Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
The Lottery By Shirley Jackson
The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took only about two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.
The children assembled first, of course. School
was recently over for the summer, and the feeling of liberty sat uneasily on
most of them; they tended to gather together quietly for a while before they
broke into boisterous play, and their talk was still of the classroom and the
teacher, of books and reprimands. Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets
full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the
smoothest and roundest stones; Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix—the
villagers pronounced this name “Dellacroy”—eventually made a great pile of
stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the
other boys. The girls stood aside, talking among themselves, looking over their
shoulders at the boys, and the very small children rolled in the dust or clung
to the hands of their older brothers or sisters.
Soon the men began to gather, surveying their
own children, speaking of planting and rain, tractors and taxes. They stood
together, away from the pile of stones in the corner, and their jokes were
quiet and they smiled rather than laughed. The women, wearing faded house
dresses and sweaters, came shortly after their menfolk. They greeted one
another and exchanged bits of gossip as they went to join their husbands. Soon
the women, standing by their husbands, began to call to their children, and the
children came reluctantly, having to be called four or five times. Bobby Martin
ducked under his mother’s grasping hand and ran, laughing, back to the pile of
stones. His father spoke up sharply, and Bobby came quickly and took his place
between his father and his oldest brother.
The lottery was conducted—as were the square
dances, the teen-age club, the Halloween program—by Mr. Summers, who had time
and energy to devote to civic activities. He was a round-faced, jovial man and
he ran the coal business, and people were sorry for him, because he had no
children and his wife was a scold. When he arrived in the square, carrying the
black wooden box, there was a murmur of conversation among the villagers, and
he waved and called, “Little late today, folks.” The postmaster, Mr. Graves,
followed him, carrying a three-legged stool, and the stool was put in the
center of the square and Mr. Summers set the black box down on it. The
villagers kept their distance, leaving a space between themselves and the
stool, and when Mr. Summers said, “Some of you fellows want to give me a
hand?,” there was a hesitation before two men, Mr. Martin and his oldest son,
Baxter, came forward to hold the box steady on the stool while Mr. Summers
stirred up the papers inside it.
The original paraphernalia for the lottery had
been lost long ago, and the black box now resting on the stool had been put
into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born. Mr.
Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but no one
liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box.
There was a story that the present box had been made with some pieces of the
box that had preceded it, the one that had been constructed when the first
people settled down to make a village here. Every year, after the lottery, Mr.
Summers began talking again about a new box, but every year the subject was
allowed to fade off without anything’s being done. The black box grew shabbier
each year; by now it was no longer completely black but splintered badly along
one side to show the original wood color, and in some places faded or stained.
Mr. Martin and his oldest son, Baxter, held the
black box securely on the stool until Mr. Summers had stirred the papers
thoroughly with his hand. Because so much of the ritual had been forgotten or
discarded, Mr. Summers had been successful in having slips of paper substituted
for the chips of wood that had been used for generations. Chips of wood, Mr.
Summers had argued, had been all very well when the village was tiny, but now
that the population was more than three hundred and likely to keep on growing,
it was necessary to use something that would fit more easily into the black
box. The night before the lottery, Mr. Summers and Mr. Graves made up the slips
of paper and put them into the box, and it was then taken to the safe of Mr.
Summers’ coal company and locked up until Mr. Summers was ready to take it to
the square next morning. The rest of the year, the box was put away, sometimes
one place, sometimes another; it had spent one year in Mr. Graves’ barn and
another year underfoot in the post office, and sometimes it was set on a shelf
in the Martin grocery and left there.
There was a great deal of fussing to be done
before Mr. Summers declared the lottery open. There were the lists to make
up—of heads of families, heads of households in each family, members of each
household in each family. There was the proper swearing-in of Mr. Summers by
the postmaster, as the official of the lottery; at one time, some people
remembered, there had been a recital of some sort, performed by the official of
the lottery, a perfunctory, tuneless chant that had been rattled off duly each
year; some people believed that the official of the lottery used to stand just
so when he said or sang it, others believed that he was supposed to walk among
the people, but years and years ago this part of the ritual had been allowed to
lapse. There had been, also, a ritual salute, which the official of the lottery
had had to use in addressing each person who came up to draw from the box, but
this also had changed with time, until now it was felt necessary only for the
official to speak to each person approaching. Mr. Summers was very good at all
this; in his clean white shirt and blue jeans, with one hand resting carelessly
on the black box, he seemed very proper and important as he talked interminably
to Mr. Graves and the Martins.
Just as Mr. Summers finally left off talking and
turned to the assembled villagers, Mrs. Hutchinson came hurriedly along the
path to the square, her sweater thrown over her shoulders, and slid into place
in the back of the crowd. “Clean forgot what day it was,” she said to Mrs.
Delacroix, who stood next to her, and they both laughed softly. “Thought my old
man was out back stacking wood,” Mrs. Hutchinson went on, “and then I looked
out the window and the kids was gone, and then I remembered it was the
twenty-seventh and came a-running.” She dried her hands on her apron, and Mrs.
Delacroix said, “You’re in time, though. They’re still talking away up there.”
Mrs. Hutchinson craned her neck to see through
the crowd and found her husband and children standing near the front. She
tapped Mrs. Delacroix on the arm as a farewell and began to make her way
through the crowd. The people separated good-humoredly to let her through; two
or three people said, in voices just loud enough to be heard across the crowd,
“Here comes your Mrs., Hutchinson,” and “Bill, she made it after all.” Mrs.
Hutchinson reached her husband, and Mr. Summers, who had been waiting, said
cheerfully, “Thought we were going to have to get on without you, Tessie.” Mrs.
Hutchinson said, grinning, “Wouldn’t have me leave m’dishes in the sink, now,
would you, Joe?,” and soft laughter ran through the crowd as the people stirred
back into position after Mrs. Hutchinson’s arrival.
“Well, now,” Mr. Summers said soberly, “guess we
better get started, get this over with, so’s we can go back to work. Anybody
ain’t here?”
“Dunbar,” several people said. “Dunbar, Dunbar.”
Mr. Summers consulted his list. “Clyde Dunbar,”
he said. “That’s right. He’s broke his leg, hasn’t he? Who’s drawing for him?”
“Me, I guess,” a woman said, and Mr. Summers
turned to look at her. “Wife draws for her husband,” Mr. Summers said. “Don’t
you have a grown boy to do it for you, Janey?” Although Mr. Summers and
everyone else in the village knew the answer perfectly well, it was the
business of the official of the lottery to ask such questions formally. Mr.
Summers waited with an expression of polite interest while Mrs. Dunbar
answered.
“Horace’s not but sixteen yet,” Mrs. Dunbar said
regretfully. “Guess I gotta fill in for the old man this year.”
“Right,” Mr. Summers said. He made a note on the
list he was holding. Then he asked, “Watson boy drawing this year?”
A tall boy in the crowd raised his hand. “Here,”
he said. “I’m drawing for m’mother and me.” He blinked his eyes nervously and
ducked his head as several voices in the crowd said things like “Good fellow,
Jack,” and “Glad to see your mother’s got a man to do it.”
“Well,” Mr. Summers said, “guess that’s
everyone. Old Man Warner make it?”
“Here,” a voice said, and Mr. Summers nodded.
Asudden hush fell on the crowd as Mr. Summers
cleared his throat and looked at the list. “All ready?” he called. “Now, I’ll
read the names—heads of families first—and the men come up and take a paper out
of the box. Keep the paper folded in your hand without looking at it until
everyone has had a turn. Everything clear?”
The people had done it so many times that they
only half listened to the directions; most of them were quiet, wetting their
lips, not looking around. Then Mr. Summers raised one hand high and said,
“Adams.” A man disengaged himself from the crowd and came forward. “Hi, Steve,”
Mr. Summers said, and Mr. Adams said, “Hi, Joe.” They grinned at one another
humorlessly and nervously. Then Mr. Adams reached into the black box and took
out a folded paper. He held it firmly by one corner as he turned and went
hastily back to his place in the crowd, where he stood a little apart from his
family, not looking down at his hand.
“Allen,” Mr. Summers said. “Anderson. . . .
Bentham.”
“Seems like there’s no time at all between
lotteries any more,” Mrs. Delacroix said to Mrs. Graves in the back row. “Seems
like we got through with the last one only last week.”
“Time sure goes fast,” Mrs. Graves said.
“Clark. . . . Delacroix.”
“There goes my old man,” Mrs. Delacroix said.
She held her breath while her husband went forward.
“Dunbar,” Mr. Summers said, and Mrs. Dunbar went
steadily to the box while one of the women said, “Go on, Janey,” and another
said, “There she goes.”
“We’re next,” Mrs. Graves said. She watched
while Mr. Graves came around from the side of the box, greeted Mr. Summers
gravely, and selected a slip of paper from the box. By now, all through the
crowd there were men holding the small folded papers in their large hands, turning
them over and over nervously. Mrs. Dunbar and her two sons stood together, Mrs.
Dunbar holding the slip of paper.
“Harburt. . . . Hutchinson.”
“Get up there, Bill,” Mrs. Hutchinson said, and
the people near her laughed.
“Jones.”
“They do say,” Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner,
who stood next to him, “that over in the north village they’re talking of
giving up the lottery.”
Old Man Warner snorted. “Pack of crazy fools,”
he said. “Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next
thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work
any more, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in
June, corn be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed
chickweed and acorns. There’s always been a lottery,” he added petulantly. “Bad
enough to see young Joe Summers up there joking with everybody.”
“Some places have already quit lotteries,” Mrs.
Adams said.
“Nothing but trouble in that,” Old Man Warner
said stoutly. “Pack of young fools.”
“Martin.” And Bobby Martin watched his father go
forward. “Overdyke. . . . Percy.”
“I wish they’d hurry,” Mrs. Dunbar said to her
older son. “I wish they’d hurry.”
“They’re almost through,” her son said.
“You get ready to run tell Dad,” Mrs. Dunbar
said.
Mr. Summers called his own name and then stepped
forward precisely and selected a slip from the box. Then he called, “Warner.”
“Seventy-seventh year I been in the lottery,”
Old Man Warner said as he went through the crowd. “Seventy-seventh time.”
“Watson.” The tall boy came awkwardly through
the crowd. Someone said, “Don’t be nervous, Jack,” and Mr. Summers said, “Take
your time, son.”
“Zanini.”
After that, there was a long pause, a breathless
pause, until Mr. Summers, holding his slip of paper in the air, said, “All
right, fellows.” For a minute, no one moved, and then all the slips of paper
were opened. Suddenly, all the women began to speak at once, saying, “Who is
it?,” “Who’s got it?,” “Is it the Dunbars?,” “Is it the Watsons?” Then the
voices began to say, “It’s Hutchinson. It’s Bill,” “Bill Hutchinson’s got it.”
“Go tell your father,” Mrs. Dunbar said to her
older son.
People began to look around to see the
Hutchinsons. Bill Hutchinson was standing quiet, staring down at the paper in
his hand. Suddenly, Tessie Hutchinson shouted to Mr. Summers, “You didn’t give
him time enough to take any paper he wanted. I saw you. It wasn’t fair!”
“Be a good sport, Tessie,” Mrs. Delacroix called,
and Mrs. Graves said, “All of us took the same chance.”
“Shut up, Tessie,” Bill Hutchinson said.
“Well, everyone,” Mr. Summers said, “that was
done pretty fast, and now we’ve got to be hurrying a little more to get done in
time.” He consulted his next list. “Bill,” he said, “you draw for the
Hutchinson family. You got any other households in the Hutchinsons?”
“There’s Don and Eva,” Mrs. Hutchinson yelled.
“Make them take their chance!”
“Daughters draw with their husbands’ families,
Tessie,” Mr. Summers said gently. “You know that as well as anyone else.”
“It wasn’t fair,” Tessie said.
“I guess not, Joe,” Bill Hutchinson said
regretfully. “My daughter draws with her husband’s family, that’s only fair.
And I’ve got no other family except the kids.”
“Then, as far as drawing for families is
concerned, it’s you,” Mr. Summers said in explanation, “and as far as drawing
for households is concerned, that’s you, too. Right?”
“Right,” Bill Hutchinson said.
“How many kids, Bill?” Mr. Summers asked
formally.
“Three,” Bill Hutchinson said. “There’s Bill,
Jr., and Nancy, and little Dave. And Tessie and me.”
“All right, then,” Mr. Summers said. “Harry, you
got their tickets back?”
Mr. Graves nodded and held up the slips of
paper. “Put them in the box, then,” Mr. Summers directed. “Take Bill’s and put
it in.”
“I think we ought to start over,” Mrs.
Hutchinson said, as quietly as she could. “I tell you it wasn’t fair. You
didn’t give him time enough to choose. _Every_body saw that.”
Mr. Graves had selected the five slips and put
them in the box, and he dropped all the papers but those onto the ground, where
the breeze caught them and lifted them off.
“Listen, everybody,” Mrs. Hutchinson was saying
to the people around her.
“Ready, Bill?” Mr. Summers asked, and Bill
Hutchinson, with one quick glance around at his wife and children, nodded.
“Remember,” Mr. Summers said, “take the slips
and keep them folded until each person has taken one. Harry, you help little
Dave.” Mr. Graves took the hand of the little boy, who came willingly with him
up to the box. “Take a paper out of the box, Davy,” Mr. Summers said. Davy put
his hand into the box and laughed. “Take just one paper,” Mr. Summers said.
“Harry, you hold it for him.” Mr. Graves took the child’s hand and removed the
folded paper from the tight fist and held it while little Dave stood next to
him and looked up at him wonderingly.
“Nancy next,” Mr. Summers said. Nancy was
twelve, and her school friends breathed heavily as she went forward, switching
her skirt, and took a slip daintily from the box. “Bill, Jr.,” Mr. Summers
said, and Billy, his face red and his feet overlarge, nearly knocked the box
over as he got a paper out. “Tessie,” Mr. Summers said. She hesitated for a
minute, looking around defiantly, and then set her lips and went up to the box.
She snatched a paper out and held it behind her.
“Bill,” Mr. Summers said, and Bill Hutchinson
reached into the box and felt around, bringing his hand out at last with the
slip of paper in it.
The crowd was quiet. A girl whispered, “I hope
it’s not Nancy,” and the sound of the whisper reached the edges of the crowd.
“It’s not the way it used to be,” Old Man Warner
said clearly. “People ain’t the way they used to be.”
“All right,” Mr. Summers said. “Open the papers.
Harry, you open little Dave’s.”
Mr. Graves opened the slip of paper and there was
a general sigh through the crowd as he held it up and everyone could see that
it was blank. Nancy and Bill, Jr., opened theirs at the same time, and both
beamed and laughed, turning around to the crowd and holding their slips of
paper above their heads.
“Tessie,” Mr. Summers said. There was a pause,
and then Mr. Summers looked at Bill Hutchinson, and Bill unfolded his paper and
showed it. It was blank.
“It’s Tessie,” Mr. Summers said, and his voice
was hushed. “Show us her paper, Bill.”
Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced
the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a black spot on it, the black spot
Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal-company
office. Bill Hutchinson held it up, and there was a stir in the crowd.
“All right, folks,” Mr. Summers said. “Let’s
finish quickly.”
Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual
and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. The pile
of stones the boys had made earlier was ready; there were stones on the ground
with the blowing scraps of paper that had come out of the box. Mrs. Delacroix
selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to
Mrs. Dunbar. “Come on,” she said. “Hurry up.”
Mrs. Dunbar had small stones in both hands, and
she said, gasping for breath. “I can’t run at all. You’ll have to go ahead and
I’ll catch up with you.”
The children had stones already, and someone
gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.
Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared
space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in
on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.
Old Man Warner was saying, “Come on, come on,
everyone.” Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs.
Graves beside him.
I adore B&W
DC Behind the Monuments: The legend of Lincolns burial train
A
phantom funeral train is said to run regularly from Washington, D.C. to
Springfield, Illinois…the route Lincoln's body was taken to be buried. It had
been reported to the police by citizens living near the tracks that the phantom
train can be heard around the time of the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's
death, stopping watches and clocks in surrounding areas as it passes.
American Oddities: What Became of the Andrews?
On the evening of May 15,
1970, Edward and Stephanie Andrews, a couple in their early sixties drove the
wrong way down Chicago's magnificent Michigan Avenue and disappeared forever. In
almost a half a decade later, no sign of the Andrews or their 69 Oldsmobile has
ever been found.
The couple arrived at
the Sheraton-Chicago Hotel, then at 505 N. Michigan Ave., shortly after 5:30
p.m. for a cocktail party sponsored by the Woman's Association of Allied
Beverage Industries. All the gusts agreed that the Andrews seemed to be in good
spirits. But then guests noticed that a few hours later, Edward appeared to
become ill. He complained of hunger.
They left the party at
9:30 p.m. and took the elevator to its underground parking garage witness testified
to that much. The parking manager told police Edward Andrews was
"staggering" and that Stephanie was crying and asking him not to
drive home. He seemed to have trouble getting into his black and yellow 1969
Oldsmobile sports coupe. As he drove out he accidentally hit the garage door
before pulling out on the street the wrong way down Michigan Avenue.
The police theorized
that a disoriented Edward attempted a U-turn but instead plunged into the
Chicago River at a point where there were no guard rails and drove into the
Chicago River. However, an extensive search of the water turned up nothing. Ten
years later, in 1980, a full clean-up of the river produced twelve vehicles,
but none of them were the Andrews’ Oldsmobile.
Fourteen years after
that the case came to the attention of the police again in 1994 when an
informant, a 36-year-old man from north suburban Knollwood told police that he
had suffered from amnesia and memories of the killings only recently returned.
He said that the Andrewes’ had been murdered that night by gang members, who
placed the couple’s bodies in their car and submerged it in a pond near the
village Green Oaks, some forty miles north from they were last seen. The
informant was 13 years old at the time and was at the lake when the car was
buried there.
"About every
third sentence he told us was true," said Cpl. Curt Corsi of the Lake
County Sheriff's Office. "We verified some of what he said through police
reports."
Divers searched the
pond and recovered two pieces of metal that resembled pieces of the underside
of a car and also found a large object several feet deep in the muck, but could
not determine what it was. "It's the right size, but there is no way to
get equipment in there to find out what it is," Corsi said. “We don't want
to pull something up, unless we know it's the car"
He added that during
the 1970s, the pond was privately owned and used for water skiing. The
location, about 5 to 10 feet offshore, was marked with a yellow buoy but
because the bottom of the pond is deep with mud and muck, police speculated
whether it would have been possible for a car to sink low enough to escape
detection and determined it wasn't probable.
It was not until the
following Monday that the Andrews were reported missing when co-workers became
concerned because they failed to arrive at work. Police officers thoroughly
searched the Andrewes’ Arlington Heights home at 738 S. Vail Ave. but nothing
was out of sorts. Everything that was supposed to be in the house, was in the
house. All of their stocks, bonds, and credit cards were untouched since the
day they disappeared. Neighbors described them as a happy, outgoing couple,
always willing to help.
A background check
showed nothing abnormal. Edward Andrews was a semi-retired manager and
bookkeeper for Miller-Peerless Manufacturing Co. of Chicago, and Stephanie was
a credit investigator for Local Loan Co. The Andrews drank sparingly and
witnesses do recall them having drinks on the night they disappeared. They
never gambled. They weren’t rich but they were comfortable in a middle class
way. They had apparent ties to any criminal elements. They had been married
about seven years. It was the second marriage for Stephanie, whose first
husband had died. Edward Andrews had been married five times before. A search
of their backgrounds and family revealed nothing to indicate someone would want
to harm them.
In the meantime, a
dozen policemen searched the edges of the river and located a place on a bridge
on Lower Wacker Drive where there were scrapes on a concrete pillar and skid
marks on the road but no sign of a car going down into the river. Another team
of detectives interviewed most of the 250 guests who attended the party.
Police dragged the
river for 11 days after they found the car scrapes and tire marks. A grappling
hook caught something and the next day, divers swam 15 to 20 feet down to the
bottom of the river to investigate but it was random river junk. Stephanie
Andrews' brother, John Rynak, had stepped in to help. He provided sonar
equipment to help with the search. In November 1971, police returned to the
river for another search with more sophisticated sonar equipment and
metal-detection devices. Each of those searches revealed nothing.
A UFO Abduction case?
On January 6, 1976, Mona Stafford celebrated her 36th birthday with friends Louise Smith and Elaine Thomas. The three women drove the thirty-five miles from their home in Liberty, Kentucky, to have dinner at the Redwoods Restaurant near Lancaster, Kentucky. At dinner, none of them drank any alcoholic, something that will later prove crucial to their story. At about 11:15, the trio headed back home but at Stanford, Kentucky, nine miles from Lancaster, a bright red object appeared in the sky, which Mona Stafford at first thought was an airplane on fire. As the object descended from the right side of the road to a point ahead of them, they could see that it was not an airplane, but a huge object bigger than "two houses." The object stopped about a hundred yards ahead of them, stretching across the road on both sides. It rocked back and forth for a couple of seconds, and then moved off to the left.
The women kept driving but after they had been about a quarter
of a mile, a blue light appeared through the rear window of the car. At first
they thought it was a highway patrol car with its lights flashing, but soon
they realized that the flying object had circled around and had come up behind
them.
Something wrested control of the car away from Louise Smith. The
car accelerated to 85 mph. Mona Stafford, in the front passenger seat, tried to
help Louise regain control of the car, but it was not possible. The women began
to feel a burning sensation in their eyes. The ignition lights lit up on the
instrument panel, an indication that the car's engine was stalled, but they
were still speeding along. They saw a wide, brightly lit road ahead of them,
and then, seconds later, the scene became Highway 78 and they recognized they
were on the outskirts of Hustonville, a full eight miles from where they had
just been. Checking the time, they found that, incredibly, an hour and twenty
minutes had passed.
They arrived at Louise Smith's trailer in Liberty at 1:25 am,
almost an hour and a half late. They went inside to collect themselves and
found that they each had a red mark like a burn on the backs of their necks,
and they all had burning, irritated eyes. Louise Smith went into the bathroom
and removed her watch to wash her face. She saw that the hands of her watch
were spinning at a much higher than normal speed. When she splashed water on
her face, she found that contact with water caused pain in her hands and face.
They went next door, to the home of Mr. Lowell Lee, and told him
what had happened. He had them separately sketch the object they had seen. The
sketches were extremely similar, if not identical. They called the police and
the local navy office, but neither showed any interest in their story.
In the days that followed, Mona Stafford had more problems with
her eyes than did the other two women, and she sought medical help for severe
conjunctivitis. Louise Smith's pet parakeet was now inexplicably terrified of
her. Smith's car also began to develop mysterious electrical problems.
The navy office reportedly gave information about the story to
the news media and from there, MUFON set up an interview with the three women.
The investigators found that other individuals had independently reported
sightings of a UFO in the Casey and Lincoln counties that same night. Dr. R.
Leo Sprinkle of the University of Wyoming heard of the case and flew in, and on
March 7, 1976, he performed a preliminary hypnotic regression of the women.
In July of 1976, Lexington Police Department detective James
Young separately gave the three women lie detector tests regarding their
experience. They all passed with no problems. Later that evening and continuing
into the next day, extensive hypnotic regression of the women was performed by
R. Leo Sprinkle. These sessions were similar to the story of Betty and Barney
Hill in that they revealed that during the period of missing time the three women
were taken on board the object they had seen. While there they were medically
examined by shadowy beings that they later identified as being similar to
depictions of aliens.
DC Behind the Monuments: The attempt on Harry Truman’s life
DC Behind the Monuments: The attempt on Harry Truman’s life
November 1, 1950. President
Harry Truman resided in the Blair House (Across from the street White House)
while the interior of the White House was completely gutted and rebuilt.
Puerto Rican terrorist
Griselio Torresola walked up Pennsylvania Avenue from the west side while his
partner, Oscar Collazo, walked up to Capitol police officer Donald Birdzell on
the steps of the Blair House.
Approaching Birdzell
from behind, Collazo pulled out a Walther P38 handgun, pointed it at the
officer's back, and pulled the trigger; but since he had failed to chamber a
round in it, nothing happened. After pounding on his pistol and fumbling around
with it, Collazo managed to chamber and fire the weapon just as Birdzell was
turning to face him, striking the officer in his right knee.
Nearby, Secret Service
Special Agent Floyd Boring and White House Police officer Joseph Davidson heard
the shot and opened fire on Collazo with their service revolvers. It was later
said that Boring stood back and cocked the hammer on his revolver to make
accurate shots, while most of the other officers fired double-action, as
quickly as they could.
Collazo returned fire
but found himself outgunned, as the wounded Birdzell managed to draw his weapon
and join the shootout. Soon after, Collazo was struck by two .38 caliber rounds
in the head and right arm, while other officers rushed to join the fight.
Meanwhile, Torresola
approached a guard booth at the west corner of the Blair House, and saw police
officer Leslie Coffelt, sitting inside. In a double-handed shooting stance,
Torresola quickly pivoted around the opening of the booth.
Now shot in both knees,
Birdzell was no longer able to stand and was effectively incapacitated (He
would later recover). Soon after, the severely wounded Collazo was hit in the
chest by a ricochet shot from Davidson, and was also incapacitated
Torresola realized he
was out of ammunition. He stood to the immediate left of the Blair House steps
while he reloaded. At the same time, President Truman, who had been taking a
nap in his second-floor bedroom, awoke to the sound of gunfire outside.
Truman, dressed in a tee
shirt and boxer shorts, went to his bedroom window, opened it, and looked
outside. From where he stood reloading, Torresola was thirty-one feet away from
that window.
At that same moment, the
mortally-wounded Coffelt staggered out of his guard booth, leaned against it,
and aimed his revolver at Torresola, who was approximately 30 feet away.
Coffelt fired and hit Torresola two inches above the ear, killing him
instantly. Coffelt was taken to the hospital and died four hours later
It is unknown whether
Torresola saw Truman, when the president opened and looked out his window. If
Torresola did see him, then officer Coffelt may have saved Truman's life, and
sacrificed his own life in doing so.
The gunfight involving
Torresola lasted approximately 20 seconds, while the gunfight with Collazo
lasted approximately 38.5 seconds. Only one shot fired by Collazo hit someone,
while all of the rest of the damage was done by Torresola.
In a letter to his
cousin, Ethel Noland, dated November 17, 1950, President Truman wrote:
I'm sorry I didn’t get
to talk to you and (cousin) Nellie at the dinner or after it. But I'm really a
prisoner now.
Everybody is much more
worried and jittery than I am. I've always thought that if I could get my hands
on a would-be assassin he'd never try it again. But I guess that's impossible.
The grand guards who were hurt in the attempt on me didn't have a fair chance.
The one who was killed was just cold bloodedly murdered before he could do
anything.
But his assassin did not
live but a couple of minutes – one of the S.S. (Secret Service) men put a
bullet in one ear and it came out the other. I stuck my head out the upstairs
window to see what was going on. One of the guards yelled, "Get
back." I did, then dressed and went downstairs. I was the only calm one in
the house. You see, I've been shot at by experts and unless your name's on the
bullet you needn't be afraid – and that of course you can't find out, so why
worry.
The S.S. chief said to
me, "Mr. President, don't you know that when there's an Air Raid Alarm you
don't run out and look up, you go for cover." I saw the point but it was
over then.
Hope it won't happen
again. They won't let me go walking or even cross the street on foot. I say
'they' won't, but it causes them so much anguish that I conform – a hard thing
for a Truman to do as you know, particularly when he could force them to do as
he wants. But I want no more guards killed.
When Fiction becomes Fact: The Brookhaven UFO weapon
The story is that a UFO crashed in Long Island at South Haven
Park, about five miles from the infamous Brookhaven lab on November 24, 1992.
Further, the story goes, the Brookhaven fire department responded to the crash
and extinguished a massive brush fire caused by the crash.
There were no bush fires in the area that month and the
Brookhaven lab Fire Chief Chuck La Salla showed that the department didn’t
respond to any fires of any type on the week in question.
Legend says that the UFO was shot down by a high-powered plasma
beam from inside the lab. However, the physicist at Brookhaven National
Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider pointed out that, although the lab
does have high-powered plasma particle accelerators, it is locked into to a
prescribed path and if they did escape the lab, they would dissipate as soon as
they interacted with air.
When Fiction becomes Fact: The Betz UFO ball.
On March 27, 1974
members of the Betz family were near their property on Ft. George Island, which
is a patch of dry ground along the coastal marshlands of northeastern Florida.
They were inspecting the damage done by a small brushfire when they came across
a bright metal globe, about the size of a bowling ball. It was sitting there in
the grass. It was heavy and a few guessed it to be an old cannonball.
They took it back to the
house and when Terry Betz started playing the guitar, the ball, the family
reported, started to move around. The Betzes experimented with it, placed it on
their table, and watched it navigate its own way around the perimeter without
falling off.
According to the family
“Doors began slamming themselves around the house. Mysterious organ music
filled the residence, even though there was no organ.”
Mrs. Betz then called
the US Navy base directly across the water from the island and asked if they
could examine it; perhaps it was theirs. They did but returned it to the Betzes
once they verified that it was not Navy property. The navy X-rayed it and did a
metallurgical test and found it to be high grade yet common stainless steel;
hollow with a shell approximately 1/2 inch thick (about 13 mm); measured 7.96
inches in diameter (202.2 mm); and weighed 21.34 pounds (9.68 kg). The numbers
added up, it was the right weight for that much stainless steel. Its surface
was scuffed but seamless, with only one identifying mark: a tiny triangle about
3mm long.
Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a
UFOlogist and astronomer at Northwestern University in Chicago examined the
ball with five other scientists and concluded "None will go so far as to
say it's extra-terrestrial. They would be putting their scientific reputations
on the line."
Robert Edwards,
president of a Jacksonville, FL. equipment supply company, saw a photo of the
ball in his local newspaper and went to the local UPI office with a brand new
stainless steel ball, manufactured by Bell & Howell in Bridgeport,
Connecticut. It weighed and measured exactly the same as the Betz sphere.
"I'm not saying
that this thing didn't come from outer space because I've never seen it,"
said Edwards. "All I'm saying is that the physical description of it
matches exactly the type of ball we have in stock."
As for the many
published news reports about the ball moving on its own etc. the fact was that
the ball sat quietly on display inside the Betz home for nearly two weeks and
is not reported to have ever moved on its own at all.
Regarding the ball's
movement, the Navy's spokesman Chris Berninger concluded: "I believe it's
because of the construction of the house... It's old and has uneven stone
floors. The ball is almost perfectly balanced, and it takes just a little
indentation to make it move or change direction."
When Fiction Becomes Fact: Mary Reeser and Spontaneous Human Combustion
“In July of 1951, authorities found the body of 67-year-old Mary Reeser in her St. Petersburg apartment. Or more accurately, the pile of mostly ash that once was Mary Reeser’s body (part of her lower leg and some of her spine remained). Apparently, her body had been almost entirely cremated, which is mind-boggling when you consider that cremation requires three hours of burning in a 3,000-degree fire. Even more bizarre—only Reeser’s body had burned: The rest of her apartment was intact, even a pile of newspapers beside her body.”
The reader has two choices in taking in the story above, the
Reeser case, which is probably the most well-known tale of spontaneous human
combustion. One option is to believe that Mary Reeser suddenly exploded in a
ball of flames for no reason. The other option is to believe that Mary Reeser
accidentally set herself on fire with a cigarette.
First a little more on the Reeser case.
Just before 9 P.M., on July 1, 1951, Mary Hardy Reeser, a widow,
had walked her son, Dr. Richard Reeser Jr., to the door. He had dropped by a
for a visit. After he left, Mary dressed in her nightgown and took two sleeping
pills. She opened two windows in the apartment and sat in her overstuffed easy
chair and lit her last cigarette of the night.
Several hours later, a neighbor smelled fire and phoned the
police. Firefighters arrived quickly and found virtually nothing left of Mrs.
Reeser, most of her was reduced to a pile of black ashes. Her backbone was more
or less untouched and her left foot still had on a black silk slipper. Her
skull, reports say, had “shrunken to the size of a cup.”
St. Petersburg Police Chief J.R. Reichart requested help from
the FBI in solving the case. The bureau’s technicians spent three weeks
examining Reeser’s case. It was only able to determine that there was no
evidence that suggested lightning had struck Reeser or the building. All of the
fuses in the apartment were still intact. And investigators hadn’t been able to
detect substances that could have started the blaze. The FBI also ruled out
spontaneous combustion but did suggest that the overweight Mrs. Reeser (She
stood five feet and weighed about 170 pounds) fat could have fed a fire that
smoldered throughout the evening, allowing hot air and smoke to rise to the top
of the room.
Although there are several hundred unconfirmed reports of people
spontaneously combusting, there has never been a proven case of spontaneous
human combustion. There are, however, countless millions of cases of people
accidentally setting themselves on fire.
Benjamin Radford, science writer and deputy editor of the
science magazine, Skeptical Inquirer, casts doubt on the
plausibility of spontaneous human combustion, "If SHC is a real phenomenon
(and not the result of an elderly or infirm person being too close to a flame
source), why doesn't it happen more often? There are 5 billion people in the
world and yet we don't see reports of people bursting into flame while walking
down the street, attending football games, or sipping a coffee at a local
Starbucks."
The phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion, if it exists at
all, can be attributed to the wick effect, whereby an external source of fire
ignites nearby flammable materials and human fat or other sources.
In order for anything to combust, three things are required:
Very high heat
A source of fuel (Mrs. Reeser’s nightgown was made of rayon
acetate and could have caught fire from a cigarette ash.)
An oxidizing agent (Generally the oxygen in the air.)
One of the problems with the concept of spontaneous human
combustion is that the human body is largely composed of water, making it very
difficult to burn. However, the fat in a human body will burn and when it does
burn it could…..I stress the word could…..act as fuel once the fire from fat
starts. As the fat melts the body burns from the inside out, leaving the
surroundings intact. The victim's hair or clothing might act like a candle wick
— known as the wick effect. A BBC TV show "Q.E.D" performed a similar
experiment in 1998 with a pig body wrapped in a blanket and showed that the
body burned for several hours without igniting its surroundings.
A 1928 study of supposed of spontaneous human combustion found
some commonalities among recorded cases included the following characteristics:
The victims are chronic alcoholics. (Mrs. Reeser had ingested
sleeping pills)
They are usually elderly females (Mrs. Reeser was 67 years old)
The body has not burned spontaneously, but some lighted
substance has come into contact with it; (She was a smoker)
The hands and feet usually fall off (As was the case in the
Reeser fire)
The fire has caused very little damage to combustible things in
contact with the body;
The combustion of the body has left a residue of greasy and
fetid ashes and a strong offensive odor.
A second study completed in the 1950s found that the burned
bodies were in close proximity to plausible sources for the ignition: candles,
lamps, fireplaces, and the sources were often omitted from published accounts
of these incidents. The investigations also found that there was a correlation
between alleged SHC deaths and the victim's intoxication which could have
caused them to be unable to respond properly to an accident. The reason the
legs and feet didn’t burn is that they usually weren’t covered in clothing. The
study also found that in cases where the destruction was extensive, additional
fuel sources were involved, (chair stuffing, floor coverings, etc.) Nearby
objects often remained undamaged because fire tends to burn upward.
A 2002 study by Angi M. Christensen of the University of
Tennessee cremated both healthy and osteoporotic samples of human bone (Meaning
porous bone where a disease might reduce the density and quality of a bone.
This sort of thing is common in the elderly.) and compared the resulting color
changes and fragmentation. The study found that osteoporotic bone samples
"consistently displayed more discoloration and a greater degree of
fragmentation than healthy ones." The same study found that when human
tissue is burned, the resulting flame produces a small amount of heat,
indicating that fire is unlikely to spread from burning tissue.
Almost every case of supposed spontaneous human combustion that
has been examined involves persons with low mobility due to advanced age or
obesity, along with poor health.
In the Reeser case, Mrs. Reeser took sleeping pills and was also
a smoker. Cigarettes are most often the cause of the source of fire in one in
every four fire deaths in the United States. A common theory was that she was
smoking a cigarette after taking sleeping pills, and then fell asleep while still
holding the burning cigarette, which could have ignited her gown, ultimately
leading to her death.
“Mary was a great smoker,” Ernestine Reeser, Mary Reeser’s
daughter-in-law, told the St. Petersburg Times in 1991. “The cigarette dropped
to her lap. Her fat was the fuel that kept her burning. The floor was cement,
and the chair was by itself. There was nothing around her to burn.”
There are still unanswered questions. For one thing, instead of
shrinking, Reeser’s skull should have exploded, but it didn’t. Also, a near
cremation of the body would have required several thousand degrees over the
course of several hours.
It only fair to mention that there is one theory is that a
condition called ketosis, the human body produces small amounts of the
flammable substance acetone (a component of nail polish remover) A person who
is ill may produce enough acetone that a tiny spark, say from static
electricity — could cause the person to catch fire and burn. Yet another
theory, this one a little further out, is that methane built up in the
intestines might somehow ignite.