"Here is a man, elderly but still kicking, who witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Yet his setting -- the 1950s/1960s game show "I've Got a Secret" -- is completely recognizable as a modern media production. Sure, it's not in color, the hairstyles are a bit outdated, and a cigarette advertisement is prominently displayed, but those are subtle changes when compared with those this man saw in his lifetime."
That’s fascinating. I can’t watch this now, but I will in a few days time.
Thanks for posting this, amazing really.
It’s like that saying, the past isn’t even past. (I don’t have that right, but you get the gist!)
Child Eyewitness of The Gettysburg Address
“the voice of William V. Rathvon, who as a nine-year-old boy watched and listened to Abraham Lincoln deliver his address at Gettysburg in November 1863.
“The story was told on February 12, 1938 and recorded on a 78 rpm. record. No other Gettysburg eyewitness is known to have recorded his memories in audio format.”
Ping
The last surviving Confederate Civil War widow died in 2004. The last surviving Union Civil War widow died the year before.
“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.
LOL! Supposedly he “witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.” Yet, at the end, Bill Cullen tells us that he didn’t actually see Lincoln shot, he only Booth fall on the stage and he felt sorry that “somebody had fallen onto the stage.”
I mean, it’s amazing he was there and saw that, but apparently he did not actually witness the shooting.
I used to see a face in my dreams of a very old man who looked very much like Albert Einstein. I had no idea who he was and I thought he was just another made up person in my dreams.
I was at my parents place one day looking at pictures and I saw him in a picture exactly like I had seen him in my dreams. I asked who he was and was told that he was my great grandfather. The first year after I was born he was around me all the time and we inseperable. My memory of his face is photographically accurate down to the wrinkles in his face.
He was born before the civil war and came to this country in 1866. He was born in 1850.
This is indeed a young country. Very young.
Thanks.
Wonderful! Thank you.