pronematch.com

by Hap Rocketto

I was doing a little on line research for a prominent departed military shooter’s biography and typed “Arlington” into my search engine with the intent of checking what might be said about him on the Arlington National Cemetery website. Much to my surprise what came up first in the queue was Arlington Cemetery in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania. As I was getting ready to close the window I noticed that the cemetery maintained something they called their “Museum of Mourning Art.” Not one to miss an opportunity to enlighten myself I opened the hyperlink and found myself looking at a photo of what looked like a large flintlock pistol mounted on a swivel which was set into a solid wooden block. Several strings attached to the gun and radiated out from it. According to the caption it was a “cemetery gun.”

This was a new one on me. I was familiar with other large and unusual firearms of the period such as the punt gun. The punt gun was a humongous shotgun used to commercially harvest waterfowl. They commonly had calibers in the vicinity of four bore, or about two inches, tossing out around a pound of shot at a time. A single blast from this gun could down four or five dozen sitting waterfowl. In the late 18th and early 19th century they were a popular tool in commercial game hunting.

They were so large, and has such enormous recoil, that they could not be hand held and fired. Hunters mounted them in the bow of small flat bottomed boats know as a punts and that is how they acquired their eponymous name. The hunter would simply pole to an area rich in game-an area he had most likely had previously seeded with corn or set with decoys, aim the gun by pointing the punt at the sitting fowl, and let fly. Obeying Newton’s Third law of Motion, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction” the punt would slide back in the water a short distance and then the hunter would pole forward to pick up the floating fowl carcasses.

Market hunting was thriving business at the turn of the 20th century when the clouds of migrating birds would darken the sky making the supply seemed endless. However, bird populations began to decline at this time, in part due to both market hunting and degradation of habitat. This ecological change brought about the start of the modern conservation movement which reached its zenith in 1937 with enactment of the hunter initiated Pittman–Robertson Act. Hunters asked to have an excise tax levied on guns and ammunition the proceeds of which were earmarked for the Department of the Interior to provide funds to each state to manage game animals and their habitats.

Then there are spring guns, of which the cemetery gun is but an example. A spring gun is simply a firearm set up as a booby trap. They are unattended loaded firearms which make them very dangerous to both user and intended victim and, therefore, are illegal in many locals. In a case rising out of the employment of a spring gun the United States Supreme Court ruled, in Katko v. Briney, that a landowner has no duty to make his property safe for trespassers, but he may not set deadly traps against them. In this case Briney has rigged a spring gun in an abandoned building on his property which injured Katko, who sued for damages. Katko won. The unrepentant Briney, asked if he would change anything about the situation replied: “There’s one thing I’d do different, though, I’d have aimed that gun a few feet higher.

But for what reason would one invent a cemetery gun? Simply put, “resurrection men.” The 18th and 19th centuries saw rapid advancements in the medical arts. The rise of formal medical schools in Europe and the United States strained resources. While there were plenty of teachers, students, classrooms and books there were precious few cadavers for anatomy classes. It seems that the only available legal supply of this unusual visual aid was from the criminal and the indigent classes who died in government custody.

Alternatively anatomy instructors would turn a blind eye and pay good money for a fresh corpse with no questions asked as to its source. This caught the entrepreneurial spirit of a small group of enterprising men who quickly insured that the supply caught up with demand by simply stealing recently buried bodies. Sometimes they might not even wait until the person was buried, or even expired, as in the case of Burke and Hare.

Burke, an innkeeper, has an indebted lodger die and sold his body to an anatomy instructor for seven pounds ten shillings. Seeing an opportunity to make some big money he enlisted Hare to help create inventory. By-passing the nicety of natural death they simply accosted wayward strangers and smothered them. This method kept their product in the best of condition while having the side benefit of leaving no signs of how the subject met his fate. Ironically when they were caught Hare turned state’s evidence and got off while Burke ended up swinging from a gibbet and, upon being cut down, was turned over to a medical school for public dissection.

To prevent the desecration of the dead grieving families would hire guards to watch over the graves until it was deemed that the decedent’s remains were past the point where they might be worth resurrecting. Graves were also covered with gratings or heavy stone slabs, metal caskets were sealed shut, and then there was the cemetery gun.

Set at night by the cemetery staff the guns were charged, trip lines spread out and staked, the lock cocked after which the staff gingerly made their way to safety, closed the gate closed, and went home to dinner.

In the morning they would return to work, disarm the device, and search the grounds hoping to find an unwary, and unlucky, resurrectionist sprawled on the grass. Should one be found they would take pride in striking a blow for decency and then, more pragmatically, drag the corpse off to the local medical school, returning to work with a few welcome coins jingling in their pockets.

by Hap Rocketto

One of the definitions of things that happen to us which are out of our control is luck. Luck can be good and luck can be bad.

There are some people for whom it might be said that they are both. For example let us look at Tsutomu Yamaguchi who, as a young draftsman for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, was in Hiroshima on a business trip. He was leaving for home when the US Army Air Forces B-29 Enola Gay, named after pilot Paul Tibbets’ mother, dropped “Little Boy,” the first atomic bomb. The seriously burned Yamaguchi spent the night in a Hiroshima bomb shelter and returned his hometown. Three days later Yamaguchi was regaling his boss about his trials and tribulations when a second B-29, Bockscar, named after its pilot Fred Bock, droned over Nagasaki and loosed the second atomic bomb “Fat Man.” It certainly was bad luck for Yamaguchi to be at the site of the only two atomic bombs dropped in anger in history but lucky enough to survive them and live to be 93.

Then there is the case of Violet Constance Jessop who found that the third time is not always the charm. Jessop was a White Star Line stewardess aboard the RMS Olympic when it collided with the cruiser HMS Hawke on September 11, 1911. The Olympic was heavily damaged but not in danger of sinking. Never the less Jessop felt uncomfortable sailing in her after the incident and sought a larger and safer ship. She next shipped aboard the Olympic’s sister ship the RMS Titanic.

Four days after leaving Queenstown Jessop was fished out of the frigid North Atlantic, while the Titanic rested on the seabed 12,000 feet below her. She wisely sought a change of occupation so Stewardess Jessop left the sea and trained as a nurse. About 8:30 on the morning of November 21, 1916 Jessop was going about her nursing duties aboard His Majesty’s Hospital Ship Britannic when she was startled by an explosion caused when the ship struck a mine. Fifty five minutes later Jessop was bobbing in a life boat in the Mediterranean. It was bad luck to be aboard all three of the ill-fated ships of the White Star Line’s Olympic class ocean liners during disasters but good luck to survive all three and live to the ripe old age of 84.

The case of Roy Cleveland Sullivan is intriguing as the lucky US Park Service Ranger beat the odds. In the 35 years between 1942 and 1977, Sullivan was struck by lightning seven times and survived all of them. The odds of being struck just once by Jupiter’s Darts are 3,000 to one. To have Sullivan’s luck the odds increase to an astronomical twenty-two septillion to one, a 22 followed by 24 zeros. To ice the cake his wife was struck once. Having been struck by lightning is truly unlucky but to have lived is lucky. However, Sullivan took his own life at 71 over “unrequited” (read that unlucky) love” so we may presume that he was lucky in cards.

Jason and Jenny Cairns-Lawrence were enjoying the sights and sounds of New York City on September 11, 2001 when terrorists took down the Twin Towers. On July 7, 2005 they were at home in London when bombs were set off in multiple locations in London’s subways system. Like their fellow loyal subject of the crown Jessop the third time was not the charm. Three years later they were in Mumbai, India for a third try at a relaxing vacation. Mumbai experienced a three day terror attack. Unlucky vacation planning but a good survival rate for the British tourists who probably wished that had tried a “Staycation.”

Robert Todd Lincoln was 21 when his father was assassinated. The younger Lincoln followed his father into public service and was eventually appointed Secretary of War in the Garfield Administration. On the morning of July 2, 1881, Garfield and Lincoln were walking through the Sixth Street Station of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad to catch a train when Garfield was shot by Charles J. Guiteau. Twenty years later Lincoln accompanied President William McKinley to Buffalo where, on June 13, 1901, Leon Czolgosz elevated Teddy Roosevelt to the presidency by pumping two 32 caliber rounds from an Iver Johnson revolver into McKinley’s stomach. After being present at his third presidential assassination Lincoln habitually turned down any presidential invitation offered him. He ruefully remarked that “…there is a certain fatality about presidential functions when I am present.”

Then there was poor C.I. Shootwell, to whom Dame Fortune was seldom kind. C.I. approached life with passion and zeal but he was just unlucky. He loved playing the ponies and various gaming tables but they did not love him. He played the stock market but generally bought high and sold low.

His greatest delight was prone shooting for he loved the people and all of the aspects of the sport-the social, the technical, and historical. C.I. was not a great rifleman; in fact he never shot a 1600 and only occasionally managed a 400. An occasional place in class at Perry was enough to keep his spirits high and his hopes alive.

Unfortunately, in the spring prior to Perry C.I. fell ill and passed away before the National Championship. In his will he requested that he be cremated, his ashes taken to Perry, poured onto the X ring of a 100 yard target-as that was a place he seldom found himself with any regularity, and then scattered on the firing line at the place where he spent so many happy hours with his shooting companions.

Accordingly, after the first day of prone, his friends discreetly assembled on the firing line to carry out C.I.’s last wishes. It was a bright and sunny day and many fine words were said about their departed friend. The impromptu service drew to a close and, obedient to his words, C.I.’s ashes were decanted from the urn and, just as had happened to him so many times in his life, a gust of wind came up and blew the unlucky C.I into the nine ring.

There is being lucky and there is being lucky.