States outhouse expert studies passing trend

<p>Few people enjoy bathroom humor as much as Mary Frazier Long. In fact, the 71-year-old retired schoolteacher often gets phone calls from strangers, looking to share a few dirty jokes of their own.</p><p>As Georgias only registered priviologist, Long has spent almost 20 years collecting photos, stories, jokes and interesting information about outhouses.</p><p>Privies are fast becoming a thing of the past, she said.</p><p>The first thing people tear down when theyre moving up is the privy. By the 1990s, there were few left in Gwinnett County.</p><p>In 1984, Long and her husband, Dean, published a book called Old Georgia Privies, which contains photographs of outhouses from throughout the state, accompanied by pertinent poems and sayings.</p><p>When she retired a decade later, the Lawrenceville resident funneled her research into a talk titled Privial Pursuits and started lecturing around the state, mainly to civic clubs and church groups. She now lectures about 100 times a year donates speaking fees and profits from book sales to scholarship funds.</p><p>Long said her fascination with outhouses began in 1978, when she started photographing old farm buildings in Milledgeville, where she and her husband lived. She snapped pictures of sheds used for dressing hogs, barns for storing hay, smokehouses for curing meat and, of course, a few outhouses.</p><p>I realized that things were changing really quickly and that all of these buildings would soon be gone, Long said.</p><p>A friend who worked for a publishing company looked at her photos and advised her to concentrate on the shanties. She did and learned to scan rural areas for the small wooden buildings, often tucked behind old churches.</p><p>When she had collected enough photographs, she and Dean had the book printed.</p><p>Since then, people have been calling and sending her privy jokes, along with items such as salt and pepper shakers shaped like tiny outhouses, an outhouse lamp, and all sorts and sizes of shanty models.</p><p>Longs documented presidential privies, historic privies and even ancient privies, widening her research into all buildings scatological to America and Europe.</p><p>At a German castle, she learned that the outhouse opened onto a moat below, making moats more dangerous than we ever thought, she said.</p><p>Long said shes learned more about outhouses than she ever wanted to know and offers this sage advice: Dont ever site your privy under an apple tree, because all those apples dropping on you will break your concentration.</p>

http://accesswdun.com/article/2003/10/185237