FURTHERMORE
By Gerry Moran
I love a coincidence. I think we all do. Something strange, almost magical, or mystical about them. A few weeks back I was looking at an old school photograph wondering whatever happened to a particular individual with whom I was quite friendly and hadn’t seen in maybe 50 years.
Lo and behold I bumped into that person on the High Street some days later. He was home from Australia for a wedding.
Strange? Unusual? Yes. But nothing amazing. In the meantime I offer you a selection of the world’s most renowned coincidences.
In 1950, Life magazine reported that 15 people narrowly missed disaster by an intricate stroke of luck. The 15, members of a church choir in Beatrice, Nebraska, were to meet at 7.15pm for practice. For various reasons each member of the choir was delayed – one had car trouble, another was catching the end of a radio show while another was calming a sick child. Whatever the reason, they were all lucky to be late as the church was destroyed in an explosion at 7.25pm!
In 1983 a woman told British Rail authorities about a disturbing vision she had of a fatal train crash involving an engine with the registration numbers 47 216. Two years later, a train had a fatal accident, very similar to the one the woman had described. The engine number, however, was 47 299.Later it transpired that the number had been changed by nervous British Rail officials. The original number of the crashed train was – 47 216 !
A woman in Kissimmee, Florida could be forgiven for being just a little confused as to what her husband actually looks like. In August 1995, she married her boyfriend Ronald Legendre. The best man, who wasn’t related to the bride, was also named Ronald Legendre. And, as if that wasn’t enough, the ceremony was performed by someone who wasn’t connected to either man – Judge Ronald Legendre!
On three separate occasions – in 1664, 1785 and 1860 – there were shipwrecks where only one person survived the accident. Each time that person’s name was Hugh Williams.
Nicholas Stephen Waddle was born in Beloit Memorial Hospital, Wisconsin at 9.09am. on the ninth day of the ninth month in 1999. He weighed nine pounds, nine ounces.
During their preparations to invade Normandy during the Second World War, the Allied military commanders devised several secret code words. Among them were Utah, Neptune, Omaha, Mulberry and Overlord. Before the invasion could begin, however, all of these words appeared in a crossword puzzle in the London Daily Telegraph. After interrogating the puzzle’s author, an English school teacher, authorities became convinced that it was sheer, inexplicable coincidence.
Of the 43 Presidents of the United States, four have been assassinated. One man was on the scene for three of those assassinations. Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln, was summoned to his father’s side after he was mortally wounded by John Wilkes Booth in Ford’s Theatre in 1865.
In 1881 as Secretary of War under President Garfield, Lincoln went to Union Station in Washington to inform the president that he could not travel with him due to work overload. By the time Lincoln arrived
Garfield had been shot by Charles Guiteau.
Twenty years later in 1901, Lincoln accepted an invitation from President William McKinley to join him at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.
When Lincoln arrived he noticed a large crowd had gathered around – McKinley had just been mortally wounded by Leon Czolgosz.
One of the lesser-known figures of the American Civil war was Wilmer McLean, a Virginia farmer who had no interest whatsoever in politics. In 1861, however, the first full-scale battle of the Civil War (The Battle of Bull Run) took place on his farm when Confederate and Union forces confronted each other. Thirteen months later it happened again and the second Battle of Bull Run destroyed McLean’s farm. He had enough. He upped and moved 200 miles away from the war. Three years later in a weird twist of fate two men confronted each other in McLean’s kitchen. The two men talked and signed a document on McLean’s table.
Wilmer McLean had moved to a little village called Appomattox Court House where Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant negotiated the end of the American Civil War!
