Amazing and oddly specific coincidence

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I am a leading researcher on VintageAerial.com. My hobby is locating and identifying old aerial photos taken in rural areas starting in the 1950s. To help in this endeavor I have assembled a large collection of rural directories for counties in Ohio. I recently purchased a 1961 Licking County directory and set about seeing what neat old places I can find photos of.

To start I go through the “road guide” section that lists every family or business along each road. There were no addresses back then so everything is numbered sequentially. I highlight everything I might be able to identify. I love locating old motels, bar and restaurants, often along US or state highways. Today I found a listing for the Hyde Park Drag Strip. Cool, I don’t find too many race tracks. It was located as the 3rd spot on Rd 343, north side.

Well, that is the first problem. Licking County, like many Ohio counties, has changed their naming/numbering system. There hasn’t been a Rd 343 for over 70 years. Aha, this directory comes with a map in a pocket in the back of the book. Always a plus although they do not always include an index. I pull the brittle map from it’s pocket and carefully open the pages. Whats this? A carbon copy of a typed letter also falls out.

It is written to the Licking County Engineer in 1970. It chronicles in great detail the history of one of the original families and businesses living on Rd 303 or Dog Leg Rd. It seems the county is about to do away with the old road names and numbers and they want the name Dog Leg Rd to remain if possible. They have a deed with Dog Leg Rd from 1870.

As they describe the road and it’s twists and turns it as listed as crossing Rd 343, the very road I am hoping to locate! With the various road names in the letter I was easily able to find Rd 343 on the map. Pretty neat, huh?

It looks like the county saved the Dog Leg Rd name although today it is just a short dead end road with the animal shelter on it. It’s not even on the path of the original road. The entire area is now housing developments.

2

Doesn’t sound like too big of a coincidence. It’s a road in the same rural county, major enough for people to care about it, and for locations to be described relative to it.

3

100s of those stories about.

My road is know locally by my Husband’s name plus former sawmill that was on the place. Unused since the 60s.

So… Our last name’s Sawmill Rd.

There are a bunch of sawmills and a bunch of roads they’re on. So I guess it was a convenient thing to do.

Of course we have number configured of the 2 county roads at either end. We are not a county road. But no one including the mail persons or UPS know that.

It’s been a trial. Let me tell you.

But yeah I like to see the old maps. Not clever enough to find pictures. That’s a cool hobby.

4

C’mon, Tommy! Spill it and make it easy for everyone to find. I mean, we could start with every popular last name in alphabetical order. Wouldn’t take long… with a powerful search engine. But I could be in error by… a lot.

I like how many defunct cemeteries are clustered around you.

5

Where do think Toity ghost came from?

6

My mother grew up near there. I visited the house where she grew up a few times. I can’t remember the address.

7

Well, I thought it was pretty cool, @mixdenny!

8

I have a rather rare last name. A few years after my wife died, I wanted to look at her old Facebook page for some reason. I searched on Facebook for her name (her first name, my unusual last name) and found a page. It had her photo, and at the top a quote from Gandhi, which was the type of thing she would have at the top of her page. I started reading down the page without anything seeming amiss, until I reached a statement about her living in Florida. She had never lived in Florida, to the best of my knowledge. I went back to the top of the page and took a closer look at the photo, and realized it was not her. It was another woman with the same unusual name, many of the same interests, and who resembled her enough that at first glance I, her husband of over 20 years, did not realize it wasn’t her. That shook me a bit.

9

I actually think it’s exceedingly cool.

I wouldn’t have read it completely and replied had I not thought so.

@mixdenny has cool hobbies and interests. I like the threads he makes.

10

If you have anything else you’re looking for in the county, the county engineer still uses the old numbers internally, and they’re still shown (including County Road 343 on the part that’s still maintained by the county) on the engineer’s highway map.

The drag strip was gone long before my time, but I think it was where the River Oaks subdivision is now.

11

I don’t remember who it was, but I had an oddly-specific coincidence just here on the Dope itself, a few years ago.

I had shared my story about how, as a teen, I was touring Chiang Kai-Shek’s private residence (a museum) and I was in Chiang’s bedroom and I saw a box of his tissues in front of me and I absentmindedly pulled out a sheet of tissue. The student next to me yelped something to the effect of “WTF!” and told me to hurriedly stuff the tissue into my pockets before the guards noticed.

The other Doper then shared that they’d done exactly the same thing too. He had been touring Zhou En-Lai’s private residence, as a teenager, and also absentmindedly pulled a tissue out of the box in front of him in Zhou’s bedroom. However, in his instance, the guards did notice and gave him some scolding.

12

I was called by a nickname, by a specific subset of people (not including my parents) when I was a child, which I never liked, and shed as soon as I could talk back. My name is Rivkah, and I got called all sorts of things, most of which I was indifferent to, but one I hated was “Vicky,” which was bestowed on me by an older kid in the neighborhood who wasn’t Jewish, and decided my name was “weird.”

I also took my husband’s name when we married, after a lifetime of saying I wouldn’t, because he had an unbelievably cool name.

Well, I was listening to NPR a couple of months ago, and they interviewed some woman, who was introduced, I am not making this up, but Vicky [My maiden name]. Neither name is terribly common-- not made up, and the last name is common in Jewish circles, but not so much out, while every Victoria, once the source of 95% of Vickys, seems to go by “Tory” now.

Anyway, not a bizarre name-- just something I hadn’t heard since I was four, and I was called it for the last time*; suddenly it was more than 50 years later, and some woman, most likely quite a bit younger than me, was using it as an adult. And she was a lawyer.

Surreal moment.

Maybe not amazing, but quite oddly specific.

*Punched the kid who called me that, and got grounded. Worth it.

13

They’d rather you sneeze all over everything?

14

Wild!

15

My favorite coincidence story (which I’ve shared before on a different thread):

My mother, who loved to find and refinish inexpensive antiques, found an old solid oak end table at a shop and got it for virtually nothing because it was missing the one drawer it was supposed to have. She brought it home figuring that my dad, who was fairly handy, could produce a drawer of some type to fill the space. I was visiting home when he started working on the project. He walked over to his stack of wood and found the one small piece of oak he had left over from some other project. Taking it over to the end table, he tried it against the opening for the drawer to see if he could make it work. It fit perfectly. Didn’t even require sanding. Rather than make an actual drawer, he just put an old knob on the piece of oak and set it in the opening. Later, my mom stripped the table and refinished the whole thing. They never did anything to attach the fake drawer front…just had it sitting in the opening. It fit tightly enough that it never came out unless you wanted to tell the story and demonstrate it to a visitor.

16

I was on a family vacation hundreds of miles from home. We were sitting at a picnic table eating ice cream when an automobile collision occurred at the intersection.

The following week, back at work, I overheard a cow-orker telling another, “We were on vacation and we got into an accident…”

mmm

17

Not quite as extreme, but I was at my aunt’s house once, and saw a photo on the wall of one person in academic garb handing a diploma to another. I wondered briefly why she had a picture of my graduation on the wall: We’re close, but not that close. And then I realized that the other person in the picture was my cousin, and that the guy who looked exactly like me was the professor giving the diploma, not receiving it.

When I was in college in the Philadelphia area, I was talking with some other members of the band, and it came up that I was from Cleveland. “Oh, really, Mike was from Cleveland, too”: An apparently quite studly guy that they had just met on spring break. We started narrowing it down, and the high school that he attended that he had described to them sounded awfully familiar. So did his name, for that matter. After my next trip home, I brought back a copy of my yearbook (from my year), and showed them how dorky he’d looked back in high school.