part0047

Frequently in my columns, I will mention a story that supposedly happened to someone and then guess that it’s an urban legend because it seems so weird or funny and, plotwise, so neat. I invite readers to send me variations or verification. Sometimes I get nothing, but usually I receive a few letters reporting on different versions of the story from different locations, and that’s about it.

“The Heel in the Grate” is my best success story so far in tracing a legend. When I queried readers about that one, I soon found myself flooded with mail and led straight back to its source.

Here’s my original reference to the story from a column published the week of February 2, 1987:

During a local wedding, one of the bridesmaids got the spike-heel of her shoe caught in a ventilation grate in the aisle. The next usher coming down the aisle tried to pick up the shoe; the entire grate came up, so he just took it with him .

Then the bride came down the aisle and fell in the hole. Was my aunt suckered by an urban legend? Have you ever found the sources of such stories in the Reader’s Digest?

I think it’s a legend, but I can’t prove it —yet. There are plenty of apocryphal stories involving series of accidents, and a handful of others exist about mishaps at weddings. This one sounds like a legend, but I would need either testimony from a participant in the incident or further versions of the story from different times and locations to be sure. It certainly does sound like one of those Reader’s Digest items, doesn’t it?

My column spurred several people in Dayton, Ohio, to guide me to the story’s origin. Such discoveries are rare in urban-legend studies, and tracing an item published in one of the hundreds of issues of the Reader’s Digest takes more time and patience than I possess.

The answers to both of Joyce Kehoe’s questions turned out to be “Yes,” and the telling data came from Dayton because that’s where “The Heel in the Grate” first got into print.

But to begin with, here’s the Digest connection: “The Heel in the Grate” appeared there in January 1958 under the headline “Chain Reaction.” It told of a young woman in an Ontario church getting her “needle heel” stuck in a hot-air register and was attributed to the Kitchener-Waterloo (Ontario) Record , which had quoted it, in turn, from the publication The Lutheran , where presumably it originated.

In the Digest -transmitted version, a choir was beginning the recessional, singing as they marched. The last woman in the line was the one who lost her shoe, the first man behind her picked it up along with the heating grate, and the following man fell into the opening.

Now, for the truth. The incident did happen, but not in Canada and not in a Lutheran church. Nor was it at a wedding, as in the Seattle version. The story goes back to a mishap that took place a decade or so earlier at the Hanover Presbyterian Church in Hanover, Indiana, at the end of a regular church service, when the choir was marching down the aisle, singing.

I know this because several readers in Dayton, Ohio, said that they knew of the story from their local paper, the Dayton Journal-Herald , which had mentioned specific names. I also got a letter from Woodfin (“Woody”) Jones, who was a witness to the incident and had been the source of the first printed version. (All this quickly came to me because the Dayton Journal-Herald carried my column at that time.)

According to Woody Jones, he and two Beta Theta Pi fraternity brothers at Hanover College, Jim Stuckey and Ed Steiner, were involved in the event, which took place in spring 1949.

According to Jones, Stuckey was the one who picked up the woman’s shoe along with the grate; another student behind him stepped over the hole; and Ed Steiner, a baritone, fell into it.

I also checked with Woody’s former college classmates. James A. Stuckey, now of Port Chester, New York, backed his two fraternity brothers with this elegant testimonial, which he sent to me: “I, James Albert Stuckey, was a member of the Hanover College Choir in the spring of 1949 who, during the recessional, spied the shoe caught in the grate of the hot air register in the center of the aisle. Being the kind of courteous, thoughtful freshman so highly prized in those days, I stopped to retrieve the shoe … and the grate … tucked both under my copy of the hymnal and continued down the aisle.”

Lest any suspect that this fraternity man is perpetuating a decades-old joke, consider this: Brother Jim is now Reverend James A. Stuckey, pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Port Chester.

Edwin C. Steiner, Hanover class of 1950, now living in Midland, Michigan, also confirmed the story: “Yes, it certainly was I who fell into that hot air duct,” he wrote. “I hit the hole cleanly; I didn’t even scrape my toe on the edge. It was like stepping off a gigantic stair step, and I went into the hole all the way up to my thigh.”

The story surfaced in print when Marj Heyduck, a late Dayton Journal-Herald columnist, heard it from Woodfin Jones and published it in her popular column “Third and Main” on August 15, 1957. Jones was at that time executive secretary of the Greenville, Ohio, Chamber of Commerce.

Five months later, finding her story almost verbatim in the Digest and, subsequently, in dozens of church newsletters and other small publications, Heyduck double-checked with Jones to be sure he was not putting her on. He swore he had told the truth. So in a column published on March 8, 1958, Heyduck explained how the true story had taken on a life of its own in oral tradition and in print. As she summed up the case then, “Woody was in the church. Woody told Marj. And Marj printed the story.”

Heyduck’s theory about how the story was spread—detailed in her book The Best of Marj in 1962—was that it might have been repeated widely both from her writings and from the many times she told it in talks she gave.

We can get an idea of how the story became stylized into a true folk legend in some of the variations. Marj herself first specified in her book version that the soprano, the baritone, and the bass were the choir members involved. But a later published version mentioned the soprano, the alto, and the tenor; while a second source said it was the soprano, the tenor, and the minister. The wedding version, like this third choir version, arranges the details for the best possible climax to the story—having the bride herself fall into the hole.

Another embellishment to the story was giving the minister a funny punchline. In one version, for example, the minister, at a loss for the right words, blurts out by way of a benediction, “And now unto Him who will keep us from falling… .” Pandemonium followed in the church!

Marj Heyduck died in 1969 and was the subject of an appreciative column in her paper by writer Mickey Davis. “Marj was famous for her hats,” Davis wrote, explaining how she was photographed wearing a different hat for each one of her columns. Davis concluded that “she was a reader’s delight, but a photographer’s nightmare.”

I must add to this that she and Woody Jones, Jim Stuckey, and Ed Steiner, and the others who wrote to me are all folklorist’s dreams. They included clippings, photocopies, accurate dates, and full names and addresses for all concerned. Thanks to them, for once I found the origin of an urban legend.

There was one more lucky coincidence in tracing the life story of “The Heel in the Grate.” My column unraveling the whole business was released the week of July 20, 1987. And, with the subject on my mind, I mentioned it the following week in my summer American Folklore class at the University of Utah, whereupon a student said, “I saw a scene like that in a movie on the Disney Channel last night.”

The film, she said, called The Glass Bottom Boat , was a 1966 release that included in the cast Doris Day, Rod Taylor, Dick Martin, and Arthur Godfrey. The plot summary in the television listings didn’t sound promising, however, and I wondered if the student was remembering correctly. Nobody else in class had seen the broadcast, so I wondered how I could double-check the scene in the film.

“Well,” the student said, “you can just borrow my tape and watch it for yourself if you want to.” And why, I inquired, had she made a tape of the film? Because, she explained, she’s a big Doris Day fan and never misses a chance to capture DD on her VCR. That’s why.

Never mind the convoluted plot of the whole film, which I watched strictly in the line of duty that night. The scene we are interested in here is this one: Doris Day steps into a sort of astronauts’ clean room to demonstrate its function for a group of people who are touring the space-flight facility where she works. Doris loses her shoe when her spike heel gets caught in the floor grating; Rod picks up the shoe and the grate, and Dick comes along a bit later and falls in.

Evidently a writer working on that script in the mid-1960s had read about “The Heel in the Grate” in the 1958 Reader’s Digest —or perhaps in a church magazine or newsletter—and then filed the anecdote away for future reference.

Just think, if a rabid Doris Day fan had not enrolled in my folklore class that summer, and if the old film had not been rerun on TV, I may never have located this final piece to the puzzle of “The Heel in the Grate.”