In his book, Poizner doesn't mention any of those numbers.

And he doesn't mention the school's stats at all, but instead quotes a number for the district that the school is in, the East Side Union High School District. Even here, he cherry-picks. In 2003, the year Poizner was at the district, its dropout rate was slightly lower than the state and national averages. Poizner instead chooses to quote the number for one of the two years during the past decade, 2005, when the district had twice as many dropouts as the state and national numbers. Statistically, Poizner did not teach at a terrible school in a terrible neighborhood, but an average school in an average neighborhood.

[SINGING]

Ira Glass

These are the dangerous toughs of Mount Pleasant High School rehearsing The Music Man in the brand new auditorium that the school just built. The school has 150 students studying animation in a special studio with rows of Macs and animation stands. This was all going on when Poizner was at the school too. There are 19 AP classes. There's a vocational program teaching metal and woodworking and computer-aided design plus a variety of special projects and programs to close the achievement gap and get less-priveleged kids to college. School attendance is 95%.

[STUDENTS HOLDING A FINAL NOTE]

Ira Glass

Some things about the school though clearly could be better. The school doesn't hit its goals in statewide testing. It ranks in the 40th percentile of all California schools partly because a fourth of Mount Pleasant student body is rated "not proficient" in English. But measured against schools with similar demographics, it's in the 70th percentile.

For years, I was a reporter in the Chicago Public Schools for NPR's daily news programs. I've been in great schools. I've been in dangerous schools, urban schools, suburban schools. Mount Pleasant is definitely one of the better public high schools I've ever visited. And I know that it may seem like I'm belaboring all this, putting this one book under a microscope point by point, but so many of the political discussions in our country just seem so disconnected from reality. Every year, there are egregious examples of politicians and commentators who believe that if they repeat some non-fact over and over, it becomes true. And the more I looked into Poizner's book, the more it seemed like one of those rare cases that is so obviously and provably untrue.

Though in Poizner's case, what made this especially interesting was that from his book, it seemed very possible that he really is just a well-meaning, idealistic guy who wants to help people who just got a lot of this wrong. Though when I asked Steve Poizner if that's what happened here, that it is not a dangerous, bad school, he stuck by his guns.

Ira Glass

Again, English teacher Mark Holsten.

Ira Glass

Poizner still insists on that. It was two months after he stopped teaching at the school that he filed papers to start fundraising to run for assemblyman. In the spring after that, his campaign came back to Mount Pleasant to shoot a commercial with testimony from teachers and students about what Poizner had done for the school. The videographer set up a camera and lights in one of the classrooms during seventh period. And students were ushered in one at a time.

In campaigning, including in one of his campaign biographies-- a biography which, by the way, calls Mount Pleasant "an inner city high school"-- Poizner also touts the fact that the principal of Mount Pleasant named him Rookie Teacher of the Year.

Ira Glass

Mark Holston and Joe Lovato explained that at the end of school that year, the principal quickly wrote up a bunch of certificates on his computer for a staff party. Lots of people got them for all kinds of things.

Ira Glass

Todd Richards is the social studies teacher who supervised Steve Poizner in classroom 612 back in 2003. He's still there.

Ira Glass

In the debate among Mount Pleasant teachers over whether Steve Poizner was a Machiavellian schemer, who used them, or a sincere, perhaps slightly naive guy, who actually wanted to help out, Mr. Richards is a principled agnostic. We can't know what he was thinking, Richards says. So let's judge his actions. Richard says that he was as suspicious as anybody when this millionaire showed up in his classroom. But over the course of the year--

Ira Glass

When I recorded Mr. Richards teaching a class, his sixth-period college-level macroeconomics class for seniors--

Ira Glass

He asked me if I would like to take five minutes and ask a few questions of the students. He left the room, so his presence wouldn't bias anybody. I asked the class if there was anything that they would want me to ask Poizner on their behalf or to say to him. One senior raised his hand and said that he'd just heard from colleges.

Ira Glass

Yvette Rodriguez, another senior, spoke up.

Ira Glass

Well, sort of. Some conclusions, obviously, people do argue with. But this particular conclusion-- that being at the 40th percentile among California public schools is not good enough-- is one that's kind of gotten lost in the shuffle in a lot of the discussion at the school.

Ira Glass

Sudhir Karandikar created the AP calculus program at Mount Pleasant. He teaches four classes of AP calculus. He's the only teacher I saw at school who could be described as dapper. And the only one wearing a suit, a charcoal gray pinstripe. He's been at Mount Pleasant 14 years. And he says, sure, Poizner got it wrong when he wrote that this is a dangerous school.

Ira Glass

"We should be doing a better job with these kids," Mr. Karandikar said. "That's what we should move the discussion to now." A few teachers told me that they agreed with Poizner, that academically the school should be better. And they like the fact that Poizner gives lots of details in his book to help his readers understand the money problems that the school faces and that he shows some of the everyday teaching problems they're up against, stuff that isn't really talked about in the news or normal political discussions about schools. Here's English teacher Vivian Bricksin.

Ira Glass

Steve Poizner says, this is exactly what he hopes readers will take from his book. He wants it to lead to a better discussion about how to improve schools. In the book, he talks mostly about charter schools as being a good laboratory for new ideas.

In his gubernatorial campaign, he also talks about cutting down on the central school bureaucracy in California, giving more control of the curriculum and more money to local schools, two things that teachers like, of course. Many of Mount Pleasant's teachers are less keen on two of Poizner's other big proposals, to make it easier to fire teachers and suspend rules at the bottom 40% of California schools and to expel from public schools all the students who are in the country illegally, which would, of course, affect students at Mount Pleasant.

Poizner told me that, in the end, it doesn't matter if he got facts wrong about the school. Because everywhere, but at Mount Pleasant itself, this is the discussion that he hopes his book will engender.

Ira Glass

English teacher Mark Holston sees this one differently. He says for Poizner to misread what this school and this neighborhood are all about says a lot about his judgment. And that does mean something.

Ira Glass

One week after Poizner's book made it to number 5 on the best seller list, it dropped to number 33. The campaign declined to give sales figures for the book and declined to say whether it bought enough copies itself in that first week to put the book on the best seller list.

The principal at Mount Pleasant told me she now finds herself with an awkward dilemma. Poizner has donated the profits from the book sales to the school. And she's not sure that they should take it. He got so many things wrong about Mount Pleasant and offended so many people. But at the same time, with budgets being slashed, it's hard for her to turn her back on any money that might help her students.

[MUSIC - "GANGSTA'S PARADISE" BY COOLIO]

Coming up, what refugees halfway around the world know about us thanks to Chevy Chase and other true urban legends. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our show we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, True Urban Legends. We're wading into the vapory shadows of urban myth to see what is real and what is not. We've arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, Fleeing is Believing.

Refugees often spend decades in camps waiting, waiting for wars to end back home, waiting to be resettled, some of them to the United States. This leaves a lot of time to think about what the future might hold and makes for a huge rumor mill fed by third cousins and friends of friends who get to the United States and send back word of what it's like. And that's where the confusion begins. Mary Wiltenburg, a reporter who has spent years documenting refugee life in America, has this story.

Mary Wiltenburg

Say you're a refugee. Once you've survived whatever hell you fled plus 10 more years in a crowded camp, there are rumors about the US you want to believe. America is the land of easy money, endless food, plentiful jobs, machines that cook and clean for you. Still, it's not like you'll believe just anything. The refugees I've talked with say a lot of the rumors they hear seem way too far-fetched to be true.

Mary Wiltenburg

What makes these rumors so unbelievable often is how inscrutable or frightening or taboo they would have been back home.

Mary Wiltenburg

Faiza Mohamed is Somali and grew up as a refugee in Kenya where the whole idea of PDA was unimaginable especially among unmarried people. When refugees like her are accepted for resettlement in the US, they're bombarded with information about the country in these three-day orientation marathons that cover everything from fire safety to banking, sexual harassment to how to use an airplane toilet. Faiza's orientation leader actually mentioned that it's common for American couples to express affection in public.

Mary Wiltenburg

Another problem is Hollywood, the source of some of the most enticing images of America and some of the most exaggerated. Sinisa Milovanovic, a refugee from the former Yugoslavia, spent years waiting in Germany before coming to the US. In Berlin one Christmas, a movie came on TV, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. In case you've been spared the pleasure, it features Chevy Chase as a guy who's, let's say, intense about seasonal decorating. He's covered every inch of his house with lights, nests of sparking extension cords, Santa-related [UNINTELLIGIBLE].

Mary Wiltenburg

A few after they watched this, Sinisa and his wife moved to Fargo, North Dakota. One night their first winter there, Sinisa got home, and his wife told him she had something to show him outside.

Mary Wiltenburg

Even years later, former refugees recall these moments with incredible clarity. The shock or bewilderment or comedy of realizing, that's true? People here don't follow soccer? Men really date other men? Americans sleep in bed with their cats? A lot of times, the reaction is, whoa, OK. But once in a while, the moment changes a person's whole image of America.

Hazem Taee, an Iraqi refugee, had heard back home that ordinary Americans could go into stores and buy guns. But that seemed incredible. How could a country keep law and order if its civilians were armed? Then one day, not long after his family arrived in Phoenix, they pulled up to a stoplight next to a guy on his motorcycle. He didn't look like a policeman, but for some reason he had a gun on his belt.

Mary Wiltenburg

One especially scary rumor, one that refugees from all over the world told me they heard, but couldn't fathom, is that in America, people without homes sleep on the streets. When you come from someplace where it would be unthinkably shameful to let that happen to a relative, it's hard to believe. When Haider Hamza arrived in the US from Iraq four years ago, he was sure this was a myth. Then late one night, he went walking in Central Park.

Mary Wiltenburg

That's Hazem, who saw the guy on the motorcycle with the gun. Now he works as a case manager at a resettlement agency, helping fellow refugees transition to American life. A couple of years ago, he told a group of clients that if they missed rent payments or couldn't find a job, they could wind up homeless and have to live in a shelter. They thought he was lying. Frustrated, he loaded them into a van and drove them past a homeless shelter in downtown Phoenix with a line out the door. They were shocked.

Mary Wiltenburg

It happens so fast. You come here lost as can be and within a couple of years, you're the ambassador, the friend of a friend fielding calls from overseas in the middle of the night. You're showing around dazed new arrivals and watching their astonishment at the guns in Walmart, the dogs in handbags, the couples kissing in the park. And you're the one telling them, "Don't worry. Don't stare. That's normal here."

Ira Glass

Mary Wiltenburg lives in Atlanta.

[MUSIC - "BANKING ON A MYTH" BY ANDREW BIRD]

Ira Glass

Act 3, Sleeper Cells. The scariest urban myths are the ones that are about stuff that is everywhere, that we use every day, that we can't avoid, that our drinking water might be impure, that there are toxins in our food, that killer earthquakes might be coming to the west coast, that the polar ice caps might melt. Oh, wait a second, some of those are actually confirmed by scientists. Which brings me to cell phones.

There was an article in GQ Magazine recently about cell phones about whether they're bad for us. "The only honest way to think of our cell phones," the article says, "is that they are tiny, low-power microwave ovens, without walls, that we hold to the sides of our heads." Which is true. Cell phones and ovens both use the same kinds of waves, microwave frequencies. But, of course, microwave ovens use much, much, much more power, enough to cook meat.

And there's lots of research out there that's found no negative effects on our bodies from cell phones. In fact, there's another article in Harper's Magazine just this month about the same thing, are cell phones bad for us? And that article points out that for all the research that's found that cell phones make us lose sleep, make us think slower, break apart our DNA, cause brain damage in children, there are just as many studies, if not more, that say that cell phones make us more sleepy, make us think faster, don't break our DNA, and don't affect children one way or another.

Other countries, especially in Europe, take the possible threat of cell phones much more seriously than we do here in the US. Health ministries in Canada, Russia and Finland have asked for restrictions on sales of cell phones to children. France is trying to ban cell phones in schools. Some European governments are trying to ban wifi in government buildings and on campuses. Wifi also uses those microwave frequencies. And the National Library of France already got rid of it.

People have protested and torn down cell towers in Spain, Ireland, Australia, and Israel. In 2007, the European Union's environmental agency warned that cell phone technology "could lead to a health crisis similar to those caused by asbestos, smoking, and lead in petrol." The operative word there, of course, is "could." The weird word is "petrol."

So what should we believe? Are they bad for us? Or aren't they? Christopher Ketcham, who wrote the GQ article, talked me through some of the most troubling studies.

Ira Glass

Christopher Ketcham is an investigative reporter. We linked to his GQ article at our website.

[MUSIC - "TRUTH IS" BY BROTHER ALI]

Our program is produced today by Sarah Koenig with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Jane Feltes, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Seth Lind is our production manager. Emily Condon is our office manager. Production help from Brian Reed.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. For this week, you can see the raw data that we think contradicts Steve Poizner's findings at Mount Pleasant. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss Mr. Torey Malatia, who wants all of us here at WBEZ to get back to our exercise programs, back on the stair machine. Summer is coming.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

[MUSIC - "TRUTH IS" BY BROTHER ALI]

Announcer

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