They WHAT within hours of each other?!
Died, IIRC 
My uncle related this one:
Many years ago, when he was young, they lived in a small town. He did a party trick/magic trick one evening for a group of friends. He asked one of them to open a deck of cards, pick any card, and lay it on the table. Then another party-goer was to open the telephone book, and randomly pick any name there. My uncle then picked up the phone and called that number:
“Hello, is Joseph Small there?”
(a pause)
“Yes, this is Bricker’s Future Uncle. Hold on.”
He then passed the phone to the card-picker, and the guy was astonished to hear the person on the other end say, “It’s the three of hearts.”
Now, at this party there was a know-it-all who delighted in… well… knowing it all. So after the phone was hung up, he stood up and said: “And now, let’s call the REAL Joseph Small and see what he says!”
“What are you talking about?” asks my uncle.
“I know exactly how this trick works. You call a friend who’s in on the trick. You hang up the phone but he doesn’t, so he’s still on the line.” (Note: obviously no longer true, but apparently for the phone system in the fifties in their little town, both people had to hang up or the connection stayed live for several minutes. “So when we picked ‘Joseph Small’ and you started dialing, there was no dial tone; your confederate was already on the line! When you finished dialing, he started counting: ‘Ace - Two - Three - Four…’ When he got to the right rank, you said ‘Is Joseph Small there?’ and he started counting ‘Hearts - DIamonds - Clubs - Spades.’ When he got to the right suit, you said, ‘Hold on’ and handed the phone over. I know all about this stuff!”
At which point my uncle said, calmly, “Go ahead, then.”
The guy makes sure he has a dial tone, calls Joseph Small, and says, “I’m sorry to bother you, sir, but we were just playing a party game; you don’t know by chance what card we picked…Oh… er… thank you.” He hung up, and said in tones of wondermont: “Uh… he knew the card.”
Know-it-all’s explanation was exactly right: that WAS the trick.
But in the truth-is-stranger department, the partygoers that night had picked Joseph Small, who was actually my uncle’s confederate, as the random name in the phonebook.
My uncle’s sister swam in the 1952 Olympics. That fall she started college and enrolled in a swimming class so she could get some pool time. The swimming coach did not think women should be swimmers, probably because they couldn’t do it while pregnant and cooking his dinner. At the end of the semester, he gave her a C. She protested, pointing out that she was the fastest swimmer in the class. He responded that he graded the class on improvement, and she had not improved at all during the semester.
I read this in the Reader’s Digest, but damned if I can find it online at their site.
A nurse was at a Little League baseball game when a boy got hurt (hit in the throat? Epipleptic seizure? Choked on a hot dog?) Anyway, she provides aid and the boy lives.
Fast forward 14 years…the nurse is eating at a restaurant and starts choking. A volunteer firefighter runs over, performs the Heimlich, and saves her.
Guess who the firefighter was? Yep, the Little Leaguer, all grown up.
Sweet jesus! Bricker, I got chills from that one. I wish I had a story to tell, I’ll ask around the family see if anyone else does.
This is officially one of my fave threads, keep 'em coming!
I love it when a know-it-all gets his ass handed to him.
Unless it’s me, of course. Those times suck.
I’m probably repeating myself but here goes anyway:
I was visiting my sister in Sugar Land for a week and one afternoon we drove into Houston. The car in front of us–a Colt Vista or something similar–suddenly vaulted into the air, did a complete 360° barrel roll, landed back on all fours, then pulled into the nearest parking lot.
Then there was the time that Dad was driving us from our home outside New Orleans to spend Christmas at another sister’s house in northern Illinois. My sister from Texas and her husband were also driving up for Christmas, somehow ending up on the same stretch of highway at the same time as us! We all pulled into the nearest rest area and exchanged pleasantries.
We were known for bringing a bunch of stuff on trips, and a rather large dog. Sis & bro-in-law had been just driving along when BIL remarked that the car they were coming up upon was loaded down like her parents’. Then they noted the car looked like her parents’ Chevy wagon. Sis was like, “It can’t be! Could it?” As they came closer to investigate, they noticed the dog. Of course, Mom, Dad, and I had no idea anything unusual was going on–until a Chevy Blazer pulled alongside and started honking.
Oh, yeah, and one more with my Texan sister. Mom, Dad, and I were watching TV at home, a program talking about medical care in the Houston area; sis is an MD. The closing shot was of a figure in a lab coat and riding a bicycle…
I was a new teen driver in my volkswagen bug on a three lane highway/road. There was a long 1/4 mile section bordered on the right by a side walk and an eight-foor brick wall. I was in the center lane going around the shallow curve with traffic all around. A car cut in front of me too close and I slammed on my brakes. I started to spin and was sure I’d hit the 50mph traffic and then bouce off the curve into the wall. I stopped spinning to realize that I had done a perfect 270 while sliding right, and just slipped into the first driveway past the wall. No cars piled up, traffic kept moving, and I and everyone else were unharmed. The drive-n-run kept driving but someone else stopped to ask if I was alright. It was all like a dream and I just drove on to class.
Thirty-plus years ago, when I was living in Warren, Ohio, there was a convenience store robbery that made the news. It had happened in the dark early morning after the first light snowfall of the year. When the cops arrived, they saw one set of tire tracks leading out of the parking lot. But the store was located a block from two highways, and two blocks from a main arterial street, so they knew that following them would be pointless.
They went into the store and spent half an hour getting information. On the way out, they looked at the tire tracks again. It was light out, now, so they figured what the hell. Might as well be thourough. They followed the tracks down two blocks and over one block, and there were the robbers - sitting in the car at the end of the snow tracks, counting out the money and dividing it. It was convenient that the paperwork had already been done. The morning DJs loved the story.
A more serious convenience robbery happened here in Stockton. It was more serious because the owner was shot in the chest. He held up well as he was rushed to the hospital. When the surgeons went looking for the bullet, they found an aortic aneurism just about ready to pop. It was one of those bad news/good news situations. The last report was that he was recovering well.
That’s amazing, he knew he would be your uncle!! :eek:
What?
A true fishing story, takes place when I was a kid … I was fishing with my dad in a remote lake in Northern Quebec, when I hook a fish. I play him a bit, but then the line goes dead - the fish had managed to wind the line around something underwater, and break it.
So disheartened I pull up the line - only to find that it is still wound around something. I pull it up. It is a rope. I pull up the rope - and there is a heavy weight on the end. My dad and I pull up the weight - it is a 5 gallon bucket full of beer bottles.
Obviously some previous visitors had lowered their beer supply into the lake to cool it, and then somehow lost the rope. The wierd part was that this lake was really, really remote - it probably only gets one or two visitors a year, since you have to fly in or portage and travel a lot to just get get there.
[At the time neither of us drank, so the story was more wierd than rewarding]
What the hell did you need, an engraved invitation? That was clearly God saying, “Have a beer, dudes.”
Heh, God may have been saying “have a 10 year old beer. Get food poisioning, dudes”. 
[Can beer go bad? I have no clue - to this day, I’m not a beer drinker … then again, it was pretty cold down there]
Pretty dark as well.
Three stories
- It’s the late 70’s and my den is coming back from a Cub Scout field trip. The mother driving has a CB in her car. She explains to us all how it works and the different channels and how Ch 9 is the emergency channel.
We pass some people pulled over in the median. Nothing really serious; probably just a flat tire, but me being interested in the CB asks the mom to turn it to Ch 9. She says no but I keep insisting. Probably to shut me up, she turns it on and we hear a lady screaming for help.
Yep, it was the car we passed a mile back. Her father had suffered a major heart attack and she was freaking out. We stopped at the next phone and called the ambulance. Why the daughter didn’t do the same thing (drive to a phone) and whether or not Dad lived, I never found out.
- My mom has a severe reaction to bee stings, in fact, she once went into cardiac arrest from a scratch test. We are driving in the car on the freeway with the windows rolled down. A bee flies in and scratches my mom in the cheek with the stinger at 55 mph. Almost immediately she goes into anaphalaxis.
Before you start thinking that it was a bizarre way to watch my mom die right in front of me. The next offramp (less than 1/4 away) was Overlake Hospital, right off the freeway. She survived.
- Humorous. I saw a fish story so I have to add mine. My high school fishing club was casting lines off the boat ramp at Lake Castaic. A guy asks me if we saw his string of fish. I said no and he leaves. A half-hour later, I feel a tug and I start reeling in. There is some resistance, but it doesn’t feel right. I see a strip of green on my hook and think, “Damn, I snagged a plant.” Nope. It was a string of seven beautiful trout.
I have also been engaged to a woman before going my first date with her . . . but that has only happened to me twice.
You ever read the Stephen King short story “Grey Matter”? <shudder>
This happened to a relative of mine:
He was about to come home from Vietnam (well, actually he was stationed in Thailand, but it was in the Vietnam War timeframe) and he was supposed to board a given plane to get back to the world. He was in the airbase just waiting around for his plane to load up, and some people noticed him and asked him where he was going. He told them, and as luck would have it their helicopter was going in that direction and would leave sooner than the plane. So he got the door gunner’s seat, strapped himself in, put on the helmet with the radio headset, and off he went.
On the trip, he heard distress calls from an aircraft coming under ground fire. He heard as the plane he was supposed to be on was hit and went down. When he landed, he didn’t see any of his friends around to greet him, so he went looking. He found them commiserating and generally all down about his untimely demise; after all, there were no survivors from his plane, so he must have died. He’s alive and in good health to this day.
This is kind of mundane, but a man I worked for part-time when I was in college hit a hole in one at the local country club, then another one a year later to the day (not the same hole, though). He showed me the clipping from the local paper.