CELEBRITY NEAR-MISSES
Being famous didn’t save these folks from just-a-little-too-close brushes with death.
MILTON HERSHEY
Claim to Fame: Founder of the Hershey Chocolate Company and inventor of the Hershey Bar, the first mass-produced milk chocolate bar that ordinary people could afford (Price: 2¢)
Near Miss: If you visit the Hershey Story museum in Hershey, Pennsylvania, one of the items you’ll see on display there is a canceled check for $300 from Milton Hershey to the White Star Line, owners of the Titanic. The check was a deposit on a first-class cabin aboard the Titanic for Hershey and his wife Kitty. They had spent the winter in Nice, France. But some business issue arose and Hershey was eager to return home early to deal with it. So rather than wait until the Titanic sailed on April 10, 1912, Hershey booked passage on the German liner Amerika, which departed on April 6. (The Amerika was one of the ships that transmitted ice advisories to the Titanic in the hours before it sank.)
EDWARD G. ROBINSON
Claim to Fame: Hollywood actor best known for his gangster roles in films such as Little Caesar and Key Largo in the 1930s and ’40s
Near Miss: Robinson was traveling in Europe with his family in August 1939. These were the last days of peace before Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland on September 1 sparked the beginning of World War II. As the international situation deteriorated in the last days of August, Robinson decided to cut short his trip and bring his family back to the United States. He tried to buy tickets on the passenger liner Athenia, but there had been an error in booking, so the Robinsons had to settle for a single cramped cabin on an American liner called the Washington. That inconvenience turned out to be a lucky break: On September 3, 1939, the Athenia was torpedoed by a German submarine off the west coast of Ireland and sunk, killing 117 passengers and crew.
THE FOUR TOPS
Claim to Fame: Motown vocal group best known for their hits “Baby I Need Your Loving,” “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch),” and “Reach Out I’ll Be There” in the 1960s
Near Miss: In December 1988, the group was in London taping two performances for the BBC television show Top of the Pops. The group wanted to record both performances in a single session, and had already booked their flight home to Detroit on Pan Am Flight 103 on December 21. But a BBC producer insisted that they record the performances in separate sessions, forcing them to take a later flight home. Shortly after 7:00 p.m. on the evening of December 21, a bomb planted aboard Flight 103 by Libyan agents exploded, causing the airplane to disintegrate in the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing everyone aboard. “The producer on Top of the Pops was the reason we didn’t get on that plane,” Duke Fakir, the last surviving original member of the Four Tops, told the BBC in 2016. “I was so glad, so, so glad we didn’t do it in one session.”
In 2014 Budweiser tried to trademark the sound of a beer can opening. (They failed.)
SETH MACFARLANE
Claim to Fame: Voice actor and creator of the animated series Family Guy and American Dad, and creator and star of the live-action sci-fi series The Orville
Near Miss: MacFarlane, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, delivered a speech at his alma mater on September 10, 2001, and had a ticket for the following morning’s American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles. Two things caused him to miss his flight: 1) he was up late celebrating with old friends, and 2) his travel agent had given him the wrong departure time—8:15 a.m. instead of 7:45 a.m. Hung over, MacFarlane arrived at the airport 10 minutes too late to board the plane…which was hijacked by the 9/11 terrorists 15 minutes into the flight and flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. (Actor Mark Wahlberg also had a ticket on Flight 11, but he changed his plans and caught a flight to Canada instead, because a friend invited him to view a film at the Toronto Film Festival.)
GUGLIELMO MARCONI
Claim to Fame: Inventor of the radio
Near Miss: As you might expect with the first person to transmit “wireless” telegraph messages across the Atlantic, Marconi made regular transatlantic crossings as he set up a business to capitalize on what would soon be a boom in communication between Europe and the United States. By the time he was offered free passage on the maiden voyage of the Titanic in early 1912, he already had 40 transatlantic trips under his belt and was familiar with the services offered aboard various passenger liners. At that time, he was preparing for a patent-infringement lawsuit against an American telegraph company, and he had a lot of work that he wanted to do during the trip. But Marconi’s secretary, Giovanni Magrini, “was hopeless on board ship, he was seasick from shore to shore,” Marconi’s daughter Degna Marconi recounted in her 1962 book, My Father, Marconi. “Father switched his passage to the Lusitania, which departed three days earlier, because he had a mountain of paperwork to clear away and knew that the public stenographer [on the Lusitania] was quick and competent.”
Fastest-growing tissue in the human body: bone marrow.
Claim to Fame: Vice president of the United States under President George H. W. Bush
Near Miss: In November 1978, Quayle was a freshman congressman from Indiana when another member of Congress, Leo Ryan, invited him to participate in a fact-finding mission to the Peoples Temple cult compound in Guyana, South America. The purpose of the trip was to find out whether members of the cult were being held there against their will. But Quayle’s wife Marilyn was expecting their third child and needed help with the other two, so Quayle begged off the trip so that he could stay home with his wife. Congressman Ryan went without him, and was murdered along with four other members of his party during the Jonestown massacre, in which more than 900 cult members committed suicide or were murdered on the orders of Jim Jones, the founder and leader of the cult.
MICHAEL JACKSON
Claim to Fame: Singer, songwriter, presumptive “King of Pop,” and the third best-selling music artist of all time after the Beatles and Elvis Presley
Near Miss: Jackson’s brother Jermaine writes in his 2011 book You Are Not Alone: Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes that Jackson had meetings in the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11. But on the night of September 10, he stayed up so late visiting with his mother, his sister Rebbie, and others that he never made it to his first appointment of the day. “None of us had a clue that Michael was due at a meeting that morning at the top of one of the Twin Towers,” Jermaine Jackson writes. “We only discovered this when Mother phoned his hotel to make sure he was okay. She, Rebbie, and a few others had left him there around 3:00 a.m. ‘Mother, I’m okay, thanks to you,’ he told her. ‘You kept me up talking so late that I overslept and missed my appointment.’ ”
“I’d kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.”
—Steven Wright
Carnauba wax is used in car wax and as a food additive, to give gummy candies their shine.