Today’s Ricocheting Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
One fatal factor in falling deaths at the Grand Canyon is nightfall. Six victims – five of them males – fell at night while camping or walking alone. A possible culprit in many of these fatalities may be the male urge to urinate off high places combined with dizziness (and possibly alcohol consumption). Other male victims likely have fallen to their deaths from heights within the Canyon or into the river to drown, while urinating.
Surprisingly, another category for unplanned plunges involves motor vehicle accidents, usually at very slow speed – or even parked. Five people have died accidentally this way. The most tragic of these is the case of James Lloyd Qualls, age 5, and Harold Frank Qualls, 15 months old, visiting with their family from Brownsville, Texas. On June 8, 1958, the two boys’ father had parked the family sedan (with both boys in it) at a lookout point on the rim above the Little Colorado River eight miles west of Cameron. The father, Frank Qualls, age 28, had left the transmission in gear, but in the highest gear of “overdrive” (which offered the least resistance to the vehicle rolling). Qualls also had not set the parking brake.
While the adults were 200 feet away admiring the view, they sent another relative, Kenneth Dull, age 10, back to the car to fetch a camera in the glove compartment. Dull said the car started rolling as he opened the door. Dull jumped aside. After rolling only 25 feet, the car plunged over the rim 100 feet into the gorge, ricocheting off rocks, then exploding into flames.
Culled from: Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon
Ah, the good old days – before they put guardrails up everywhere.
Horrifying Racism Du Jour!
I have in my collection a 1935 catalog from the “Johnson Smith & Company” in Racine, Wisconsin. They sold novelty items – you know, like whoopie cushions, itching powder, x-ray spex – all the stuff that you’d find in comic books. They also had a penchant for racism, as these horrifying images will reveal. The catalog is in very poor shape, so I couldn’t open it up all the way to scan the full verbiage, but you get the jist.
This one actually set me aghast. Seriously, our grandparents were horrible people!