I came across a reference to Lillian Alling this evening, a Russian immigrant to the USA who became homesick and decided to walk back to Russia:
While reading her article on wikpedia there was a link to the story of Carl McCunn, who went on a solitary expedition to the Alaskan wilderness and ended up comitting suicide:
I’m fairly well read and I had never heard of these people before, their wikipedia entries make for interesting reading and I was wondering if anyone had similar links to people otherwise forgotten to history.
The story of the Lykov family was also eyebrow raising!
Jazz musician Billy Tipton lived, and pursued a music career, for decades as a man, with few people, if any, realizing that he was born a woman. Those who had no idea of his birth gender included a number of female romantic partners. As noted on Wikipedia:
His transgender identity was discovered only as he was dying, by paramedics who were trying to save his life.
I’d only heard about Tipton because an actress friend of mine portrayed him in an episode of “E! Mysteries & Scandals” in the 1990s.
Jack Parsons doesn’t get enough respect for someone who was practically a comic book character, and I’m not just saying that because his birth name was Marvel and he was in the Suicide Squad. (Hell, he was an inter-company crossover.) He was deeply involved in early rocketry, to the point NASA’s JPL is sometimes referred to as Jack Parsons Lives or Jack Parson’s Lab, and was active in occult ritual magic along with L. Ron Hubbard. Going back to comics, he’s somewhere between Tony Stark and Dr. Strange and I’m sure a movie would have to tone him down even now.
I first heard of Josephine Baker years ago. She was an extremely popular black exotic dancer who lived back in the 1920’s as well as one of the first successful black business women. There was a reference to her in the movie The Triplets of Bellville. And she was recently featured in a time travel TV series.
Here is a good article about the Lykovs from a few years back.
You want obscure, I can give you obscure. While doing some genealogical work, I ran across a story that I at least thought was interesting about the man who was the doctor in my grandmother’s community. He was a farmer living in a one-room house with his wife and three children when he decided to try to become a doctor, and ended up being the first licensed physician in South Carolina. (Brief bio starting on page 3 of this PDF. Be sure to see the photo of him chomping a giant cigar on page 5.) Seems like he was an interesting character. I’d love to find a copy of this book.
In his life he was a classically trained musician, a jockey, a lightweight boxer, an actor (and a big success on Broadway), a bandleader, the owner of a nightclub, one of the first DJs, and a civil right activist. He got caught up in the Blacklist and found it hard to get work. His best-know film role was in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, where he fought to give his character more dignity.
A biography came out a few years ago. It’s fascinating.
As a kid, I learned about Mary Jemison. A Scots-Irish girl captured by Seneca in 1755 at the age of 12 and lived her entire life with them.
While researching my family tree, I discovered that a great-aunt was descended from the Hill family of Parker County Texas. A family that between 1863 and 1873 saw father, mother, son and two daughters shot and three daughters hanged by vigilantes.
In the late 1600s, they were captured by the Karankawas, a tribe of giant cannibals on the south Texas coast Very little is known about this tribe, except what was related when the captive children were rescued and interviewed.
Their investigation of the ruins of the Maya civilization was fascinating, but that was just one tiny piece of their lives. I kept turning the page and finding out about how one or the other was involved in some extraordinary new 19th century event or adventure.
Also there’s the de Védrines, a family of French aristocrats who were conned, enslaved and tortured by a con man for a decade – in the 21st century.
Cave explorer Floyd Collins was the most famous man in the U.S. for about two weeks in 1925, and has been celebrated in books, movies and music ever since.
Joyce Hatto was a concert pianist who was discovered to be a fraud.
In another thread about a possible sailing hoax, we’ve been discussing the story of Donald Crowhurst, who faked a sailboat race around the world.
Eadward Muybridgehad a crazy life as a photographer and early experimenter with motion pictures, and also killed his wife’s lover.
George McJunkin was born a slave, and spent his adulthood as a cowboy in the old west. He learned what he could about what he could, which was as lot. He noted differences in the sizes of buffalo bone piled together, and observed that different kinds of arrowheads were found, according to the size of the bones, and theorized that the buffalos of different sizes were millennia apart in age, and therefore, so were Clovis points and Folsom points. This revelation turned on its head the prevailing theories about indigenous Americans.
In 1932, nine year old Lennie Gwyther rode his pony 1000 miles from his home town of Leongatha to Sydney to see the opening of the new Harbour Bridge. His parents let him go on the trip as a reward for having taken on all the farm work while his dad was laid up in hospital with a broken leg.
Not totally obscure but probably more than Billie Tipton who I thought was pretty widely known, at least postmortem.
I think Rick Rescorla’s story is fascinating.
Interesting biographical fact: the band Radio Head is named after a Talking Heads song called Radiohead. David Byrne wrote the song Radiohead about actor Steve Tobolowsky and his psychic abilities. The band Radio ahead is named after Ned Ryerson. He does genuinely believe he is psychic
Parsons isn’t really that obscure. He’s not exactly a household name, but you don’t have to look far for info on him. There’s a published biography of him, [B\sex and Rockets** by John Carter (not the Warlord of Mars)
There are also plenty of pop culture references to him (se The Big Book of Conspiracies from Paradox Press, for instance, or any of the bios of L. Ron Hubbard or the early history of Scientology)
Interesting. I am distantly related to Mary Draper Ingles, who also walked home–though it wasn’t quite as far away.
I’ve always found the idea of being able to walk home to be a powerful one. The only time I’ve had a full-on homesick breakdown was when I was alone on the wrong side of an ocean.
I thought he seemed like an interesting man even before reading this. Wow. If he was still alive, he could do Dos Equus commercials! :eek:
How about these people? This book was a decent best-seller in the late 1980s, and a documentary film has been in the works for almost as long.
The father started out with his two sons; one dropped out early on, and I found out recently that the one who finished lives in my area. He keeps a very low profile and sees himself as a professional musician, not an explorer.
Don Starkell later did a similar journey through the Northwest Passage, which cost him all his fingers and toes, and he died not long afterwards from a brain tumor.
He’s largely forgotten now, but Richard Halliburton was very famous at the peak of his career in the 1920s-1930s. He was a professional adventurer who undertook outrageous adventures and then wrote books about them. He is most famous for swimming the length of the Panama Canal and paying the lowest toll, 36 cents (based on his tonnage). He also crossed the Alps on an elephant, descended into the Mayan Well of Death, spent the night in a cell block on Devil’s Island twice, climbed the Matterhorn, swam the Hellespont, and on and on. He died trying to sail a Chinese junk across the Pacific from Hong Kong to San Francisco.
