Given my last post, it of course has jumped out at me somewhat that the recent school shooting in Texas was on Queen Victoria's birthday and that the Highland Park shooting was on the anniversary of the Tacoma trolley disaster. It even occurred to me that the Texas shooter starting his attack by driving into a ditch near Nicolas Street was not inconceivably a reference to the last tsar, Nicholas II. On closer inspection I have noticed a few other suspicious coincidences.
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald perished on James Earl Ray's 20th birthday in the fire (9 dead) at the Highland Hospital for the Mentally Diseased, located in Asheville, NC. James Earl Ray (using alias Eric Starvo Galt) bought his Mustang in 1967 when he was living on Highland Avenue in the Highland Park neighborhood of Birmingham. In Los Angeles, Ray stayed a couple months at the Serrano Apartments before he stayed at the St. Francis Hotel, and Sandy Serrano is probably the most controversial witness in the RFK assassination—Serrano means "highland" in Spanish. John Hinckley graduated from Highland Park High School, just four miles north of downtown Dallas, TX.
The September 8, 1860, Lady Elgin disaster (~300 dead) is the deadliest ship disaster to take place on the Great Lakes. The locations are hard to pin down exactly from varying internet accounts, but my best understanding is she collided with Augusta of Oswego more-or-less off Highwood/Highland Park, and sank off nearby Winnetka. The second deadliest Lake Michigan disaster was the 1847 loss of Phoenix (187 dead) near Sheboygan; on its anniversary last year was the Waukesha Christmas Parade van attack. Some consider the loss of Eastland (848 dead) the deadliest Great Lake disaster, though technically Eastland capsized on the Chicago River (at dock preparing for a journey on Lake Michigan), on Zelda Fitzgerald's 15th birthday. Huey Long was shot on the 75th anniversary of the Lady Elgin disaster (which shooting, as I have mentioned, was also the 35th anniversary of the Galveston Hurricane (6000 dead), America's deadliest non-pandemic disaster).
Thanks to the Gordon Lightfoot song, the most well-known ship disaster on the Great Lakes is presumably that which befell the Edmund Fitzgerald and her crew on November 10, 1975. Just three days before the sinking was the public reburial ceremony (about three weeks after the bodies were physically reburied, according to contemporary newspaper accounts) of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda from Rockville Cemetery into St. Mary's Cemetery in Rockville, MD. James Gleason, the Montgomery County Executive, declared on the occasion that November 7 in Montgomery County was to be known as “F. Scott Fitzgerald Day”. The burial site became just 400 feet from the site of Rockville's worst disaster, the 11 April 1935 collision between a school bus and a train that killed 14. The last morning of John Fitzgerald Kennedy's life, he called Uvalde resident John Nance Garner, FDR's first vice-president, to wish him a happy 95th birthday. Garner died November 7, 1967. And so Garner's death and the public reburial ceremony for the Fitzgeralds were both on the anniversary of the 1916 Summer Street retractable bridge disaster (46 dead), North America's second deadliest trolley disaster. Also worth keeping in mind in reference to November 7 is that Elijah Lovejoy was murdered November 7, 1837, in Ray's hometown of Alton, Illinois.
The January 21, 1893, Wann train wreck in East Alton, Illinois was just outside Alton, Illinois, and spectators from Alton were killed in the subsequent explosion. As for the date of it, it's the centennial of the execution of Louis XVI. As for the exact place of it, there's nothing definitive about it on internet that I have found. It was one-quarter mile west of the Wann Depot according to a St. Louis paper of the next day. Well, not exactly west, I'd say, because the train was coming from the south when it was directed onto the wrong track thanks to a misdirected switch (trains can't turn on a dime). But other accounts differ substantially as to suggestion of location. Anyway, one day in 1954 the Western Cartridge Company in East Alton would produce the cartridges which Oswald would use in 1963 in his rifle when shooting JFK. The best I can figure, the southern boundary of the cartridge manufactuing facility would be about where one would expect the 1893 wreck to have been if the wreck was about a quarter-mile west north west of where I think the depot was, but again, I have very little confidence about where the wreck was in East Alton--still, for that wreck to have happened even in the same town as the place where the rifle cartridges fatal to JFK were manufactured is peculiar. I believe the plant was originally part of the Union Cap and Chemical Company, a joint venture of Western Cartridge Company and Austin Cartridge Company, until Western Cartridge bought out Austin in 1907. Possibly the partial homonymy of those defunct outfits with Union Station and Conductor Austin and the Austin Street where Kitty Genovese was attacked was something intentional, but I'm guessing it's more likely a mere coincidence about just that.
