Teddy Siegel
speaker
63 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Teddy Siegel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And almost immediately, actually at the World's Fair, there was an uproar. These paid toilets were a lot nicer than the free toilets. But also... there were complaints about equity. Like, why were there haves and have-nots when it came to toilets? Well, the pay toilets took hold anyway. So by the 1960s, when Michael was a kid, there were about 50,000 pay toilets. They were the norm.
This was the era of civil rights, women's rights, rebellion against the status quo. Michael's rebellion was against pay toilets.
Why did you think they were extortion?
There were still free public toilets, too. And men had the option of urinals, also free. But basically, you had these two tiers of toilets, nice ones you paid for or dumpier free ones. And in 1968, when Michael was 14 and Ira was 17, they decided they wanted to do something about it. They made their big plans on New Year's Eve.
Ira got his op-ed published in a school newspaper, and it caught the attention of other kids. Ira and Michael and some friends eventually started a club, the Committee to End Paid Toilets in America. Septia, you know, like septic. They published a newsletter called the Free Toilet Paper. They had a logo, a clenched fist clutching chains and rising out of a toilet.
They wrote songs like the Talkin' Toilet Blues and the Ballad of the Pay Toilet. How did the Ballad of the Pay Toilet go? Can you sing it for me?
Or maybe he won't pass.
They put out this resistance guide, ways to get around the locks on the pay toilets. There was the sacrificial lamb where you paid and held the door open for others. The American crawl where you slipped under the door. The club stopped feeling like just an outlet.
There's an expression about that, right? Isn't it like piss or get off the pot?
Michael and his friends plan protests, boycotts, pressure campaigns. And this was coming soon after people pushed for racial desegregation in all kinds of facilities, including bathrooms. Bathroom equity was on people's minds in lots of ways. There were other small groups like Michael's, like FLUSH, Flush, Free Latrines Unlimited for Suffering Humanity.
Also around this time, feminists were pissed about the pay toilets. If urinals were free, why did pay toilets cost a dime? In 1969, there was a Down with Pay Potties protest. a huge crowd of people marched to the California state capitol with a brass band, waving signs that read, put up or flush up, and we don't give a dime.
At the center of it all was then-California State Assembly member March Fong Yu.
She is wearing a pink suit, black pumps. She has her hair teased in this perfect arc around her head. And she's speaking next to a toilet encircled by a locked chain.
And then she takes a sledgehammer to that toilet.
Pretty soon, newspapers started writing about Michael's Club.
After a few years, Michael and his friends all went off to college and started club chapters in different cities. And in 1973, they decided to hold a press conference in Chicago where they spoke of biological function and discrimination and the indignity of pay toilets. By that time, there were already local officials in Chicago pushing to ban them. Some even came to Michael's event.
And soon after, the mayor banned pay toilets in public places in Chicago.
We kept on going. Michael's movement went the 70s version of viral. Over the next few years, legislators in many states started banning pay toilets. Now, the pay toilet companies obviously hated this. So did businesses like Greyhound. They didn't want to offer free toilets that they would have to clean and maintain and stock. So they sued. They fought it.
The biggest toilet lock company was called Nickel Lock. And in their lawsuit, they predicted what economists call an unintended consequence. They wrote that getting rid of pay toilets would actually encourage the deterioration and closing of the free toilets. But they couldn't stop it. At the height of paid toilets, when Michael was in high school, there were about 50,000 of them.
By 1980, there were just about none. And just as Nickel Lock predicted, the public toilets started going away too.
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