Beyond Coincidence (16 page)

H
EY
M
ISTER
, T
HAT'S
M
E
U
P ON THE
J
UKEBOX

UK musicians The Gibsons recorded three singles on the Major Minor record label in their sixties heyday, and for a while they made encouraging headway on the cabaret circuit. But none of the singles made it into the charts and when the sixties petered out so did they. Years later ex-Gibson Bernie Shaw followed a classified ad to a farm in the middle of rural Lancashire, hoping to buy an old jukebox. The farmer led him across a rutted field to an old barn and there, covered in straw, stood the music machine. It could hold forty seven-inch records, but only two remained, covered in dust. One didn't have a decipherable label; the other was “Only When You're Lonely,” by the Gibsons, featuring Bernie Shaw on vocals.

O
NE
G
OOD
T
URN
D
ESERVES
A
NOTHER

Allan Cheek's first promotion in business brought about a rude awakening for him. His employer summoned Cheek to congratulate him on the way he had revived various business operations he ran. The time had come, he said, to involve him in a more trusted and responsible way in his serious business plans.

It wasn't long before Cheek realized just how serious these were. The first plan was to swindle a great deal of money out of a prospective investor. Cheek refused to get involved, telling his boss that if he went ahead with it he would resign and go straight to the intended victim and warn him.

The boss was furious. “You can't afford to be squeamish,” he said. He was right: Cheek was hard up and needed the job.

“But I really had no choice,” he said. “I resigned.” Immediately he drove 180 miles to where the unsuspecting victim lived. The man was a little discomfited by the surprise visit; he didn't like to think he might have been taken in.

“Well, it's up to you,” said Cheek. “I've done all I can.” And he drove home again.

Two years later he was working for a new company that had got itself into serious trouble. In just a few months the original investment had been frittered away and it had run up a huge bank overdraft. The chairman decided it was time to pull the plug and fire the CEO and close down the operation.

Cheek thought something could be salvaged, though, and worked all night on a report setting out how the company might prosper if it were allowed to continue. For several hours the next day the chairman argued with him over the report before finally agreeing to leave Cheek in charge. “Be it on your own head” were his last words.

Cheek had to work his miracle on a shoestring, so the first thing he did was to move the company out of the expensive suite of offices it was renting. But now he needed an office. In the classified ads of the local evening paper he saw an advertisement for three measly rooms over a garage. He made an appointment to view them. They were barely adequate, but they were cheap. Even so he couldn't afford them. He followed the landlord down the stairs and out into the street.

“They'll do,” he said, “but there is one small snag. I can't pay you any rent—yet.” He explained his predicament, hoping wildly that the landlord might share his faith in his near-bankrupt company.

The landlord was silent for a while, then surprisingly said, “What did you say your name was?”

“Allan Cheek.”

“Did you two years ago warn a man he was about to be swindled?”

“Yes.”

“That was my brother. He would have lost his life savings. Move in when you like and pay me when you can.”

Within four years the company had not only repaid its generous landlord and cleared its overdraft, but it could also afford to move into a brand-new office park, with a warehouse attached.

T
HE
L
ATE
G
UEST

Patti Razey was invited to her friend Janet's wedding. She couldn't go because she'd already agreed to go on vacation to Tunisia with Liz. After two days Liz was informed of a death in her family and had to return home. Disappointed at being without friends, Patti decided to make the most of it and go anyway. On the plane was Janet with her new husband. Patti said, “Well I couldn't get to the wedding, but I did make it to the honeymoon.”

L
OST
P
ROPERTY

In 1953, the
Chicago Sun-Times
columnist Irving Kupcinet checked into the Savoy Hotel, London, to cover the coronation of Elizabeth II. He opened a drawer in his room and found some personal belongings of an old friend, the basketball player Harry Hannin of the Harlem Globetrotters. Two days later Hannin sent a letter to Kupcinet from the Hotel Meurice in Paris. Hannin wrote, “You'll never believe this but I've just opened a drawer here and found a tie with your name on it.” Kupcinet had stayed in that particular hotel room a few months earlier.

T
HE
R
ETURNING
M
ANUSCRIPT

An aspiring writer submitted his manuscript to a publisher and waited anxiously for a response. Some time later he found the manuscript lying in his back garden. Angrily he rang the publisher to ask what on earth was going on.

The publisher explained that she had in fact been very impressed with the work. It had been stolen the previous night from her car along with a number of other things when she was at a restaurant.

She could only conclude that the thieves had not thought as highly of the manuscript as she had, and had tossed it over the nearest garden fence.

O
NE
G
OOD
T
OURNIQUET

The destinies of Allen Falby, an ordinary El Paso County highway patrolman, and Alfred Smith, an ordinary businessman, came together not once, but twice, to the two men's consecutive advantage.

The first time they met, on a hot June night, Falby was lying in the road in a pool of blood, one of his legs rapidly hemorrhaging blood from a ruptured artery. He had flown off his motorcycle while trying to overtake a speeding truck. The truck had braked without warning and Falby had slammed into the tailgate.

Smith was driving home when he came across the accident. He had no medical training but he could see immediately that Falby was bleeding to death and common sense told him what to do. With his tie he fashioned a tourniquet. An ambulance crew that arrived a few minutes later said it might have been the crucial element that saved Falby's life.

Falby spent months in hospital, but eventually returned to work. Five years later, at Christmas, Falby was on highway night patrol when he received a call to investigate an accident on U.S. 80, in which a car had run into a tree. Falby, who was first on the scene, found Smith slumped unconscious in the car, bleeding profusely from a severed artery in his leg. Falby, who was trained in first aid, quickly applied a tourniquet above the ruptured artery. As he put it later: “One good tourniquet deserves another.”

S
TRANGERS ON THE
S
HORE

A couple basking on a beach caught John Peskett's eye as he flicked through his wife's old photographs of a childhood holiday. He looked closer—and realized to his astonishment that the couple sunbathing were his parents.

John and his wife-to-be Shirley, then both aged ten, had been just feet apart on the same sands at the same time without realizing they were destined for each other.

They grew up hundreds of miles apart, but in 1963 both their families spent their summer vacations on the same bit of beach, paddled in the same bit of sea, and went home without making contact.

In 1974 John and Shirley met at a teacher training college and began dating. The romance led to marriage.

When Shirley brought out her snapshot of the vacation, John first spotted a duffle bag and a football he had been playing with that day.

He said, “That woman there looks just like my mother.”

“Then I did a double take and realized she was my mother. We had the picture blown up and took it to show my parents.

“They were suitably shocked, but they were also great believers in fate and thought we must have been meant for each other.”

John said, “I believe in fate—I think it puts you in the right place at the right time.”

P
ROPHETIC
S
IGN

Eileen Bithell was so astounded by this coincidence that she felt compelled to write to the
Times
about it.

“For over twenty years there hung in the window of my parents' grocery shop a framed sign indicating which day of the week the shop closed. Two weeks before my brother's wedding, the sign was taken down to be altered and was removed from its frame. On the back of the sign was a large photograph showing a small girl in her father's arms. The man was then the mayor of the town and was officiating at the opening of a new hospital. The small girl was my brother's bride-to-be and the man his future father-in-law. No one knows how this particular photo came to be used as the backing for our shop sign as none of the people in the photo were then known to my family, yet now, twenty years later, the two families were to be joined in marriage.”

E
LECTRIFYING
C
OINCIDENCE

The distinguished poet Craig Raine recalls being asked by composer Nigel Osborne to write the libretto for the opera,
The Electrification of the Soviet Union.

“Nigel rang me up one evening and said, ‘Are you interested in writing the opera?' I thought about it for fifteen seconds and said that was a very good idea. I then asked him if he had an idea and he said he had in mind a story by Boris Pasternak called
The Last Summer.

“I said, ‘You are not going to believe this but I took it down off my shelf yesterday thinking I would read it again. I can actually see it from here.'

“He said, ‘The only trouble is, we might not get permission to do it from the Pasternak estate.'

“I said, ‘I don't think we'll have too much trouble there. My wife is Boris Pasternak's niece.'”

A C
HANCE
A
RREST

A series of coincidences enabled police to arrest a man believed to have been responsible for about two dozen armed robberies of San Fernando Valley businesses. In most cases the robber entered stores brandishing a gun. He forced staff to lie on the floor, stole cash, and made his escape.

Police made little progress tracking down the culprit until, by chance, a woman visiting the Los Angeles Police Department's West Valley Division on other business happened to see a composite drawing of the robber. She identified him as Douglas McMann.

Desk officer Ken Knox ran a computer check and found that police had briefly held McMann in custody for several days for an unrelated crime. The next day Knox happened to be walking along Roscoe Boulevard when he spotted McMann and arrested him. He was charged with three counts of robbery and one count of assault with a deadly weapon.

2

IT'S A TOO SMALL WORLD

Just as the “small world effect” can bring us wonderful surprises, welcome reunions, rescue from imminent death, and other benefits, it can also bring us pain, humiliation, and even the unwanted attention of the police. That's when our small world becomes too small a world.

Many of the people caught up in the following stories would surely wish to have been born on a much larger planet.

T
WO
S
ISTERS

Two sisters driving separate vehicles on a rural highway collided head-on, and were both killed. They were traveling to see each other. State troopers said that Sheila Wentworth, forty-five, and Doris Jean Hall, fifty-one, were driving Jeeps in opposite directions on Alabama 25 when one of the vehicles crossed the median strip and collided with the other vehicle.

W
RONG
N
UMBER

Amanda recognized the voice on her answering machine, even though the caller had dialed the wrong number. What's more the male voice recognized her voice. “I misdialled but I know your voice, even though we haven't spoken in fifteen years,” he said. “I've listened to the message a dozen times now and I know it's you.”

Amanda had thought that John was out of her life. Fifteen years before they'd had a passionate relationship, but he had broken it off for another woman, and now had three children. Amanda had also married since and had four children.

John left another message asking her to call him. She did, and then she went to see him. Now Amanda and John are once again trapped in a love affair, desperately trying to come to terms with the potential consequences for their families.

C
OINCIDENCE, OR
N
OVELTY
V
ENDETTA
?

A stray golf ball hit a man on a course in the UK. Ten days later his wife was hit by a ball at the same spot, played by the same golfer.

C
HECK
M
ATE

Vincent Leon Johnson and Frazier Black picked the wrong bank teller when they tried to cash a stolen check.

A court in Austin, Texas, heard how the two burglars broke into the home of David Conner, helping themselves to two color television sets and checkbooks belonging to Conner and his girlfriend Nancy Hart—who were both at work at the time.

A few hours later, Johnson and Black showed up at the bank where Nancy worked as a teller. They presented her with a forged personal check for $200 belonging to Hart and made out to Conner. Bank security staff held the men until the police arrived.

K
ARPIN'S
C
AR

French intelligence agents arrested a German spy, Peter Karpin, in France, shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. They kept the arrest secret and sent fake reports from Karpin to his superiors, at the same time intercepting money sent on his behalf back to France. The funds were used to buy a car. Karpin escaped in 1917. Two years later, after the war was over, the car ran down and killed a man in the French-occupied German Ruhr. The victim was Peter Karpin.