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This is a repost of some previous Pagan Spirits book blog content. It combines the original Bummer July post with the update.
July 1, 1996: Model/actress Margaux Hemingway, the granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, is found dead inside her home in Santa Monica, California. She has died by suicide after overdosing on the barbiturate medication Luminal.
July 2, 1961: Ernest Hemingway dies by suicide at his home in Ketchum, Idaho.
July 3, 1999: Musician/artist Mark Sandman, perhaps best known as a member of the band Morphine, collapses while playing a Morphine show in Palestrina, Lazio, Italy. He is pronounced dead in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The 46-year-old’s fatal heart attack is thought to have been triggered, in part, by the extreme heat of the day.
July 5, 1932: Z. Smith Reynolds, an heir to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco fortune, dies of a gunshot wound. Three other people are inside the house with Reynolds at the time: Reynolds’s wife Libby Holman (a noted Broadway singer/actor), Holman’s personal assistant Ab Walker, and friend Blanche Yurka. A party has taken place at the home earlier and all of the witnesses are drunk when the shooting occurs. It’s unclear if Reynolds died by suicide, accident, or murder. Holman maintains she was too drunk to remember what happened that night. She and Walker are indicted on murder charges, but the Reynolds family insists that the charges be dropped.
July 6, 1819: Sophie Blanchard, the first woman to pilot a hot air balloon as a professional balloonist, dies in a hot air ballooning accident. Performing balloon ascents for a crowd at Tivoli Gardens, the Parisian amusement park, she included fireworks in her show. The fireworks ignited the helium in her balloon. Blanchard became entangled in the balloon’s net and subsequently falls to her death.
July 6, 1944: A fire at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Hartford, Connecticut, kills an estimated 167 people.
July 6, 1962: Author William Faulkner dies of a heart attack.
July 6, 1971: Louis Armstrong dies of a heart attack.
July 6, 1983: Model/actor Tammy Lynn Leppert, 18 years old at the time, is seen for the last confirmed time getting out of a friend’s car in a parking lot in Cocoa Beach, Florida. The friend confirms he and Leppert argued and that he dropped her off in a parking lot; Leppert has never contacted her friends or family since then. Leppert appears briefly in the movie Scarface.
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July 6, 1988: An explosion on the Piper Alpha oil platform in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland kills 165 oil workers and two rescue workers. Although no one from the platform’s owner, Occidental Petroleum (Caledonia) Limited, was ever charged with a crime, neglected maintenance and inadequate safety procedures contributed to the disaster.
The platform collapses and sinks. 61 survivors are rescued.
July 7, 1930: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dies of a heart attack at age 71. Reportedly, his last words were to his wife Jean: “You are wonderful.”
July 8, 1822: Poet Percy Shelley drowns while out sailing with a friend. He is 29 years old.
July 8, 1918: Ernest Hemingway is wounded while serving as a volunteer ambulance driver for the Red Cross during World War I.
July 10, 1861: After asking for a cup of coffee, Frances “Fanny” Appleton Longfellow dies of burn injuries she sustained the day before. Fanny’s dress caught on fire when either a spark or hot wax made contact with her dress as she melted sealing wax to seal an envelope containing locks of her children’s hair.
Her husband, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was napping when he heard her screams and attempted to smother the flames with a rug. Longfellow also sustained burns to his arms and face to the extent that he was too injured to attend Fanny’s funeral. He wore a beard for the rest of his life to conceal his facial scars.
July 10, 1873: French poet Paul Verlaine shoots his inappropriately younger lover/fellow poet Arthur Rimbaud in the wrist, wounding him, although the injury is not serious.
July 11, 1807: Vice President Aaron Burr shoots U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton in a duel in New Jersey. Hamilton dies the next day.
July 11, 1906: Pregnant, 20-year-old Grace Brown, a worker in the Gillette Skirt Factory, is intentionally drowned and murdered by her boyfriend Chester Gillette, nephew of the factory owner. Gillette is subsequently executed in the electric chair.
The murder inspires Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which in turn inspires the 1951 film A Place In the Sun. The character based on Brown is played by Shelley Winters.
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July 12, 1562: Bishop Diego de Landa orders the burning of Maya codices of the Yucatán, to the utter horror of the Maya people who witness the act. Only three manuscripts are known to have survived into the 21st century.
July 12, 1979: Singer Minnie Riperton dies of breast cancer. She’s 31 years old.
July 12, 1996: Multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Melvoin, at the time touring with the Smashing Pumpkins as a keyboardist, dies of a heroin overdose. He’s 34 years old.
July 12, 1997: The bodies of Lela and Raymond Howard, a couple from Texas who’ve been missing for over two weeks, are found in their Oldsmobile about 350 miles away from their home. The couple had been making their annual visit to the Pioneer Days fiddle festival on June 28th when they apparently become disoriented and lose their way, ending up near Hot Springs, Arkansas. No foul play is suspected; their deaths are apparently accidental. The Oldsmobile is found at the bottom of a ravine with Lela at the wheel.
Raymond was 88; Lela was 83. They’d married 11 years earlier after each had lost their previous spouse. The incident inspired the Fastball song “The Way.”
July 12, 2014: 30-year-old John Christopher Wallace, who went by Chris, dies after running deliberately into a burning wooden effigy at the Element 11 festival in Utah. The effigy was formed in the shape of one of the monster characters from the children’s book Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. Volunteers attempted to stop Wallace before he got too close to the fire, but were unable to prevent the suicide.
July 14, 2015: Arthur Cave, the 15-year-old son of Australian musician Nick Cave and English fashion model and designer Susie Bick, dies after sustaining a brain injury in an accidental fall from a cliff in the family’s home of Brighton, U.K. Arthur has used LSD before the accident. He’s survived by his twin brother Earl.
July 14, 2017: Stunt performer John Bernecker dies from injuries he sustained the previous day. While filming stunt footage for the TV show The Walking Dead, Bernecker had fallen 20 feet off a balcony onto a concrete floor.
July 15, 1958: John Lennon’s mother Julia Lennon is struck and killed by a car while walking home.
July 15, 1974: During a live broadcast of the digest news program on which she appeared, 29-year-old journalist Christine Chubbuck pulls a loaded handgun from her purse, places it behind her left ear, and shoots herself in the head. She dies at Sarasota (Florida) Memorial Hospital fourteen hours later. Her family gets a court order to keep the tape of the broadcast from ever being aired again.
July 17, 1935: Cudjoe Lewis dies. The formerly enslaved man’s story of being kidnapped from his home in what is now Benin is the subject of Zora Neale Hurston’s book Barracoon.
July 17, 1959: At 3:10 a.m., Billie Holiday passes away under arrest in her hospital bed. Her death comes from heart failure and fluid in her lungs brought about by a failing liver. She’s 44 years old.
July 17, 1967: 40-year-old jazz saxophonist John Coltrane dies of liver cancer. Although he has been sober for the last 10 years of his life, earlier struggles with heroin and alcohol use may have contributed to his cancer.
July 18, 1817: Jane Austen dies, aged 41. Her death is speculated to have been from Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
July 18, 1988: Christa Päffgen, the model and singer who performed under the mononym Nico, dies in Ibiza at age 49 from a cerebral hemorrhage suffered from a fall off her bicycle.
July 19, 1374: Tuscan poet Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) dies on the eve of his 70th birthday.
July 19, 1850: Journalist Margaret Fuller returns, with her husband and child, from assignment as the New York Tribune’s European correspondent aboard the merchant ship Elizabeth. The vessel’s captain has died of smallpox during the 5-week voyage. The Elizabeth, being piloted by her less-experienced first mate, strikes a sandbar off of Fire Island and is run aground. Many of the crew abandon ship and are able to swim to shore, but Fuller and her husband are never found and are presumed to have drowned. Their son’s body is found washed up on the shore.
July 21, 1796: The poet Robert Burns dies at the age of 37, leaving behind his wife and five children.
July 22, 1934: Criminal John Dillinger is shot dead by FBI agent Melvin Purvis outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago.
July 23, 1846: Henry David Thoreau is put in jail for refusing to pay a $1 poll tax. He’s protesting the poll tax on the grounds that it supports slavery.
July 23, 2011: English jazz singer Amy Winehouse passes away, having recently completed rehabilitation for a severe alcohol addiction.
July 25, 1966: Poet Frank O’Hara dies from a ruptured liver. The previous night he had been struck by a dune buggy on Fire Island while standing near a beach taxi that had broken down.
July 25, 1984: Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, the first artist to record “Hound Dog,” dies of a heart attack and liver disease at age 57 in Los Angeles.
July 26, 2015: Bobbi Kristina Houston Brown, the daughter of Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, dies in a hospice care facility at the age of 22. She had been in a coma for the previous six months after being found unresponsive in her Georgia home by her fiancé, Nick Gordon. Brown was discovered face-down in her bathtub less than three years after her mother died in a bathtub at a hotel in Los Angeles. Eerily similar to her mother’s passing, Brown was found to have been intoxicated with alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, prescription drugs, and other substances when she apparently drowned in her bathtub.
July 28, 1841: Either the police or a pair of fisherman (accounts vary) discover the body of Mary Cecilia Rogers floating in the Hudson River near Hoboken, New Jersey. Rogers, who was 20 or 21 years old and worked as a cigar seller in New York City, was last seen by her family on the 25th. Although the case is officially unsolved, it’s suspected she was either murdered by her boyfriend Daniel Payne or perhaps died as a result of an illegal abortion.
Payne killed himself by overdosing on alcohol and laudanum on October 7, 1841. The discover of Rogers’s body inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.”
July 29, 1974: Cass Elliot dies of a heart attack. Years of heroin abuse and cycles of rapidly gaining and losing weight have weakened her body. Cruelly, urban legend will afterwards contend that she died by choking to death on a ham sandwich.
July 30, 1918: American author Joyce Kilmer is killed in action, shot by a sniper at the Second Battle of the Marne in the First World War.
July 31, 1703: Daniel Defoe is locked in a pillory as a punishment after being found guilty of seditious libel. He has criticized church officials in a pamphlet.
The Cut audiobook is now available to stream on Spotify! Add it to your audiobook library today.
The Cut audiobook is now available to stream on Spotify! Add it to your audiobook library today.
Don't have Spotify? Don't worry; you can also download the audiobook as an mp3 from Etsy.
This is a repost of some previous Pagan Spirits book blog content. It combines the original Bummer June post with the update.
June 1, 1981: A mob of Sinhalese people in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, burns the Jaffna Public Library. The mob formed in protest of the killing of three Sinhalese police officers the night before, at a rally held by a Tamil pro-democracy political party. The burning of the library, which destroyed an estimated 97,000 books and manuscripts, came as part of clashes between the Sinhalese, who make up about three quarters of the population of Sri Lanka, and the Tamil minority.
June 2, 2013: Grizelda Kristiņa dies at the age of 103. She was the last fluent native speaker of Livonian, a Uralic language closely related to Estonian.
June 7, 1984: On or around this date, the Indian Army burns the Sikh Reference Library building in Punjab, India, to the ground. The library held approximately 20,000 materials, including irreplaceable handwritten manuscripts. The status of these materials is unknown and considered classified by the Indian government; they may have been destroyed, sold off into private collections, or held in an undisclosed archive somewhere.
June 7, 1993: NBA player Dražen Petrović is killed in a road accident while riding on the German Autobahn highway system in Bavaria. Petrović is not wearing a safety belt and is ejected from the vehicle, which is driven by his girlfriend.
June 8, 1971: J.I. Rodale, an early advocate of sustainable and organic farming and founder of Rodale Press, appears as a guest on a pre-taped episode of The Dick Cavett Show. In his interview for the show, Rodale states that he’s never felt better and intends to live to be 100 years old. Unfortunately, he suffers a fatal heart attack at the age of 72 that evening, as he’s sitting in a chair on the Cavett Show set listening to another guest being interviewed. Rodale is pronounced dead on arrival at a local hospital; the episode is never aired.
June 9, 1865: Charles Dickens and his friend/perhaps lover Ellen Lawless Ternan are riding in a train on a voyage home from Paris. The train is near the village of Staplehurst, Kent, when it crosses a bridge. The engineer is unaware, until it's too late, that the bridge is closed for repairs and about 42 feet of track have been removed.
Dickens and Ternan, riding in the first-class car near the front of the train, are carried over the gap by the momentum of the engine. Their car lands on its side, but although they're shaken, they don’t have any serious injuries.
The center and rear cars of the train fall into the river below. Ten passengers are killed. Approximately 50 others are injured. Dickens helps render aid to the victims at the scene; some of them die in front of him. For the rest of his life he suffers flashbacks; in modern terms he could probably be said to suffer from PTSD.
June 9, 1870: Charles Dickens dies after suffering a stroke the previous day.
June 10, 1898: The last-known native speaker of the Dalmatian language, Tuone Udaina, dies. Udaina is killed in an explosion caused by road work.
June 12, 2015: Musician Dave Grohl falls from the stage, breaking his leg, while performing with the Foo Fighters in Gothenburg, Sweden.
June 14, 1949: 19-year-old typist Ruth Ann Steinhagen shoots and almost kills Philadelphia Phillies first baseman Eddie Waitkus in one of the earliest recorded cases of what comes to be known as stalking. Steinhagen, a resident of Cicero, Illinois, has been obsessed with Waitkus since she sees him playing for the Chicago Cubs in 1946. She even leaves an empty plate at the dinner table for him when eating with her family. Steinhagen was seeing a psychiatrist, but this didn’t stop her from traveling to Chicago’s Edgewater Beach Hotel, leaving a note with Waitkus’s roommate asking to meet, then shooting the baseball player with a .22 caliber rifle when he came to see her. She shot him in the chest, puncturing one of his lungs.
After shooting Waitkus, Steinhagen allegedly looked for a second bullet with which to shoot herself, but was unable to find one. Instead she called the police and told them, “I just shot a man,” allowing Waitkus to reach medical care before his injury killed him. He had to sit out the rest of the ‘49 baseball season, but returned in 1950. Eddie Waitkus developed a drinking problem and died in 1972 of esophageal cancer.
This incident was partially the inspiration for the 1952 Bernard Malamud book, then the 1984 Robert Redford film, both called The Natural. Which is partially the inspiration for the Simpsons episode “Homer at the Bat” (original air date February 20, 1992).
June 16, 1994: Kristen Pfaff, bassist for the band Hole, dies of a heroin overdose. She is 27 years old.
June 18, 1984: Jewish talk show host Alan Berg is gunned down by two members of a white supremacist terror group in Denver. He is 50 years old.
June 19, 1999: Stephen King suffers a broken leg, a broken hip, a collapsed lung, and a lacerated scalp when he’s struck and thrown 14 feet by a Dodge minivan driven by Bryan Edwin Smith. Smith, who was distracted by the movements of his unrestrained dog in the back of the vehicle, pleads guilty to a moving violation and receives a six-month suspended sentence.
June 21, 1858: Samuel “Mark Twain” Clemens’s brother Henry dies of wounds he received on June 13th as a crew member on the steamboat Pennsylvania when the boat’s boiler explodes. Mark Twain, at the time working as a crew member on the riverboat A.B. Chambers, felt guilt for the rest of his life for convincing his younger brother to work aboard a riverboat.
June 24, 2006: Three men in Pretzien, eastern Germany, burn copies of Anne Frank’s diary and the American flag in apparent support of the Nazis. The members of a far-right-wing group are charged with incitement of racial hatred.
June 24, 2023: Hikers in the San Gabriel Mountains of San Bernardino County, California, discover human remains. These turn out to be the remains of actor Julian Sands, age 65, who had been reported missing after failing to return from a hike on January 13, 2023. Winter storms, avalanches, and record snowfall in the area had hindered the search for him, although eight official searches were conducted during the five months he was missing.
June 28, 2018: A gunman attacks the offices of Annapolis, Maryland, newspaper The Capital. The assailant became enraged at the newspaper after it published a story about his arrest for harassing an acquaintance through social media. Reporter Wendi Winters, sports reporter John McNamara, columnist Gerald Fischman, editor Rob Hiaasen, and sales assistant Rebecca Smith are killed.
June 29, 1950: Ring Lardner reports to prison to begin his 1-year sentence for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He’ll serve nine months.
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June 30, 1995: 45-year-old jazz singer and Broadway actress Phyllis Hyman dies in the hospital after having been found unresponsive in her home. She has overdosed on prescription barbiturate medication and alcohol.
"We Didn't Start the Fire," again, but this time the links are to the blog of author Julie S. Howlin. She's covered many of these topics in depth in the form of Top Ten lists.
[Verse 1]
Harry Truman, Doris Day
Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific
Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon
Studebaker, television
North Korea, South Korea
Rosenbergs, H-Bomb
Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, The King And I,
Eisenhower, vaccine
Marciano, Liberace
Santayana goodbye
[Chorus]
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
[Verse 2]
Joseph Stalin, Malenkov
Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella
Communist Bloc
Roy Cohn, Juan Peron
Toscanini, Dacron
Dien Bien Phu Falls, "Rock Around the Clock"
Brooklyn's got a winning team
Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev
Princess Grace, Peyton Place
Trouble in the Suez
[Chorus]
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
[Verse 3]
Little Rock, Pasternak
Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Sputnik, Zhou En-lai
Bridge On The River Kwai
California baseball
Starkweather homicide
Children of Thalidomide
Buddy Holly, Ben-Hur
Space Monkey, Mafia
Hula Hoops, Castro
Edsel is a no-go
U-2, Syngman Rhee
Payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, Psycho
Belgians in the Congo
[Chorus]
[Verse 4]
Hemingway, Eichmann
Stranger in a Strange Land
Dylan, Berlin
Bay of Pigs invasion
Ole Miss, John Glenn
Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X
British Politician sex
What else do I have to say?
[Chorus]
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
[Verse 5]
Birth control, Ho Chi Minh
Richard Nixon back again
Moonshot, Woodstock
Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine
Terror on the airline
Ayatollahs in Iran
Russians in Afghanistan
Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride
Heavy metal suicide
Foreign debts, homeless vets
AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shores
China's under martial law
I can't take it anymore
[Chorus]
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
But when we are gone
It will still burn on, and on
And on, and on
[Outro]
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
This is a repost of some previous Pagan Spirits book blog content. It combines the original Bummer May post with the update.
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May 2, 1981: Antiques dealer Jim Williams shoots 21-year-old Danny Hansford at Williams’s historical home, Mercer House (formerly owned by composer Johnny Mercer), in Savannah, Georgia. The lovers had been in an argument; Williams argued the killing was self-defense. After four trials, Williams was acquitted. The homicide is the basis of John Berendt’s book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
May 4, 1897: On the second day of a charity bazaar set up by Catholic charitable organizations in Paris, aristocratic women shop in a wooden warehouse set up to look like a Medieval market. Decorations of cardboard, cloth, papier-mache, and wood help achieve this effect. As an extra attraction, an early movie projector called a cinematograph is set up with ether lamps as a light source.
The projection equipment catches fire. With flammable materials all around and little to no signage marking the exits, the largely female crowd is trapped inside. 126 people die; 200 more are injured. Many of the dead were so badly burned that they could only be identified by their clothing, jewelry, or expensive dental work.
May 5, 1994: American Michael Fay, age 18, receives four lashes with a bamboo cane after being convicted of vandalism in Singapore. Fay attended the Singapore American School and lived with his American mother and Singaporean stepfather. This is believed to be the first time an American was sentenced to corporal punishment in another country.
May 7, 1896: Serial killer H.H. Holmes (real name: Herman Webster Mudgett) is executed by hanging at Moyamensing Prison in Philadelphia after his conviction for 27 murders and attempted murder of six other people. His neck does not break when his body is dropped, and it takes over 15 minutes for Holmes to strangle to death.
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May 8, 2012: Children’s book illustrator and author Maurice Sendak dies in the hospital of complications from a stroke.
May 9, 1914: Cereal manufacturer Charles William (C.W.) Post, recovering from emergency surgery for what was believed to be appendicitis, dies by self-inflicted gunshot wound when he can longer stand his severe abdominal pain.
His death leaves the Post cereal fortune to his only child, Marjorie Merriweather Post, who uses some of it to build her mansion, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida.
May 9, 1977: American novelist James Jones dies at age 55 from congestive heart failure.
May 10, 1933: Led by Joseph Goebbels, a crowd of 40,000 Germans gathers at the State Opera building in Berlin to watch the German Student Union burn approximately 25,000 books that they’ve decided are “un-German.”
May 10, 1943: Fire destroys the grounds of the National Library of Peru in Lima, taking it with numerous irreplaceable historical artifacts.
May 12, 2010: Afriqiyah Airways Flight 771 leaves Johannesburg, South Africa, bound for Libya. A series of errors by the flight crew causes the aircraft to crash into low terrain, killing 103 of the aircraft’s 104 occupants. Among the dead is novelist Bree O’Mara, an Irish and South African dual citizen.
The sole survivor is a 9-year-old boy from the Netherlands. Both of his legs are broken, but he sustains no life-threatening injuries. His parents were killed in the crash, so he is adopted by his aunt and uncle.
May 13, 1988: American jazz musician Chet Baker dies of an apparently accidental fall from a window in Amsterdam, Netherlands. If you're like me, you recently heard this story on the "Sunflowers" episode of Ted Lasso.
May 14, 1998: Frank Sinatra dies of a heart attack. He's 82 years old.
May 15, 1886: Poet Emily Dickinson dies of kidney disease at her home in Amherst, Massachusetts. She’s 55 years old. Dickinson has not left the home since 1865.
May 15, 1953: Chester “Chet” Miller dies in a car crash during practice for the 1953 Indianapolis 500. He is 50 years old.
May 16, 1940: During World War II, the library of the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, rebuilt after German troops burned it down in the First World War, is shelled by the Nazis. The rebuilt library catches fire again, and approximately one million books and other materials are lost.
May 16, 1955: Writer/activist James Agee has a heart attack and dies in the back of a taxi cab in New York City. He’s 45 years old.
May 17, 2012: Singer Donna Summer dies of lung cancer. She's 63 years old.
May 19, 1935: Thomas Edward Lawrence, a.k.a. “Lawrence of Arabia,” dies of his wounds six days after a motorcycle crash. He is 46 years old.
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May 21, 1703: Under the reign of Queen Anne, novelist and political pamphleteer Daniel Defoe is sent to prison for seditious libel on the basis of his satirical writings. He’ll spend six months in prison before the Earl of Oxford helps get him released in exchange for Defoe supplying the Earl with intelligence about his political rivals.
May 21, 1956: Léo Valentin attempts a dive using a wing suit at an air show in Liverpool. Among the 100,000-person crowd that day are George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and 3-year-old Clive Barker. Valentin’s wing suit malfunctions after it makes contact with the plane as he jumps. He attempts to land using a backup parachute, but it fails, and he falls to the ground to his death.
May 25, 1895: Oscar Wilde is convicted of "committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons" and taken to Newgate Prison for processing. He is later transferred to Pentonville Prison, where he is sentenced to hard labor, is malnourished, and is only allowed to read either the Bible or The Pilgrim’s Progress.
May 25, 1979: American Airlines Flight 19, bound from Chicago to Los Angeles, loses an engine shortly after takeoff due to improper maintenance. It crashes less than a mile from the end of the runway. All 271 people on board are killed, as are two people on the ground.
Author’s note: My mother’s first cousin, James Zielinski, was one of the passengers killed in this incident.
May 26, 1991: Lauda Air Flight 004, flying from Bangkok to Vienna, breaks apart mid-flight and crashes into a national park in Thailand. All 223 people on board are killed. The bodies of victims who could be recovered were taken to a hospital in Bangkok, where they were stored without refrigeration; as a result of decomposition, 27 victims were never able to be identified.
Lauda Air belonged to Austrian Formula One driver Andreas “Niki” Lauda, who himself had suffered severe burn injuries and almost died in a racing accident on August 1, 1976, at the German Grand Prix.
May 29, 1997: 30-year-old musician Jeff Buckley drowns in the Wolf River in Tennessee.
May 30, 1955: William John Vukovich Sr., who won the 1953 and 1954 Indianapolis 500s, dies in a car crash during the 1955 Indy 500. Vukovich’s car went over a wall, sailed through the air, flipped several times, and struck a low bridge. Vukovich is partially decapitated and dies instantly when his car struck the bridge. His grandson, William Vukovich III, will die during racing practice in 1990. Metal roll bars installed in vehicles and safety-certified driver helmets were mandated starting with the 1956 Indy 500.
May 30, 1958: Pat O’Connor is killed during the last lap of the Indy 500 amidst a 15-car pile-up. O’Connor’s car strikes Jimmy Reece’s car, sails through the air, lands upside-down, and catches fire. His death is due to head trauma from the car’s upside-down landing.
