Here’s a photograph from the September 19 1935 edition of the Toronto Daily Star of a midget car race crash that fatally injured a driver.
A search for Harry Jastroch turned up his Find a Grave entry. From this, I learned that he had been 22 years old and married for two weeks when he was killed. I couldn’t find out anything else about him, other than that his nickname was “Jastrow”; presumably, this was because that was what his last name was pronounced.
Here’s a short sad article from the July 27 1931 edition of the Toronto Daily Star about a man who passed away in a plane crash. As his plane was falling, he tried to write a note explaining the problem:
A search for H. J. Hewins turned up nothing other than a slightly longer version of the same article in another newspaper.
I assume that it wasn’t a coincidence that the bit of filler titled Human Fear appeared in this spot in the newspaper.
Here’s a brief article from the July 25 1935 edition of the Toronto Daily Star that appears to be sad news.
I agree with the writer of this anonymous article: a car with a fictitious registration is a very bad sign. The odd part: poor Miss Duffy appears to have been a resident of Buffalo who was abducted from Columbus and then transported back to Buffalo. Sadly, this means that she might have been targeted.
Here’s a sad bit of filler from the February 11 1936 edition of the Toronto Daily Star:
Google searches for more information led me down an odd rabbit hole. It turned out that the model for the Paris statue of Joan of Arc was an 18-year-old girl named Aimée Girod. Unfortunately, she did indeed burn to death in her apartment, but the references that I found (here, here, and here) claimed that this happened in May 1937.
So now I’m confused. Either a different woman, claiming that she was the model for Joan of Arc, was also unfortunate enough to burn to death, or all of the sources available to me today on the Internet have her date of death wrong.
Here’s a series of photographs from the December 7 1931 edition of the Toronto Daily Star of a pilot who had passed away in a plane crash.
Lowell Bayles (1900-1931) had just finished winning a number of events at the 1931 National Air Races when he decided to go for the landplane speed record. Analysis of the crash indicated that the aircraft’s fuel cap came loose and struck Bayles in the head, causing him to lose control of the plane. YouTube has footage of the crash, which is horrifying to watch.
Here’s a short sad story from the September 16 1946 edition of the Toronto Globe and Mail:
Presumably, this sort of accident is why window cleaners now work on hoists outside the building, rather than clinging to the building the way that poor late Mr. Thompson did.
I found Samuel Thompson in the 1946 Toronto city directory: his occupation is listed as “window clk Can Perm Mort”. The Canada Permanent Mortgage Corporation is listed at 320 Bay, so I’m not sure if this is the same place.
One final thought on this sad event: the “Path of Fall” photo and diagram in this article is (a) somewhat ghoulish, and (b) somewhat obvious. Doesn’t most falling happen in a downward direction?
The front page of the July 27 1936 edition of the Toronto Daily Star contained this photograph taken at the Vimy Ridge memorial.
This was taken during the brief reign of King Edward VIII, who is shown comforting a woman who lost eight of her twelve sons to the First World War. His response is the caption to this photograph, “Please God, it shall never happen again.”
But in the same edition, there was this photograph of German women preparing for air raids:
And, as of course you know, it did happen again.
Here’s a photo from the July 20 1946 edition featured a publicity photo of two movie stars who had just adopted a child.
Susan Peters (1921-1952) did not have a happy life after this photo. After her accident, the former Academy Award nominee was offered parts as “crippled girls who were all sweetness and light”, which she turned down. Eventually, she and Quine divorced and her career went into decline; depressed, she stopped eating and died of a kidney infection and bronchial pneumonia.
Richard Quine (1920-1989) doesn’t have a happy ending to his life story, either. After he and Ms. Peters divorced, he went on to marry three more times, and dated Natalie Wood and Kim Novak, among others. In 1989, after an extended period of depression and bad health, he shot himself.
Here’s a Personals ad from the July 6 1920 edition of the Toronto Daily Star that is somewhat heart-wrenching.
I hope that the poor widow with five children was eventually able to keep her family together.
Here’s a brief article in the July 5 1930 edition of the Toronto Daily Star about a man who was about to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel:
Wikipedia has an entry listing all of the people who have gone over Niagara Falls accidentally or deliberately. From this, I learned that Mr. Strathakis’ fate was a cruel one: he apparently survived the trip over the falls, but his barrel was stuck behind a curtain of water for 18 hours and could not be retrieved. Since his barrel had only eight hours’ supply of air, he suffocated to death. Presumably, the undertaker and the doctor didn’t wait around that long.
No one attempted to go over the falls in a barrel again until 1951, when William “Red” Hill Jr. tried and failed. Mr. Hill was the son and namesake of a legendary rescuer and daredevil who saved a total of 28 lives near the falls. The next successful attempt was in 1961, when Nathan Boya went over in the “Plunge-O-Sphere”.
A seven-year-old boy, Roger Woodward, went over the falls by accident in 1960 and survived. There is video footage of him being interviewed in 1975 as part of an art project, and he was also interviewed about his ordeal in 2015.
