Toasted Phonebooks

by Dave Miller

When I was still single, I lived for a year in the basement of a church building in Utah, a privilege I received in exchange for helping around the church. During that period, I also performed occasional magic shows for kids of all ages. One of my tricks was to challenge someone from the audience to rip a phone book in half faster than I could. Of course, there was a trick to tearing up phone books, and I’ll tell you the secret if you don’t tell anyone I told you. You put a garden variety phone book into the oven and bake it for a good number of hours at a temperature just a tad below the paper’s ignition point. After some time, the moisture gets baked out of the paper, and it becomes so brittle that it almost cracks in half under its own weight.

On one beautiful spring Sunday afternoon after everyone left from the morning church services, I started to prepare a new batch of prime phone books. These weren’t just any little local phone books, these were big plump juicy ones from Salt Lake City. I cranked up my downstairs oven to about 275 degrees or so, threw in a few phone books, and then decided to take an afternoon nap. I closed my bedroom door and dozed away the cool afternoon.

My alarm clock rang in just enough time for me to get dressed for the evening church services. Groggily I opened the door to leave my bedroom, and a wall of thick smoke pushed its way in, just about knocking me over. I gasped up a big lungful of smoke and held it in while I groped through the hallway and into the kitchen. There weren’t any flames, but the oven was belching out smoke like a volcano ready to blow, and services would be starting in a few minutes. I shut off the oven, raced to my bedroom, found a big electric fan, ran back to the kitchen and aimed the fan up and out the basement window, trying to force the smoke outdoors.

Pretty soon members started arriving and saw a stream of smoke oozing out of the ground level basement window. Some brave souls with a godly faith ran down to the basement to battle the blazes, and I yelled at them that it was just my phone books in the oven that were smoking -- no fire. Of course they looked at me like I was smokehappy or something, but when they pried open the oven door, sure enough, there were the cremated remains of a stack of phone books.

They prayed for me that night.