“Here is a man, elderly but still kicking, who witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.”
Mmmm. Would I be flamed too much if I express some skepticism?
Here is the deal. In 1956 the Lincoln assassination was 91 years in the past. Don’t know about the rest of you, but my earliest memories date from when I was about 5 (memories of the election returns in 1960). So this guy would have to be a minimum of 96, and a more realistic estimate of his age would be 100.
So how many nonogenarians or centennials do you think were alive in the United States in the 1950s? (A smaller percentage of the population than in that cohort today, and there were about half the people in the US then than there are today.) What are the odds that one of them was in the audience when there were only (at best) a dozen or so children in that audience at Ford Theater?
I don’t doubt he was alive when Lincoln was assassinated. Anyone in their nineties would have been in 1956. I just find it hard to believe this is more than some old codger finding a nifty means of getting people to pay attention to him. (For that matter, he was probably dining out on the “I saw Lincoln assassinated” story for the last 50 years before then.)
And please don’t tell me people don’t make stuff like this up. Look at all the folks who claimed to be dead Old West outlaws that had faked their deaths and led a new life, or all the people that claimed to have been the couple in the Times Square V-J Day photo.
Funny, but that's exactly the age he claimed to be. And he looked it, too.
***Would I be flamed too much if I express some skepticism?***
Remember when the last veterans of the Civil War died?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_surviving_United_States_war_veterans
There were people alive during the Civil War that remembered the British marching through the countryside back during the Revolutionary War.
I remember when the last White survivor of the Indian Wars died in 1973, and the same year, during the Indian problems at Wounded Knee, the news reported on a living elderly woman whose parents died at the original battle in 1890.
***I don’t doubt he was alive when Lincoln was assassinated. Anyone in their nineties would have been in 1956.***
I remember when LIFE magazine did an article on LINCOLN.
They had an interview with the last living person who looked on the face of Lincoln in his coffin. This article was in either the late 1960s or early 1970s.
He was just a child at the time, and it was just before they opened the casket for the last time in Springfield Ill, and closed it back up, then poured cement around it to protect it from grave robbers, as the body had almost been stolen once before.