…with as few urban legends as possible, if you please.
My personal nomination would be for the “Luckiest Driver in Baghdad,” from the First Gulf War. Remember him?
After him, (WARNING: May be disturbing to some readers)Phineas Gage.
Then there was that poor fellow who’s skull had a meeting with a bullet from a .357. Despite losing the right lobe of his brain, and having a gaping hole blown in his cranium (Which was reconstructed…a few years later), he survived, and is alive today, with only some paralysis, and without any noticeable mental disability. I wasn’t able to find a web page about him, which the reader’s stomachs will undoubtedly thank me for.
Then there’s always the story of a man who had such a severe Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder that he decided to commit suicide to escape the torment. He shot himself in the head, but not only did he survive, but the bullet turned out to have only destroyed the part of his brain that had been causing his OCD…thus curing him of the disorder. I’ve yet to confirm the veracity of this story to my satisfaction, so it only gets an “Honorable Mention” in my book.
I remember reading a number of years ago about a man in, I believe, a car accident, who survived being impaled through the skull with a fairly thick iron rod.
Now, his getting impaled through the skull would tend to make me think that he wasn’t a particularly lucky man in the first place, but it is pretty amazing that he survived, with apparently no deleterious effects.
Magne cum laude at 21
mellon fellow 25
true love 26
published 27
instructor at small college 27
own our own home 33
have a wife who’s honestly my best friend.
She’s 78 and has been hit by 4 moving vehicles. A bus, a taxi, a car, and a motorcycle. She only gets bruises. She’s also fallen many times. Of course this is all due to her not paying attention to anything.
The running joke in our family is that she won’t die of natural causes. It’s gonna be something like a piano falling on her head.
Here you could say the degree of luck is proportional to the amount, and inversely proportional to the age of the winner. I’d say the luckiest lottery winner was that 18 or 19 y.o. girl who won $160 million or so in a Powerball drawing. I think she was in West Virginia.
Or maybe not. Maybe that type of good fortune means more to someone who is a little older and has lived more.
He was trained as a geologist, and ended up on the final manned mission to the moon. Never could he have imagined that his discipline would lead to that. Another astronaut was even bumped for him to fly on Apollo 17.
How about Violet Jessop? She was a nurse who survived the Titanic, Olympic AND Britannic shipwrecks. I realize that a woman had a better chance of getting to a lifeboat, but…that’s pretty lucky.
Very few of these other people seem lucky at all. If they were lucky, the wouldn’t have been hit by cars, impailed on spikes, fell out of planes in my opinion.
As for “The luckiest driver in Baghdad”, conventional wisdom is that he was killed by the concusion of the blast, but that wouldn’t be a clever tag line for the highlight reels. (cite: some PBS show about the Gulf War and what we didn’t get to see)