Odd facts:
Booth saved Lincoln’s life.
In late 1864 or early 1865, Mr. Booth was waiting on a train platform in Washington DC when he noticed Lincoln had fallen into the gap between the platform and the train when the train began to move. Mr. Booth, who was a well-known actor in the famous Booth acting family, pulled Lincoln by his collar and rescued him from being crushed by the train.
The rescuer was Edwin Booth, the brother of the man who would assassinate the President less than a year later. The man who was rescued was Robert Todd Lincoln, the President’s son.
The Story of the Unsinkable Ship.
A book was authored by a man named Morgan Robertson about a luxury ocean liner that was said to be unsinkable. The ship was described as “the longest craft afloat” and “equal to that of a first class hotel” and “unsinkable.”
The ship (called the Titan) in the novel hit an iceberg on an April morning around midnight about 400 miles from Newfoundland and sank. The ship had too few lifeboats for all aboard and, in fact, carried, as few as the law would allow.
You might think that Robertson is just a hack who took the story of the ocean liner Titanic and wrote a story surrounding it. Heck, he couldn’t even be bothered to come up with an original name for the ship! The Titanic did sink 400 miles from Newfoundland on an April morning around midnight. The Titanic was carrying too few lifeboats. It was regarded as one of (if not the) finest luxury liners in the world at the time. So, Robertson simply took the story, didn’t even bother to change the pertinent details, and published a silly book.
Except for one little thing — The Titanic sunk in 1912. Robertson’s book was published in 1897.
Unlucky Twice — and Lived To Tell
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was a gentleman who had the unfortunate luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was attending a business conference in the city of Hiroshima, Japan, on the morning of Aug 6, 1945. Of course, that was the day that the atomic bomb fell on the city. Yamaguchi was 3 km away from the blast site. He was temporarily blinded, his eardrums were ruptured and he suffered burns over a good portion of his upper boddy because of the blast. Having survived the blast, he found some shelter and spent the night there.
Since it was unlikely that any business was going to be done in Hiroshima for the foreseeable future, Yamaguchi turned to go home — to Nagasaki.
Despite being badly injured, he managed to not only make it home, but to return to work on the morning of August 9. He was describing the blast to one of his supervisors when the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. While he was, again, 3 km from the blast, this time he was unhurt.
You might think that being at the location of not one, but two atomic blasts, that this guy would have suffered from radiation poisoning. As it turns out, he recovered nicely and survived until 2009, when he died of stomach cancer at age 93.
The Lucky Unlucky Nurse
Violet Jessup worked a stewardess/nurse for the White Star line. The White Star line had three famous Olympic-class liners at the time — Olympic, Titanic and Britanic.
She was working as a stewardess aboard the Olympic when she hit a cruiser on Sep 20, 1911. The ship managed to stay afloat as only two forward compartments flooded.
Afterwards, she boarded the Titanic to serve as a stewardess on that ship. On the morning of Apr 14, 1912, Titanic struck an iceberg and sank. Jessop was eventually ordered onto lifeboat 16 and survived the sinking.
You see where this is going, right?
She was serving about the Olympic (which had been converted into a hospital ship for the war effort) when it struck a mine in the Aegean Sea on Nov 21, 1916. She was sucked under water and hit her head on the keel before being rescued. Thirty people died in the incident, but Jessop survived.
Jessop eventually died of drowning aboard the… no, I’m kidding. She died of heart failure in 1971, on dry land.
The Wolf