WHAT'S IT WORTH?

If you have some degree of celebrity, you may have a fortune in your home.

The late Beatle John Lennon owned, like most modern people do, a toilet. This particular toilet was used (I guess “used” is the word) in Lennon’s Berkshire home in England from 1969 to 1971. Let’s cut to the chase. John Lennon’s toilet fetched $14,740 at a Liverpool auction house.

Which reminds me . . .

In 1972 I was part of an Air Force Inspector General team that checked out cost of the maintenance operation for the Air Force’s presidential aviation fleet at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. Our team was able to finagle an on-board visit of President Nixon’s Air Force One jet. Inside his plane, we had to wear little blue booties over our shoes. What a magnificent airplane. The color scheme was tan and blue. In the cockpit, the knobs on the pilot’s throttles were chrome plated. Got to visit President and Mrs. Nixon’s bedroom (separate beds, by the way). Adjacent was Nixon’s private bathroom, and toilet. Here’s my confession (may haunt me someday on an opponent’s campaign flyer). I sat on Nixon’s toilet (just to say I did), reached over and swiped a square of the president’s private toilet tissue. The paper was bordered with a blue filigree.

I brought the elegant tissue home and put it on my dresser. Figured I was the only one on my block with square of Nixon’s toilet paper. Next morning it was gone. Sadly, my wife Marlene had put it in the trash as “just a piece of paper.” And the trash had already been collected.

The question comes to mind, how much could I have gotten at an auction house for President Richard Nixon’s toilet paper? “The saddest words of tongue and pen are what might have been.”